![]() Reagan, of course, first made his name as an actor, but his Hollywood-to-the-White-House arc’s significant moment was when he served as “friendly witness” to HUAC as Screen Actors Guild President. One cannot describe the domestic political dynamics of the Reagan era without invoking nostalgia-fueled campaign slogans like “Let’s Make America Great Again,” a sentiment that married social and economic conservatism to the provincial American myth that the past was preferable than the present. There was an undeniable moment of the 1950s reentering the cultural sphere in the late 1970s and ushering in the 1980s, a decade marked by a reactionary urge to duplicate 1950s conformity in the face of women’s liberation, gay liberation, black liberation, sexual liberation, and high divorce rates, with its avatar being the newly elected American president. ![]() And beyond the cinema, jukeboxes and checker-tiled diners were even seeing a revival. These permeated the culture in an unignorable way and were insidious in their “harmless” presentation, which was revisionist and whitewashing of the time periods they re-created. There were legitimate classics, like American Graffiti, The Wanderers, and Cooley High, which nodded to sentimentality and cultural memory of a time and place, but there was also the empty-calorie patina kitsch of the more commercially viable Grease (which Waters would outdo in his ’50s greaser spoof Cry-Baby) and the television show Happy Days. But there were also emerging films and television shows fueled by Baby Boomer sentimentality of the not-so recent past. The narrative of 1970s Hollywood has been simplified into the New American cinema of mavericks like Cassavetes, Altman, and co., allegedly killed off by a mix of Jaws, Star Wars, and the widely perceived hubris of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate. Polyester still reads as counterprogramming to trends of American cinema both small and large. Waters dropped his film into the Baltimore suburbs, surveying the ugliness and low culture of mainstream American living. It was a material Waters believed nobody actually wanted or liked but nevertheless had, something cheaply nouveau riche disguised as suburban decadence, from furniture to sleazy leisure suits worn by divorcees. The title Polyester, for Waters, conjured something that was anti-nostalgia. During this brief historical window, Hollywood was still open for business for certain outsiders like Waters, who had already established his name in independent film infamy. But Waters was soon given the opportunity to shoot on 35mm with a sizable budget through New Line Cinema, which had moved from distribution (as it had for all Waters’s films up to that point) into production. Divine felt similarly, as she was still seen as “the drag queen who ate shit” in Pink Flamingos, and her Studio 54 period of disco hits had a short mainstream shelf life due to a disco backlash that was fueled by a strong undercurrent of anti-black and anti-gay attitudes. They had made headlines for their profanity and bad taste, but he began to fear that these career-defining works would just continually push him into an artistic corner. Waters was burned out from those productions. While Polyester is an undeniable transition film for Waters, which feels informed by the changing standards of Hollywood and the world around him, it’s also very much the work of a prankster.ĭivine and Waters were both in their mid-thirties at the time of Polyester’s making, and the brash, abrasiveness of Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs, and Female Trouble, produced when they were in their twenties, cannot be duplicated, either in terms of tone or the intensive labor necessitated by their DIY budgets. Polyester is on its surface a cocktail of pop culture artifacts where the cross-gender drag casting of Divine as Francine Fishpaw becomes less of a punkish transgression than an homage to the tradition of the “women’s picture” melodramas of the 1950s-with the added stunt of Odorama scent, achieved with scratch-and-sniff cards. ![]() Instead, they are stretching their artistry and deepening their approach to performance with a devilish wink. Waters and his muse, Divine, had not worked together since her tour de force performance as Dawn Davenport in 1974’s Female Trouble, and with Polyester, the Waters-Divine collaboration feels less content to ride on pure shock value. Polyester (1981) was the first John Waters film of the eighties, and it has an unmistakably different vibe from his earlier films.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |