Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. John Waters' Cry-Baby (1990) is showing September 7 – October 7, 2018 in many countries around the world as part of the Back-To-School Series.
The opening line of John Waters’ raucous autobiography says it all: “To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about.” Divine’s triumphant cry of “Filth are my politics! Filth is my life!” in the director’s breakout hit Pink Flamingos was more than simply a statement of intent, it was a declaration of war on good taste and all that which is socially-acceptable. The irony of writing any kind of critique on a man who celebrated pure chaos and considered coprophilia a suitable final argument is not lost on me. In fact Nick Zedd, author of the Cinema of Transgression manifesto would strenuously object to such a notion:
“We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred […] We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimetres, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema.”
“Kill everyone! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit!”
Zedd’s diatribe against the establishment actually reads like something Divine might say if he were a little more loquacious: anything and everything perceived as ‘normal’ must be overturned and ravaged in order for a so-called “state of expanded cinema”—‘expand’ taken to its most logical and suggestive extreme. By comparison, Cry-Baby is a relatively tame entry in Waters’ canon. While it still relishes in its share of grotesqueries (especially an opening which relishes in the agony of a polio vaccination), Waters’ style has been refracted through the lens of a clean, presentable teen movie format—a coy (though I use that word lightly), sex-free love story between ‘square’ Allison and the eponymous ‘drape’ Cry-Baby—and shot with a high-end camera. A far-cry from the grubby, noisy quality of the film stock used in Multiple Maniacs and Female Trouble.
Nonetheless, Cry-Baby is still worthy of analysis as it marks the beginning of the brief, bizarre period when the self-described King of Filth broke mainstream. It’s hard to pin down exactly why this happened, especially considering that John Waters had apparently done everything in his power to actively avoid such an outcome. However, after the moderate success of Hairspray, it seems that someone thought it was a good idea to let the man who defended an act of bestiality by quipping, “I think we made the chicken's life better. It got to be in a movie, it got fucked,” have a career in Hollywood…and Johnny Depp was cast in the lead role!
“Orphans have special needs!”
Following on from Hairspray, a pseudo-musical set poppy R&B and 60s jukebox anthems, Cry-Baby takes a more direct approach to musical form, using a series of original rock and bluegrass compositions (described in one of the film’s more memorable scenes as “something hillbilly… something coloured!”) to narrate a culture war waged in the streets and meadows of 1950s Baltimore between the aforementioned squares and drapes. The musical format is kind of a perfect fit for Waters’ proclivities. The old adage that rock is a sublimation of sex drive is the first thing that comes to mind, as all the songs performed by Cry-Baby and his family of drapes involve him yearning for freedom (“Please Mr. Jailer”) or defiantly expressing his independence and demanding the liberation of all the social taboos—especially sexual ones—that the drapes represent (“High School Hellcats”). Sequences which are usually followed by mass displays of french kissing and ludicrous seduction.
Though merely suggesting that sex is happening (or isn’t far off) seems a bit tame for someone like John Waters, the trend that Cry-Baby represents was, in this writer’s humble opinion, one of the most startling and provocative statements of the director’s career. The socially-acceptable, industry standard form of Cry-Baby (and his later feature, the superb Serial Mom) are an out-and-out invasion. Similar to the exclusively white, heteronormative, God-fearing world of squares which the drapes are encroaching on, Waters gleefully subverts the traditions of the mainstream. The assurance with which he shoots the suburban landscapes, understanding perfectly the trappings of the world he relentlessly parodies, provides a consummation of the square multiplex and the virtuosically subversive cinema of transgression: a hideous hybrid combining all the director’s usual (worst) tendencies in a kind of trojan horse. In order to stamp out all that which is traditional, sacred or boring! As Honey Whitlock would assert: “Death to those who support mainstream cinema!”