Subject: Desperate Living: One Ear Wide Shut
EJBGermany@aol.com
Date: Fri Feb 11 2000 - 07:13:05 CST
Maybe it was the mono sound of my budget-priced video recorder, which the
salesperson at 'Saturnsmith' (Saturn Hansa) had dubbed the 'Trabant' (der
Trabi, das Symbol eines verschwundenen Landes, the symbol of a disappeared
country, hat heute längst Kultstatus erreicht, has long since attained cult
status) of VCRs. Maybe it was the parallelepiped PAL cassette's lack of THX
Home Cinema Certification for its 'film transfer onto video' sound processing
technology. Maybe it was poor original tech work, some sort of bit
oversampling or multi-microphone acoustic signal mixer confusion, at the
inaugural amplifier link of the sound reproduction and media storage chain.
Maybe it was an intentional Director's Cut, a willful reduction in the
spectral distribution and reverberation of the direct and reflected sound
fields, or a deliberate blunting or compression of dynamic range and
differences in tonality. I don't know, but, after the opening scene on the
front doorstep of a stately 'upper-class home,' all of the characters in John
Waters' Desperate Living seemed to us to be constantly screaming. It was as
if all voice timbres had been equalized and limited to the coarsest level of
granularity of sound wave radiation, as if one dimension of reality had been
taken away. Close one eye, and you lose your three-dimensional depth
perception. Close one ear wide shut, and the multimedia switching computer
which your brain and biotech auditory devices are alleged to be lose their
relativistic sense of position, velocity, and distance.
Those human emblems of everyday authority, the distinguished psychiatrist
(uncredited actor) and the 'understanding,' moneymaking husband-father
(George Stover as Bosley Gravel), are calmly discussing the improving mental
health of the highly neurotic Mrs. Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole), as they stand
at the outdoors user interface to the wealthy interior home, while children
play baseball on the lawn. Once past this gateway from pastoral surface to
entangled innards, it is ninety-nine minutes of nonstop frantic screeching.
Language itself, for the ruled as well as for those who rule, becomes an
unadorned, permanent, desperate outcry of the needy individual for some
personal attention. Extreme caricature of a functional-dysfunctional cultural
citizen of the upper crust, the near-anorexic, paranoid,
just-released-from-the-mental-hospital, female outpatient Peggy Gravel,
experiences perpetual mortal terror at the ordinary real-time 'accidental
connections' of suburban technological life, a wrong-number phone call or a
bedroom window smashed by the projectile of a home run hardball. Extreme
parody of a societal outcast, the thieving, alcoholic, obese, 350-pound black
maid Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill), commits a capital felony at Peggy's
instigation, using her own fatter-than-fat buttocks as the murder weapon. The
two sisters-in-crime are suddenly on the run together in the family Mercedes.
Beneath the apparent serenity of the quotidian 'American way of life' lies
the limitless violence, desolation, madness, corruption, and vulgarity which
John Waters the artist must summon into overt existence. Nothing is given,
yet this very remainder banished from the dominant systems of accumulation
and value provides the raw material necessary to meet head-on the challenge
of 'rousing the principle of evil' (although others have preferred lateral
approaches). Just as Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe) has the oculomotoric nerve to
commit double-homicide in the sub-culturally marginal Jesse Ventura Wrasslin'
Ring, and Muffy St. Jacques (played by Las Vegas strip joint burlesque star
Liz Renay) is able to flagitiously divert the banal accoutrements of
commonplace 1970s consumerism into a fatal dog food facial for the trippin'
babysitter who preserved the baby in the refrigerator, and into a lethal
automobile electrical power window head-squeeze'n'drive for her irresponsible
drink'n'drive male spouse, thus succeeding in making a twin killing, so John
Waters himself employs the media of the screenplay and the feature film to
attempt to pry apart the effectively non-copulative binary system of smug
middle-class morality and the scapegoated residuals which it excludes,
sequesters, or declares to be useless. But like his shrieking lesbian
anti-heroes, Waters aspires to invent a certain alternative numerical system,
between the one and the two of Haraway, rather than seeking to unpack
dualistic opposition into some mere self-multiplying ultra-hi-res virtual
reality or quadraphonic hyper-dimensionality.
The two chronological parts of the movie, separated by the gruesome scene
with Turkey Joe as the sexually perverted motorcycle cop who offers to not
haul the all-points bulletin fugitives Peggy and Grizelda off to jail if they
agree in return to help him get off his jollies, paint dramatically divergent
'realities,' each of which has an inherently differing aesthetic status. In
the film's first segment, we find ourselves in the habitual environment of
the polyester ennui and average white band families which John Waters, in his
anger and in his art, strives to satirize. In the film's lengthier second
portion, we are transported to a realm of wretched devastation, to the abject
misery which is the scorched earth town of Mortville and the crying lot of
its inhabitants. Perhaps it is a 'monstrous, revisionist, inverted fairy
tale' of the wicked, tyrannical Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey of Pink
Flamingos 'Mama Edie the Egglady' fame) and her sadomasochistic Nazi henchmen
in their plywood castle headquarters, as Waters himself claims. Perhaps it is
rather a science fiction scenario of a Paul Auster-like 'Country of Last
Things,' where a township owned by a tourist industry mega-corporation named
Charm City Productions has set up an alternative prison service with squallid
'living' circumstances for its inmates to provide an entertaining atrocity
exhibition for the cruel voyeuristic amusement of its anti-theme park
vacationer-customers. My best clue here is that John tells us in the essay
"101 Things I Hate" that he despises science fiction, and that he considers
it to be the worst cinema genre of all.
In the article "Going to Jail" (also in Crackpot: The Obsessions of John
Waters), I learned about the lately-gone-uptown director's critique of the
American institutional system of crime and punishment. The hatred of violent
criminals by the God-fearing Baltimorean masses is, according to John, based
on the erroneous assumption of the purported ethical superiority of the
'normal character' to that possessed by the scorned delinquents. Boiling
resentment and internecine family warfare of the roses are conditions endemic
to all of our lives, and they are the concrete prerequisites which could turn
any one of us at any time into a ready-made serial killer. It is therefore
hypocritical of us to presume to judge offenders, and to condemn them through
the instrument of the penal system to decades of harsh confinement or even
death. John taught film studies and 'sex education' to prisoners with life
sentences at the experimental Patuxent Correctional Facility in the State of
Maryland. In the prurient movie currently under investigation, the Rarefied
Authority of the Law and the Righteous Scales of Justice are represented by
the pivotal character of Turkey Joe the transvestite motorcycle cop. In one
speculative sense, the whole story of Desperate Living begins and ends within
the first ten minutes of the film, culminating in the instant of Big Joey's
frenetic bliss, the moment of real material production of his
desiring-machine. Everything that happens after the furious rush to orgasm,
the entire sojourn of the viewer and of the Dreamland players in Mortville,
might just be a deliriously wayward side-effect of the Wild Turkey's
ejaculation.
The leather- and lingerie-clad Law Enforcement Officer with the bad case of
drooling gingivitis is a disgusting low-life panty thief who is ready at the
drop of a trouser to forego his sworn duty to arrest the suspected female
murderers if they are willing to participate in the bizarre erotic ritual
activity which will bring him to climax. The Man's own special Thang is
wearing women's hosiery, and getting a big slurpy kiss from the complicit
woman who must reach down and hand over her undies to him. Then Baltimore's
Finest writhes around on the ground for a few trices of ecstasy and shoots
off his load. But just after finally achieving his release from tension,
Sheriff Shitface, as Grizelda calls him, momentarily feels a pang of guilt or
embarrassment over the depravity of his actions. He unexpectedly declares,
"What are you hogs looking at? Go on -- the show's over!" This univocal
utterance announces the end of the movie, at least in the traditional mode of
realism, the end of that libidinal economy which establish(m)e(nt)s what is
called reality. Taking off hurriedly into the misty woods, Grizelda and Peggy
emerge seconds later in Mortville, a 'trash aesthetic' domain which perhaps
only exists in reverie as the phantasmagoric waste byproduct or castoff
negative rectal underbelly of the motorcycle cop's fetishistic sex fantasy.
"I like the feel of that cold nylon on my big butt!" (Turkey Joe). "I love
the smell of napalm in the morning... You know, it smelled like victory."
(Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in 1979's Apocalypse Now). It is John Q.
Law, lampooned upholder of the Social Order and of the Prison System, who
will, from this point on, 'tell the story' of Mortville.
In Shantytown Mortville, nearly everything is running backwards, inside out,
or in reverse. On the illustrious Holiday known as Backwards Day, you have to
walk backwards and wear your clothes backwards, or face the penalty of
immediate execution by firing squad. Mass extermination by injected
rhabdovirus will also be gloriously commemorated, since "history will not
forget this holiday of death," as Peggy Gravel, the substitute Princess and
latter-day architect of Project Rabies, proclaims. Owning a lottery ticket in
Mortville practically means a guaranteed win, and bankbooks are as good as
worthless. Makeover artists are 'ugly experts.' Nourishment is available from
the daily 'food dump,' and mangy dogs eat discarded penises. Prominent
nudists are obsessed with the sublimity of collector's items of garbage. The
love poem of Herbert the nudist garbageman (George Figgs) to Princess Coo Coo
(Mary Vivian Pearce): "every piece of trash... reminded me of you." Coo Coo
is eventually 'punished' for her 'transgression' of heterosexuality with
death. The shooting set and soundstage of Mortville were themselves
constructed almost completely out of garbage. John Waters recounts how
difficult it was to gain access to the 'wonderful world' of official refuse.
He and Art Director Vincent Peranio were chased away from garbage dumps and
junkyards with due force by trash owners and their watchdogs, obliged to
swallow as they ran the bitter accusation hurled at their backs of not being
'real junk dealers.' But most of all, Mortville is about the double-negative
paradox of the accursed share or 'le rien': "There ain't nothing here," as
Mole McHenry so succinctly puts it.
It is thus by winning the lottery that the 'lesbian melodrama about the
revolution' against the repressive corporatist monarchy and the leather
fascist goons can finally take place. Mole travels to the drugstore Lotto
office in Baltimore to pick up her thousand dollars. With cash in hand, she
then goes on a shopping spree and buys three things: her penis implant, new
clothes for Muffy, and weapons. The new organ fails to stick, but guns and
bras make the revolution.
The brassiere's support for her breasts and the stunning gown give Muffy the
self-confidence to seduce on the drawbridge the Nazi officer who will become
the first kill of the uprising. The pistols and revolvers enable the
indignant rebels to storm the castle. As reality accelerates into
hyperreality, as the technicians of practical knowledge add the fourth and
umpteenth dimensions to image and sound, garbage reenters the scene, scaling
moat and rampart from just the opposite direction to save the day. Resurging
from its assigned place, it returns to reinhabit what had rejected it and
spewed it out. Trash art or filmmaking takes away one dimension from reality.
Shut one ear wide and listen to this sound of one hand clapping, to the
two-sided screaking of trash art.
Alan Shapiro
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