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John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 film Hairspray was given a PG certificate. He said: “It was very bad.”
Until then, Waters, called the “Pope of Trash” by novelist William S Burroughs, was famous for his non-painting. In Eat Your Makeuphe repeated the assassination of JFK just five years after the event, causing an uproar. Divine drag like Jackie Kennedy. He introduced the vulgar sex called “rosary work” inside Several maniacswhich also had crab-raped-by-giant-lobster. Worst of all, in Pink Flamingoconvinced Divine to mock the new dog on camera.
Now here he was making a bubblegum drama about teenage heartthrobs in a fictional show of the early 1960s. Hair is never without its features: there are romantic dabs of bad omen (vomiting on a fun ride, a rat disrupts a moon experiment), a glorious scene of Debbie Harry sneaking a bomb under her beehive wig, and Divine has two roles as a Baltimore TV governor. The result, in the words of Rolling Stone magazine, was a family film that “the Bradys and Mansons would love”.
Speaking from his home in the seaside idyll of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Waters shuddered at the memory of his first and only PG: “I was scared. I thought my fans were going to turn on me.”
The 80-year-old intruder has turned off his camera for the morning call but his voice is heard as if he were in the same room: a damp cloth, a high-pitched voice, a sneer hinting at the curl of the lips. I ask him to describe his appearance today, he sounds like a disabled person on the phone during one of his films, and he helps him: “I have a turtleneck, pants and socks by Paul Smith”. Unnamed but hinted at is the pencil mustache he once said he hoped would give him the look of “a high school senior who would be a child molester”.
Although Waters has been busy writing books and touring his own talk show (coming to the UK in February), he hasn’t directed a movie since. Dirty Shamehis 2004 drama about small-town sex. He failed to get funding a few years ago to adapt his self-indulgent novel Liarmouth, despite being joined by Aubrey Plaza, and there are no new movies in the pipeline. Thank goodness, then, for the former: boutique label Criterion has given the bells and whistles support for Blu-ray Hair coloring is a 1977 adult fiction A Desperate Lifewhich is set in Mortville, a cruel asylum ruled by the mad Queen Carlotta (played by grandmother Edith Massey).
It’s two odd coins. The hairstyle marks the beginning of Waters’ unexpected entrance into mainstream Hollywood, paving the way for a barbed but not scary comedy with a real star: Johnny Depp (Cry-BabyKathleen Turner (Mother, don’t worryChristina Ricci (Pecker). It also produced several Tony-winning Broadway musicals in 2003 and a second film version starring John Travolta in 2007.
Desperate Living, on the other hand, remains its own film. “It didn’t do well when it came out,” he admits. The absence of God may have something to do with it. Originally cast in the film as a prostitute who undergoes phalloplasty and abortion, she was arrested by an actress instead. “I think he also wanted to get away from me a little bit, to make sure he was good,” Waters says.
It may be embarrassingly funny, but Desperate Living feels heavier and less powerful than many of Waters’ other works. He said: “It’s my most annoying movie. “And my worst.” No doubt about it. What about when the car drives the dog? “It wasn’t like that. that disgusting,” argues Waters, who took the animal out of the freezer at the hospital’s laboratory.” “It was already dead. And it should be in the film. ” I was thinking that the dog was not melted properly, so that pieces of it stuck to the axle and had to be carefully removed to take it again. “Yes, it’s true,” he admits with a throaty laugh. “The perfect world for filmmaking.”
Desperate Living was also the first of his films written without the help of marijuana. “Most people when they have success, they get addicted to cocaine or other things. Why? “I wanted to keep going and not get distracted.” He’s tried it all. “I hated heroin. All the itching and scratching. Luckily, I’m not a jazz musician, so I didn’t have to.” Special sarcasm is reserved for fun. “Drugs that make you love everybody no to me,” he scoffs.
Viewed side by side, parallels are evident between the two disparate films. There’s an obsession with rats and cockroaches: in Desperate Living, a cockroach pounces on the body of naked man-turned-actress Liz Renay, and the opening credits show a blind rat being sent to something better. Afterwards, some dead rats are stirred into the pot; it’s a wonder the cast and crew didn’t come down with hantavirus. As well as a rodent cameo in Hairspray, the film also features a dance called the Roach, which heroine Tracy Turnblad (future showrunner Ricki Lake) performs dressed as a roach while pretending to squash bugs on the floor. “Why don’t we have a gimmick dance today?” Madzi asks, sounding bored. “Why wasn’t there a Covid dance and a strange Covid song? I need strange music…”
The rat’s favorite moment blossomed in Pecker, his 1998 comedy about a young Baltimore artist taken in by the New York cognoscenti. “There’s a scene where the rats are leaning in the trash,” says Waters. “We had a trainer but the rats didn’t do anything. Then the owner came and grabbed the rats on the ground and shook them. It looked really good.”
In 2019, President Trump criticized Baltimore, where Waters was born, as a “chaos full of rats and rats”, he received a strong response from the director: “Give me the rats and cockroaches of Baltimore every day for the lies and racism of your Washington, Mr Trump.” It takes a bit of effort to draw a parallel between the current president of the United States and Queen Carlotta, who casually insults her subjects (“Hello fools! Hello! Wicked!”) and issues vague orders: “Every word I say must be taken as a direct declaration!” Carlotta’s plan to inject Mortville with rabies though reminds us of the role of the administration in public health. “That crazy RFK Jr,” Waters laughs. “How have you been?” ever elected?” He started chanting: “‘Hey, Hey, RFK/ How many Covid kids have you killed today?'”
But one should not confuse the computer chaos and carnage of Desperate Living with moral chaos. When I go to say that there are no rules in his films, Waters stops me dead. “No, there and rules,” he said: “The rules are these: don’t judge yourself and don’t judge people if you don’t know the whole story. People who succeed always follow through. People who are lost are jealous and judgmental. But there are rules for sure.”
Also the humor of any film should not hide their seriousness. Hairy may treat the Civil Rights era with harshness but his anger is palpable. Both films celebrate resistance against racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these videos say about the US in 2026? “I think they say anger can be good, but the way you turn things around is humor.” Is there anything he can’t joke about? “I wouldn’t go to Israel with all those events. It would be a loss for me to even try. But I’ve always walked the edge of what you can’t laugh at. In all my films, I laugh at things I like, not things I hate. That’s why I’ve been doing this for 60 years.”
It’s hard to believe that almost two-thirds of that time has passed since Divine died, three weeks after the release of Hairspray, at the age of 42. on he was very surprised,” said Waters.” “And today she is in many ways. I believe she changed the queens. When we were young, they were very nice and round. Today, every drag queen has her own style, and I think it’s because of God. Because she was so fat, with scars on her face, with chain lice – she was a punk before there was such a thing.”
