John Waters Looks Back, By TOM CARSON
ROLE MODELS
By John Waters
Illustrated. 304 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25
The best measure of the film director, trash maestro, Baltimore enthusiast and all-around anti-tastemaker John Waters’s influence on a couple of generations of aspiring oddballs is that he’s made himself obsolete. From reveling in tabloid depravity to embracing the poetry of thrift-shop kitsch, his fringe aesthetic went legit long ago. Now just another boutique in the lifestyle mall, it boasts outlets from academia to Broadway.
Unlike some other Nixon-era provocateurs, however — the late Hunter S. Thompson comes to mind — Waters hasn’t been undone by the realization that he’s not outrageous anymore. Effectively inventing a second career as a droll curator of his first, he’s the best funny uncle America has had since Paul Lynde’s cackle on “The Hollywood Squares” was confusing innocents in less wised-up times.
The nostalgia that, with dwindling cinematic returns, infused Waters’s movies from “Hairspray” on turns engagingly unabashed in “Role Models,” the latest and best of his cobbled-together exercises in autobiography at one remove. The pickings here include awed accounts of face time with two of his idols, Johnny Mathis (who confides that he wanted to be Miles Davis instead) and Little Richard. The latter reacts to Waters’s wonderful, irreducibly Catholic blurt of “I wish you had been pope” by admitting his childhood crush on the Vicar of Christ: “I liked the pumps he wore. I think the pope really dresses!”
Both portraits double as shrewdly refractive mullings of different editions of fame, epitomized by Waters’s recognition that Mathis’s appeal is “something I could never achieve and he can never escape.” In a similar spot-the-mirror vein is a tribute to Tennessee Williams, who “saved my life” when the future director of “Pink Flamingos” swiped Williams’s taboo story collection “One Arm” from a Baltimore library at the age of 12. Waters leaves it to us to figure out that plenty of his own cultists might make that “saved my life” claim about him.
If H. L. Mencken was the Sage of Baltimore, Waters is, at least, the parsley. Just for fun, consider what these two share: impudence, contrariness, uproarious insults to bourgeois values that made them controversial, then fashionable, then had them prematurely posing for their native-son statues. That they’d have horrified each other is just your usual Balmer lagniappe.
They’re also equally stubborn products of their times. At his most unreconstructed, Waters can brag, “I’m one of the few who voted for Obama because he was a friend of Bill Ayres,” which is both preening and stupid. Nonetheless, he’s more conscious than he used to be about the downside of his idea of fun. An initially sprightly tour of Baltimore’s dive bars (“the good ones have no irony about them”) sets up reminiscences of two local legends: a lesbian stripper who styled herself Lady Zorro and a Native American named Esther Martin, who ran a derelicts’ bar called the Wigwam “like an iron-fisted Elaine’s.” But then both women’s grown children tell him about their upbringings, packed with hair-raising episodes of selfishness, booze, abuse and neglect. Glumly, Waters asks himself, “Can living in a real John Waters movie ever bring any kind of joy?” If that’s a self-centered way of putting things, it’s also an accurate one.
No wonder the most interesting chapter is the most conflicted: “Leslie” describes Waters’s friendship with Leslie Van Houten, the onetime Charles Manson follower who participated in the LaBianca murders and has been in prison, with one brief reprieve, for 40 years. Even as he makes a case that Van Houten should be paroled now that she’s “served more time than any Nazi war criminal,” Waters has to acknowledge his own sins. Not only did his film “Multiple Maniacs” burlesque the killings just months after the fact, but he attended “the insane LSD media-circus Manson trial” as an apparently qualm-free groupie. Considering that he still counts a “leather-bound Baader-Meinhof gang wanted-poster kit” among his prized possessions, his contrite tone here is evidently situational, if not tactical.
The more lightweight chapters include a fetching one about Waters’s reading habits (who’d have pegged him as an Ivy Compton-Burnett addict?) and another hyping the designs of Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Despite his cloying conceit that the artists whose works he owns are his “roommates” — “Sometimes I don’t mind if my roommates are messy,” and so on — an essay explaining his fondness for, among others, Cy Twombly features at least one good wisecrack: “Aren’t maids the ultimate art critics?” Also nice is this praise of Twombly: “He makes perfect mistakes.”
But anyone who suspects that the display of Waters’s cultivated side means that Divine’s enabler has gone respectable will be dissuaded by “Outsider Porn.” This graphically besotted hymn to Bobby Garcia, who shot hundreds of videos of himself having sex with Marines, and David Hurles, whose gnarly, ultra-explicit male nudes Waters prefers to Robert Mapplethorpe’s, is a reminder that he isn’t entirely kidding when he says, “Filth is just the beginning battle in the war on taste.”
His acolytes won’t need a reviewer’s say-so to lap up every word of “Role Models,” including the tired prescriptions that address them directly. But dilettantes at liberty to skip around will find a lot to charm them. In a way, the best joke in the book is that — Baader-Meinhof gang, outsider porn and all — Waters can’t help revealing on every other page that he’s both sentimental and good-hearted. Pass the relish, Uncle John.
Tom Carson is the movie critic for GQ and the author of “Gilligan’s Wake,” a novel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Carson-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
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