October
11th marks the golden jubilee of John Waters' love letter to a life of
crime, Female Trouble, which was theatrically released on October 11th,
1974. Following immediately on the heels of his midnight movie trash
masterpiece, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble doubled down on the
disgusting behaviour as juvenile delinquent, Dawn Davenport, played by
Divine, ruins Christmas, gets pregnant from rape and plunges into a life
of crime. With a story inspired by Waters' prison visits with Manson
family member, Charles "Tex" Watson, it's a muse on the beauty of
celebrity status crime and the appeal of a perverse lifestyle, a
sentiment succinctly expressed by the inimitable Edith Massey as Aunt
Ida, when she declares, "The world of the heterosexual is a sick and
boring life."
While Pink
Flamingos often gets all the glory for its bad behaviour, Female
Trouble, in many ways, manages to surpass its excesses with even more
outrageous and offensive incidents. The "cha-cha heels" Christmas scene
has become something of an iconic crystallization of entitled American
white privilege petulance. It was even recreated on RuPaul's Drag Race,
further solidifying its place as being elevated to the status of camp
high art. The birth scene, where Divine chews on an umbilical cord made
from condoms stuff ed with raw liver, is an exemplary moment of sheer
outrage, the kind of thing that makes this film stand out, even above
its predecessor.
Film critic,
Rex Reed, utterly despised the film, infamously declaring, "Where do
these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't
there a law or something?" John Waters was so enamoured by the quip
that it became a permanent fixture in promotional posters for the film
and its subsequent releases on DVD. Yet the film now holds a 90%
approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a critics consensus that reads,
"Director John Waters' affection for camp brings texture to societal
transgression in Female Trouble, a brazenly subversive dive into
celebrity and mayhem."
Personally,
I place it only behind Desperate Living and just ahead of Pink
Flamingos in terms of my holy trinity of Waters films. Taken as a
triptych, they are a consecutive trifecta of trash transcendentalism.
Waters brought his penchant for blazing past the boundaries of virtually
every cinematic taboo to a crescendo of Divine-ly
inspired perfection in these three movies, forever solidifying himself
as the "Pope of trash". He's like the anti Mister Rogers, welcoming you
into a neighbourhood of perverts, freaks and criminals, grotesquely
decked-out in the most subversive behaviour, and you just wanna stay on
that trolley and keep riding!
