It’s his birthday today.
To anyone who is old, like myself, and into subversive art, like myself … watching John Waters becoming an elder statesman of mainstream cinema has been not only hilarious but GOOD AND RIGHT, as my friend Jackie says when she comes across something satisfying. “That is good and right.” He basically stormed the castle. Or … he just hung around across the moat, observing the goings-on inside the castle with a glint in his eye – seeing all – and he basically just lived long enough to stroll across the drawbridge. He himself laughs about this. Like, his movies are on Criterion now. In the ’70s, this would have been an outrageous thought. Well, there wasn’t a Criterion then. But still.
John Waters is steeped in the Golden Age of cinema – he has seen everything, knows every shot, every color scheme, he knows the biographies of everyone involved in every single movie ever made – and so he took all of that, every single thing he absorbed, and made these outrageous exploitation films which were his OWN versions of classic Hollywood films. He was making “women’s pictures” and melodramas and musicals, starring the outlaws of the world. He is a true independent.
John Waters is the Poet Laureate of Jayne Mansfield. I wouldn’t trust any other guide. The special features of Criterion’s release of Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It includes an interview with Waters, and I wish it was 4 hours long.
He refers to himself as a “filth elder”, and seems to get such a kick out of showing up at retrospectives of these fancy establishment places, like MoMA and the Academy Museum.
It’s good and right.
“We have to make it cool to be poor again. When I was young we wanted to kill the rich.” — John Waters
