Flak Magazine: Review of A Dirty Shame, 11.05.04

John Waters' A Dirty Shame contains more special effects than any previous Waters film, among them rapidly edited dream sequences, complex camera movements augmented by computer graphics, and, in what might the absolute zenith of Waters' technical capability as a director, giggling animated squirrels performing rear entry on a bed of nuts. Apparently, some of Waters' windfall from the stage version of Hairspray, Waters' first PG film, was reinvested in A Dirty Shame — a direct response to the mainstreaming of this self-proclaimed trash artist over the past few years. Like many icons of a particular niche, Waters edged public consciousness, appearing in dozens of documentaries as an authority on all sorts of deviant topics, even hosting the Independent Spirit Awards.

Inevitably, the Waters spirit was finally co-opted last year when "Hairspray" landed on Broadway and brought home 10 Tonys, including Outstanding Musical. This exposure brought some due respect to Waters, who helped bring underground culture into the cinematic consciousness in a more naked way than Roger Corman. Waters' '70s films responded not just to the stultifying Nixon-era silent majority but also to the hippies themselves. Waters' beef with the moral majority is obvious, but as for the hippies, his movies with Divine Brown said to them: "You call yourself a radical counterculture? This is counterculture!" As is the natural arc of all shock artists, though, once the effect wears off, all that's left is the existential search for meaning.

A Dirty Shame is an extension of Waters' self-indulgent, what-does-it-all mean phase, which has brought us Pecker and Cecil B. Demented. In these films, an aging Waters casts about for his place in cinema, even to the point of throwing himself a bit of a pity party for his castigation. In Pecker, as Edward Furlong wanders Baltimore photographing weird happenings, Waters seems to wonder: Why haven't my movies about deviant transexual sex fiends made deviant transexual sex fiends more accepted in today's society? Cecil proposes that, because the Baltimore Film Commission has chosen to bestow its crabcake receptions on Barry Levinson rather than him, all cinema is dead, and the only way to rescue it is by taking hostages — which, for Waters, means kidnapping movie stars and forcing them to star in Waters-esque movies.

These films were projected on the backdrop of a pre-Sept. 11, 2001 culture, where descriptions of blowjobs were part of historic, presidential proceedings. Clinton-era John Waters was irrelevant — hell, gays could be in the military if they played their cards right. But we live in more conservative times, one in which a messianic, fascist-aesthetic call-to-arms becomes the highest-grossing independent film of all time. What happened to the old women talking about cunnilingus via a Catholic nun ventriloquist dummy? Is that no longer relevant?

A Dirty Shame advertises itself as "SHOCKING" and "DEPRAVED," which seems like an invitation for disappointment. But what's really astounding is that A Dirty Shame actually is shocking and depraved. Waters challenges his audience with tidal waves of graphic descriptions of previously unnamed sex acts (top decking: taking a shit in the toilet tank so that no one will be able to find the smell). He overwhelms us with such poetic renderings for cunnilingus as "tickling the cabbage" and "yodelling in the canyon." He gives Selma Blair some blue eyeshadow and Hefty-bag sized knockers. There's a cop who engages in infantilism. Waters educates us on something called the "double decker." And it goes on and on, until the laughs that accompanied Waters' opening salvos recede into sheer numbness by the end of the film.

Johnny Knoxville stars as Ray Ray, a local cult leader of concussion-stricken perverts whose fetishists range from a trio of fat, hairy "bears" who have gay threesomes in their front yard while moving furniture to a guy who likes to fuck dirt. But when Tracy Ullman, an uptight conservative housewife, bonks her head, her "pussy catches on fire," and she's invited to follow Ray Ray's band of perverts. She is, believe it or not, the twelth member of this clan, who take their message of depravity everywhere — including the retirement home, where she turns the hokey pokey into an impressive display of vaginal strength. The "neuters," a local band of do-gooders, try to take the town back from the perverts to somewhat unpredictable results: The do-gooders don't just lose out to the pervs, but the victory is framed as a spiritual one.

The perverts' sex den is ordained with ornate religious iconography, they perform sex rituals on red-clothed tables, they devote their sexual acts to the spiritual guru Ray Ray and their orgasms "heal," accompanied by the same screaming and fainting you might see at Benny Hinn taping. Waters uses his special effects budget to produce giant cloud-partings and sunbursts over Ray Ray's head when Sylvia has an orgasm, scored by pipe organ music. By bestowing upon her the gift of depraved sex acts, Ray Ray has saved Sylvia from her stultifying middle-class Christian life. Suburban Baltimore — the same one that rents Barry Levinson movies — is hell, and the sanctuary of depraved sex is heaven. In John Water's Baltimore, that is.

With all this, you have to wonder if John Waters isn't trying to explicitly say that this is his The Passion of the Christ. There was a great debate earlier this year about whether Mel Gibson's film amounted to a snuff flick. In its fetishizing of the scourging of Christ, was this film essentially pornographic? This engages a broader definition than we're used to, that violence which serves no artistic function other than titliation is also pornographic. The question posed by Gibson's movie is whether a visceral indulgence of bloody violence, even in the name of extreme relgious passion, amount to depravity in art. Waters seems to think so.

By the time Waters gets to the, ahem, climax, the audience reacts the same way it did during The Passion: relief. Relief that you made it through all this, relief that it could have been worse had Waters thrown in a "Roman shower." Waters' movie ends with a cumshot that the camera follows from overhead, almost mirroring Gibson's shot of single raindrop in the final act of The Passion. The ejaculation splatters over the screen as if the audience has received a facial from Waters himself. This is John Waters' resurrection, of sorts: He wants you to know that all that Broadway money didn't change him, that "Hairspray" may have revived his career and earned him the respect of the mainstream film and theater community, but dammit he's still John Waters! And yet there's more going here: Yes, Waters flays us with unnatural acts of sexual depravity to the point of numbness, but what elevates his movie to true offensiveness is that he makes Johnny Knoxville into, literally, a Christ figure of sexual fetishes, hoisted overhead and framed by the sun parting the clouds. Waters says to his mainstream audience, "Hey, I've got my fetishes, and Mel Gibson has his. If you call mine depraved, then what do you call this feverish worship of pornographic religiosity?" Essentially, Waters equates nymphomania with zealotry, and in doing so reaffirms his historic place as the icon of trash cinema.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)