Massive Heart Attack

 

 

I Am Divine is a new documentary about probably one of my favorite artists who ever walked the face of the Earth:  Divine.  This picture does him justice:  glamorously monstrous, beautifully horrible, and yet a kind of defensive innocence glitters from his eyes.  Mockery and sympathy contend with each other in the way he presents himself.  I refer to him as "him" because I think that is what he always wanted:  the masquerade did not change who he actually was; it was only a device to show how fucked-up and beautiful everything is. 

 

Divine, or Glenn Milstead, is one of those penultimate figures in my life.  He was punk, queer, down-home, sloppy, stupid, sarcastic, bombastic, crazy, lovely, and so on.  I first saw him via VHS, 1985, when I was an art-school dropout in Indiana, washing dishes for a living, dropping acid, smoking Salem Lights and eating Little Debbie's Oatmeal Cream-pies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It was Pink Flamingos, and what a terrible and glorious introduction.  Simply iconic, Divine wore clownishly femi-nazi make-up (created by the genius Van Smith), tight-fitting ball-gowns, and brandished a pistol in the cold air outside her junkyard trailer.  She had a posse of tragicomic misfits that somehow seemed completely pleased with themselves, arrogantly mean-spirited, selfishly unaware of their own joke and yet completely committed to it.  Divine in the movie is total woman, dolled up and pissed off, ready to eat dog-shit at any moment, incredibly proud of her own demonic nature, and yet also chatty and sweet with those of her own kind.  In short, she was a lot like the white-trash folks I had grown up with, only glazed with freak-love, popping out of the ordinary nastiness because Glenn Milstead (and John Waters of course) had willed this beautiful monster into being to lead the way toward the Abyss.  Waters gave Divine a universe to be pissy and mouthy and elegant in, a brown ugly landscape of muddy hills and brambles and broken-down cars, and Divine graced that pit with an angry otherworldliness.  She was a goddess creating her own origin myth while shoplifting chuck-roast in between her legs. 

 

 

In I Am Divine, John talks about the day he and Glenn first saw each other, in high school.  They were both seventeen.  John's dad was dropping him off at school, and they both spotted Glenn waiting to go into school.  Glenn was dressed in preppy anonymous clothes, John says, and he was definitely trying to camouflage himself in normalcy, but obviously could not hide what John calls his "nelly-ness."  John's dad quietly noticed Glenn too, according to John:  his dad's face got stony, angry, right at the moment he spotted Glenn.   

 

Glenn could not hide his "Divine."  Even if he tried really really hard.  And so he eventually understood instead of hiding he would need to scream and flail and display his "nelly-ness" to the point people were afraid of it, afraid of his power.  And God did he have power.  In Pink Flamingos, in Female Trouble, in Polyester, and even in Hairspray, Divine was something never seen before or since:  all fury, all horror, and yet completely real, down-to-earth, hilarious, intelligent.  He didn't create a character (John did that); he created an atmosphere of self.

 

At the end of the documentary, Glenn's agent talks about seeing Glenn dead in his motel room in 1988.  (Glenn died of a massive heart attack in his sleep.)  That day he died was going to be one of those penultimate moments for Glenn:  he was going to start a stint on Married with Children, not as Divine, but as another character the writers had created for him.  And that character was a man, which made Glenn very happy.  The agent narrates what she saw that morning:  the Married with Children script carefully placed on his nightstand, his bed-slippers next to the bed, the suit he was going to wear laid out on a chair. 

 

And Glenn in bed, gone from this world.

 

"He was beautiful," the agent said.

 

The poignancy about that whole scene is his preparedness, his optimism, his work ethic.  He was dedicated to finding ways of turning people's heads inside out. 

 

That takes a lot out of you.

   

Foster the Gravel

Roman Polanski's movie version of Yasmina Reza's play "God of Carnage" has a truncated title (just Carnage) and a cast of brilliant actors (John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet, and Jodie Foster) hamming it up as New York City basket-cases getting hot and bothered because their elementary-school-aged sons got into a fight.  It's a tedious and gorgeous movie, like a trashy sitcom directed by Ingmar Bergman.  A claustrophobia sets in almost immediately, as we watch these four people act like complete and total idiots, with a gloss of philosophy and art-history added on to make the whole thing seem worth the trouble.  But what makes it worth watching for real is Jodie Foster.  It's like this is her Mommie Dearest moment (the 1981 Joan-Crawford dragshow that featured Faye Dunaway as the famous sadist/actress; Faye never seemed to recover).  Foster plays a politically-correct, sincere, creepy, shrill harpie that tows the party-line so hard she makes the word "community" sound like bullets shooting out of a gun.  It totally feels like she's channeling Mink Stole's Peggy Gravel all the way through.  Peggy Gravel is the main character in John Waters' 1977 masterpiece Desperate Living, and in that movie Stole inhabits Peggy's psyche with a psychotic ferocity close to demon possession.  As in all of Waters' movies, the characters mostly speak in hyperbolic hilarious monologues.  Peggy in Desperate Living is always screeching about unfairness and crime and how she does not deserve the world she is living in.  And Foster's Penelope Longstreet is in the same boat in Carnage.  The shrillness is comic and hyperbolic, but the joke is very, very thin, as is the plot, which runs along the lines of Waiting for Godot with a little Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf tossed in for good measure.  Polanski has made a John Waters' movie out of scraps from a Woody Allen one.  It is delightfully stupid and probably a truly bad movie, but incredibly watchable like a dining room fuss in Mob Wives:  pure camp, without any redeeming values.  What's better than that?     

Philadelphia Freakdom

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has a scummy, shoddy look to it and a fevered meanspiritedness at its core.  It's a really bad episode of Seinfeld directed by John Waters.  And bad on purpose.  Really, really, really bad on purpose.

I only started watching it this season so I don't exactly get the relationships and/or the premise.  But that doesn't really matter.  I have gleaned from the four episodes I've seen this season that a bunch of smarmy, creepy idiots who interact like white-trash anchor-people about to go to commercial (one female and four males, one of them being Danny Devito, who seems to be the magic-worm in this cheap bottle of tequila) are always looking for a way to, well, I really don't know.  Always looking for a way to be the penultimate smarmy, creepy idiots they are supposed to be in this universe of dead whores in hallways, chimichangas in garbage bags, and (my personal favorite) rum-ham floating delicately on the ocean's surface.  The nastiness of the show is its surrealism, and each of the puppet-characters are hell-bent on being horrible and stupid to the point there's a magical rhythm, kind of like when the Three Stooges really get going.  Only these stooges don't move around that much.  No pies or slaps in the face.  Just constant bull-shit talking.  And a sucky, vast abyss always around every corner.

My favorite episode happened a week or so ago when Danny Devito's Frank Reynolds decides to host a kiddie beauty pageant in the bar all the characters seem to either co-own or maybe just co-habitate.  The first scene is a true slapstick gem:  Devito jogs into the bar to tell everyone about his beauty-pageant idea and falls flat on his face, busting his nose.  Horrible horror-movie blood trickles down Devito's troll-like face in a gruesome, hyper-real pattern copied it seems from the Busted-Nose Hall of Fame dictionary.  The episode quickly descends into beautiful and completely politically-incorrect madness:  Frank tries to cover his broken nose with funeral-home make-up, giving him the pallor and soullessness of Nosferatu with a hangover, and he spends all his screen-time with a microphone telling everyone in the audience how much he is not going put the moves on the little girls in the pageant.  Tall and blond and gawky, like a slightly less stressed Ann Coulter, Kaitlin Olsen also stands out, turning one of the contestants into her little dancing and singing co-partner, in a duet about how horrible mothers are.

In every episode I've seen, Charlie Day's weaselly face and high-pitched voice always add a sort of terrifying joy to the atmosphere.  He's the Willy Wonka on this melted-candy-bar planet.  The atmosphere rots your teeth, the people are worthless, the candy is poisonous, and every situation is contrived and quite stupid:  God do I love this show.
  

Nothing's Shocking

At the end of Role Models, John Waters' talky, self-involved, and still somehow entertaining memoir about the people who have inspired him over the years, Waters gives a pretty good description of what art needs to be for it to be successful:  "purposely homely, haughtily failed, and passively confrontational."  He uses Cy Twombley, the Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss, and Mike Kelley as prime examples of winners of this aesthetic taste test, and it's a fascinating bit of art criticism, a full-on ironic monologue that also praises these artists while pointing out the limits of their worth.  Twombley's scribbles, Kelley's dirty stuffed animals, and Fischli/Weiss' hyper-banal photographs of airports all become examples not just of contemporary art, but also metaphors for the way Waters sees the world.  He positions himself as a cherisher of the uncherished, a snob among snobs, with a heart as big as a sweaty, low-rent circus tent, and just as sad and cheap.

Waters is one of my role models, but as I read Role Models I felt like I was on the phone with a loquacious and very drunk best friend.  A lot of the time I wanted to hang up on him and go to bed.  In the book, Waters' voice is chatty to the point of annoyance:  he seems almost too eager to please, as if he is trying to reinvent the past so he can shock people all over again.  In his early movies, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living, Waters' excitement and chutzpah in spotlighting the demented perversions of his cast of misfit talents (Divine chief among them) was bubbly and somehow innocent -- a dreamy catalog of raunchy dramas and activities.  The clothes, props, and sets were the objective correlatives of Waters' meanspirited rainbow frenzy:  whore/clown make-up, thrift-store S&M, flabby flesh inside a dirty pink playpen, a trailer set on fire, an Xmas tree falling on a sour housecoated old lady.  And so on.  He was inventing a way to focus his attention on grotesque freaks by beatifying them, pickling them in their own horrible juices.  All those early movies fit Waters' "homely/failed/confrontational" matrix.  They are even better examples than the examples he sites in Role Models.

I guess the problem is that once you burn down a trailer, push an Xmas tree onto your sadsack mother, and eat dog poop, what else can you do but feel nostalgic?  That's the tone of Role Models, but the tone doesn't fit the subject matter.  Waters seems hellbent on being "shocking" so he can relive what "shocking" used to be.  But there's no shock left now, so his chatty, gossipy takes on Johnny Matthis, Little Richard, Zorro the Infamous Lesbian Baltimore Stripper, and all the rest come off like longwinded but usually entertaining stories about The Glory Days.

The only chapters that broke out of this nostalgia were the one I mentioned about Twombley, et. al., and the chapter about Leslie Van Houten, ex-Manson-Girl.  Waters in this part of the book deconstructs his "love" for the Manson Murders, and gets serious about how being a fan of murderers like Van Houten is a pretty complex position to take.  But he's not trying to shock or lead us into temptation here:  he's writing about personal responsibility and guilt.  It's a sober chapter, and yet it seems more energetic and alive than all the other chapters before and following it.  He comes off like a true friend to Van Houten, a friend who knows all the horrible things she's done and yet he still stands by her.   He stops name-dropping and starts questioning his own life in a lot of ways, as well as trying to figure out his art:  "I [like Van Houten] am guilty too.  Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families."

You start to appreciate Waters in this part of the book.  Not as a shock-art auteur, but as a human being coming to terms with his past and how that past intersects with who he is now.  I am one of his biggest fans.  His movies  and persona have been so inspirational to me.  For the majority of Role Models, though, Waters seems dead set on being who he used to be.  He has a strange, vociferous need to please us by shocking us with stuff that doesn't really shock us anymore.