The films of John
Waters carry with them the theme of suburban unrest can result in
individuals who live outside the law. From Pink Flamingos
through A Dirty Shame he
fixates on the outsider from the suburban norm and what the inability
to conform can do to the psyche. His works raise questions about
drugs, sex, rock and roll, family, sexuality, normalcy,
heteronormative dominance, filth and its place in the human
condition. His filth filled view of the suburban American dream when
viewed in modern times is a surprisingly accurate take on where
America was and is headed and what obsessions would become glorified
in the current age of instant media and sensationalism. His knowledge
that titillation was more important that morality remains a spot on
critique of current culture and the instant fame of murders and thugs
due to media saturation and repetition of their heinous crimes in the
twenty four hour news cycle.
Waters uses saturation of shocking images and violence to make his
point. His repetition of shock and horror to engross the public is at
its slick best in Female Trouble.
This repetition of shock and awe is common practice in todays
xenophobic American Culture and was used to the extreme by George
Bush and his comrades during 9/11 when all else was blocked from our
televisions for three days showing us violence and promising the
threat of more. It was shortly after we were blindly led into wars
with little national resistance from the newly terrorized public.
Dawn Davenport is the American use of fear in the shape of a large
high school ruffian and she will get her way by asserting dominance
like the US itself does. Waters knows who is to blame and so does
Dawn and neither one is about to apologize for what will come next!
Dawns behavior in her school is not only pointing to the brazen
high school delinquent authority issues. It calls into focus
something far more troubling; the selfish greed our children are
raised to feel as they are taught through media to succeed at any
cost. Fame and riches are the goal and we can and should get them
without lifting a finger. We are taught we are owed everting just
because we are American. Businessmen, politicians and everyday people
are clawing their way to the top bending ethics and subjecting morals
to personal purpose. The character of the glutenous Dawn is repeated
in characters today like Eric Cartmen on televisions South Park. He
is the cartoon fourth grade Dawn Davenport and his behavior is still
shocking to us because we recognize this inherent selfishness in our
culture and realize our consumerism has trapped us in this cycle.
In
his crowning masterpiece Female Trouble
we see through the life of Dawn Davenport all that was, is, and will
be the driving themes of todays mass media culture created by the
masses for the masses in never ending loops. As the movie starts we
meet Dawn Davenport and her delinquent cohorts Chicklett and
Conchetta who are bored with life*s offerings in high school.
Learning very little in classes they spend their time smoking,
spraying their enormous hair do*s and eating a meatball submarine
sandwich right out in class. When their behavior is called to the
attention of the overwhelmed mousey teacher they use threats to gain
power over their accusers.
This movie is a prediction to the rash of violence that students
have been committing on each other in great numbers in recent years.
Gun toting students who do not fit in to the model society are
frequently turning to violence against their peers to express their
grave discontent. Since the mass coverage of the 1999 Colombine high
school shooting grabbed national attention and made a house hold name
out of the frustrated students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who
killed over twelve students. They became the required viewing for
concerned Americans as they watched the students flee for their
lives. We heard the sound of shots over and over like the loop of and
experimental film. Every station and all day long for days we watched
the events unfold until our brains were etched with their images.
These images would be repeated as copy cat students disenfranchised
with the suburban American dream shot their way through their
despair, piling student bodies on the heap of discontent. Alarmingly
the violence is now being served to the students of elementary
schools as witnessed in Sandy Hook. Even the most vulnerable are at
risk now for instant notoriety.
What
many fail to see in Female Trouble
is that Waters gives us the solution and the reasons to senseless
violence. Firstly the movie blames poorly run schools; that are use
more as containment devices for the youth population as their parents
work at endless jobs to provide the American dream. Coupled with
teachers low wages. With and education system that lacks funding and
tools we instead ignore what this ignorance breeds in our children we
continue to look to the next status symbol that will bring happiness.
We are bombarded several hundred times a day by images of what it is
we must achieve materially to find happiness. The aim to have it all,
a house, kids, car and cha cha heels!
Dawn become pregnant instantly after leaving home, due to the
disappointment on Christmas morning when she gets dress flats instead
of the much desired cha cha heels. Her pregnancy is similar to that
of Jesus in that there was really only one person involved as she
rapes herself on a dirty mattress by the side of the road. We through
Dawns experience are literally told that we are fucking ourselves.
With no education and a man who refuses to accept his responsibility
for the child Dawn has an at home birth where she chews the umbilical
cord with her own teeth her life as a mother begins.
Dawn sets out to provide for little daughter Taffy by being a
waitress, a go go dancer, and eventually turns to a life of petty
crime to support her daughter and get on track for the suburban
dream. As her criminal tendency grows so does Taffy and the mother
act wears thin. Taffy is chained to her bed by Dawn and her crime
pals for annoying them after a heist. This is Waters stabbing
directly at the heart of American folklore; family unity. For years
we watch Ozzie and Harriet, the Cleavers and Donna Reed raised polite
children that lived in homes with white fences and aproned mothers
who baked pies and lived a happy life. Dawns is a story we were not
told until the idea that sensationalism sells took over the board
rooms of Madison Ave.
Dawns plight has now become exploited in our current media we have
the like of Nadia Sullman a down on her luck, plastic surgery
nightmare who found a doctor willing to give her sextuplets. She has
8 children and millions of hours of coverage on national and
international news and talk shows, media of all sorts have obsessed
over her. We paid her to undress for our titillation . She even has
an exercise video for sale. A cottage industry out of a selfish
childish action involving the lives of innocents. Shows like Jerry
Spinger and reality darling Honey Boo Boo use laughing at the poor
and uneducated acceptable and entertaining while ignoring that gangs,
religious zealots, and the hopeless had reached epidemic proportions
in our society. The Dawn Davenports are leading to violence and
reactionary behavior due to lack of education and the pursuit of
hollow consumerist dreams. The American dream was cracking in the
1970*s and Waters knew a world full of Dawn Davenports was about to
be hatched.
As Dawn become more of a celebrity in the criminal world, well on
her way to become famed criminal like Bonnie Parket or Stephanie St
Clair, she finds that crime does indeed pay. Having been accepted as
a client at the famed Lipstick Beauty Salon where only the most
beautiful of the underground are accepted as clients her status rises
to the next level. The hairdressers are three queens Wink, Butterfly
and Dribble who are a nelly, a mary and a speed freak. Gator, the
lone straight hairdresser and star of the salon, is chosen by rising
star Dawn to be her attendant and a marriage soon ensues. The vision
of Divine, a drag queen, in a revealing dress of lace marching down
the isle is a brilliant commentary on todays battle for * marriage
equality * and the desire to mimic heteronormative behavior instead
of embracing the rituals of queer culture. It is a stab at the idea
of what marriage is and what it represents. It has become a privilege
that brings with it status and tax breaks. When arguing for marriage
equality the number one argument was to save money on taxes not to
strengthen a commitment. It is our greed that drives us even in
matters of the heart.
The wedding scene we again see Waters takes the normal and subverts
it to the bizarre and questions the very ideals of normalcy. Even
Dawn*s new mother in law Ida is a bizarre creature, played by the
true live bizarre woman Edith Massey, dressed in tight revealing
black as her beloved Gator continues down the straight heterosexual
path. Ida had warned her son of the evil and depraved life of the
heterosexual and tries without success to make her son gay and free
from the constructs of the American dream and its devotion to
following the rules and fitting in. If Divine as Dawn is the anti
hero then Edith Massey plays Ida as the anti anti hero. She finds her
new daughter in law intolerable and even dumps garbage into the
newlyweds yard signifying the refuse of the consumerist
herteronormative path her son has chosen, thus breaking her heart.
However Ida need not worry for her son Gator will soon leave Dawn,
loose his job and move to the fair city of Detroit to find solace in
the automotive industry. ( The irony in hindsight is even more
cutting than in 1974. Certainly it is even a bigger joke to find
solace in an industry that has all but vanished in America leaving
Detroit a virtual ghost town. ) Gator and Dawn had tried everything
from hammers and pliers to down right abuse. Gator had even tried to
get poor old looking stepdaughter Taffy to share his bed or suck his
dick. For all his pains Gator is left with nothing after his brief
marriage to Dawn. He looses everything as Dawn plots her rise to
stardoms next step.
But Dawn does continue to rise in fame eventually becoming a model
addicted to flash bulbs, fame and injections of liquid eyeliner. Her
new agents, the Fashionable owners of the Lipstick Beauty Salon, are
the wealthy Donald and Donna Dasher obsessed with the underground.
They are the lampoon of the Warhol phenomenon and the idea that
slumming is a rich peoples pleasure. The Dashers for their own
pleasure; since they have no sexual out let, introduced Dawn to the
glamorous world of modeling and crime for their vicarious thrill.
They photograph her as she act out and garners any attention and most
of it negative. Dawn goes to dinner at the Dasher home and on the way
we see regular folks gasp in shock at the delusional model prancing
down the street rubbing herself and mugging every few feet. Upon
arriving she deludedly exclaims, * I got Lots of attention on the way
over. Everyone was staring at me. I feel like a Princess!*
Dawn has fallen into the trap of fame and believing ones own press.
She is Lyndsy Lohan, Paris Hilton, Courtney Love, Alex Baldwin and a
slew of other Hollywood elite who act out due to believing their own
press and allowing themselves to act in beastly ways because fame has
made them other. Dawn is the hoards of people who clammer to get onto
a reality show like the Hills or Americas Next Top Model, to be
famous and on TV, for no reason other than fame. She is the
Kardashian girls cashing in on a sex tape and spoiled behavior to
earn millions and to teach young girls that if you are snotty and
conniving enough you can live the life of Riley without ever having
to really contribute anything.
Dawn is a comment on the fashion industry; that since the seventies;
had begun to create household names out of mannequins that took
beautiful picture to sell the American dream in glossy magazines.
Dawn believes she is the face of the time gracing the ads that made
you desire what garment makers and ad men needed to sell.
Of corse Dawn is a 300 pound drag queen in reality. She is also
living in a delusional state as almost all Waters films tend to be.
Who else but Dawn Davenport who would continue modeling even after a
horrible acid attack by her former mother in law who had just escaped
from imprisonment as a rare bird in Dawns home where she lost an arm
in her struggles. It is ludicrous to think that this is what models
are like.... or is it? Gia a famed model in the early 1980*s often
had her abscessed arm, from shooting heroin, covered up. Later the
Supermodel Linda Evangelista would not get out of bed for under
$10,000 a day. Beauty at any price, with the it girl of the moment,
giving prestige to a product that is manufactured and sold by
delusion of happiness being provided and making us like the model who
sells it. Little do we know it is just a spoiled brat who makes too
much money or a junkie propped up to look glamorous. We but the
delusion and Waters serves this delusion right to us in the form of
Dawn Davenport.
But like so many of the stars that grace the covers of magazines,
star in a show or two and get a taste for the American dream the fall
from grace can be deadly; as is the case for our anti hero Dawn
Davenport. Taffy has followed the rout of Jesus, the other immaculate
conception, and found spirituality with the Hare Krishna giving up
all possessions enraging her mother. Dawn like Michael Jackson in his
last days has only yes men around her. Pumping her full of liquid
eyeliner to get one more headline out of her while she is still able
to work because like Naiomi Cambell she is becoming increasingly hard
to control. Dawn has lost control of her fame and the machine has
taken over and like Britney Spears she just can not maintain.
Dawn reaches the height of her criminal fame when after bouncing on
a trampoline and smearing fish all over her body in a crib she turns
on the audience that made her, with a gun. She cries out * I framed
Leslie Bacon. I called the Heroin hotline on Abbie Hoffman! I bought
the gun that Bremmer used to kill Wallace! I had an affair with Juan
Corona! I blew Richard Speck and I am so fucking beautiful I cant
stand it myself!!!! Dawn Opens fire as a devoted fan decides he wants
to die for art. Like any number of celebrity breakdowns of the famed
hollywood set Dawn has gone to far and there is no coming back. She
will not get the Robert Downey forgiveness and a second chance.
Instead like all actresses that misbehave enough there is no one that
will come to Dawns aid. She is washed up.
Dawn
like the litany of names she unleashes is doomed for obscurity. Like
Andrew Cunanan her day in the spotlight had come but it is over.
Americans have a new killer to lust after. A new rich coat hanger has
just signed to Victoria*s Secret for half a billion dollars. TV
sweetheart Cory Monteith has overdosed in a hotel and David Lettermen
is fucking a staff person. We do not have time to remember Dawn
Davenport. Waters knows that the American society is on the the next
big thing, the overnight sensation, the killer on the front page. The
American dream has become the suburban nightmare and we like Dawn are
doomed to be electrocuted for our obsessions and desires. Dawns last
close up is the face of death and as Waters has predicted in
Female Trouble ours will be
as well, so you might as well enjoy the ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment