Female Trouble

(1974) dir. John Waters
viewed: 02/13/08

John Waters’ follow up to his hilarious and punk as hell film Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble, is the one of his films with which I had the most familiarity.  I have a good friend who could watch it over and over, laughing hysterically at all the classic lines, quoting them ad nauseum, and relishing in the over-the-top tour de force that is Divine in the film.  I did find it funny and uber camp and outrageous, but I certainly didn’t have the same fervor for it that he did.

For 2008 so far, my themes have been the Samurai films of Kihachi Okamoto, lame superhero B-movies, and a John Waters retrospective.

Female Trouble, for me, many years later, and with the current perspective that I’ve been developing, isn’t as strong a film as Pink Flamingos.  But interestingly, it seems a creative step for Waters into an aspect of Hollywood genre film or perhaps more specifically, a film that is really about Divine’s star power, a role written to take her to the nth degree, a true starring role.

Divine as Dawn Davenport, spoiled brat turned juvenile delinquent turned spree murderer, is the ultimate role for the actor do vamp, camp, and outlandish with the greatest of aplomb.  Dawn Davenport has a story arc, if not intentionally sympathetic, running away from home when she fails to get her deeply desired “cha cha heels” for Christmas.  She gets knocked up by the town drunk, also played by Divine, in the beautifully crass scene in which she has sex with herself as man and woman.  She gives birth, biting through the umbilical cord (certainly no worse than eating dog shit), and becomes a criminal with her gang of cronies.  Her ultimate exploitation by the art-loving snobs the Dashers, which leads to her trip to the electric chair, exudes a fulfillment as well as an exploitation, embracing the crass and filth, the mixture of beauty and ugliness that is the ultimate aesthetic at work.

Beauty and ugliness are the core of the film’s critical consciousness.  Whereas the Dashers, the well-to-do aesthetes who shun sex for the aesthetics of beauty/ugliness and crime, “disocover” their apt pupil in Dawn Davenport, who is already virtually without empathy and full of bile.  When she is disfigured by Edith Massey, Dawn’s archenemy (and arguably as willing to push the aesthetic envelope right alongside of Divine herself), Dawn’s bloodied and ultimately scarred face becomes the site of beauty.

In a performance, with a wild mohawk and tight-fitting outfit, Divine spoofs the talent shows of beauty queens, romping on a trampoline, hurling mackeral, and ultimately shooting into the audience, the debunking of beauty is complete.  Divine and Massey, both willing to exploit their rather garish figures in outfits that completely stun the eyes, play out the issues, the “female troubles” and pointedly skewer culture.

Of course, Waters does this all with cleverly camp dialogue and characterization that makes the whole outrage purely comedic.  But it would be foolish to think that the cultural critique is not significant in this film.  Divine even sings the theme song, proving wihtout a doubt, that this truly is a “star vehicle”, a star vehicle from the other side of cinema.