Future schlock

Waters predicts the mainstream course

by Alicia Potter

A mutt squats with hind legs shaking and tail arched, pleading with that embarrassed look dogs get when they're straining to take a dump. Behind the pooch sits a 300-pound drag queen, a Maybelline masterpiece of arched brows, powder-blue eyelids, and exaggerated Cupid's-bow lips. As the dog nervously goes about its business, the transvestite scoops up a warm canine nugget, pops it into his mouth, and smiles what can only be called a shit-eating grin.

With this scene, the final atrocity in the 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, writer/director John Waters shot up from filmmaking's kinky netherworld to become the undisputed sultan of shock. Of course, the movie's sloppy toe-sucking, ménagerie à trois (there's a chicken involved), and singing anus didn't hurt his reputation either. But on the eve of Pink Flamingos' 25th anniversary, Waters appears to have struck peace with the Coke-and-Cadillac mainstream he once gleefully eviscerated. A pundit of pop culture, he has written three books, recorded an upcoming Simpsons episode, and taken his stand-up shtick on the road to the masses. His press clippings quote him putting down drugs and pushing libraries; his most recent film, 1994's Serial Mom, played with barely a ripple of controversy. No coprophagy here, folks. Has the mustachio'd deviant matured into benignly wacky Uncle John?

Waters, managing to look impeccable in a beige terry-cloth jacket that could easily double as a bathmat, points out that the cultural climate has changed radically since he began making movies in the late 1960s. Let's face it -- the '90s could be a John Waters movie. Lip-glossed RuPaul preens on VH1; families squabble over whether they should rent To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar or The Birdcage; and the six o'clock news and Hard Copy have become smarmy kissing cousins. Perhaps Waters has not so much risen (or is it stooped?) to mainstream America's level; perhaps mainstream America has openly admitted he's onto something -- deviance is entertaining.

If video killed the radio star, then porno killed the kinky crossdresser. "As soon as there was nothing left you couldn't show," Waters says with a sly smile and quick gesture to his crotch, "there was no point in trying [to shock]." Declaring the Golden Age of Trash dead with the '70s, he adds that his objectives as a filmmaker changed with the passing of camp's heyday. "Being angry at 20 is sexy, being angry at 50 is pathetic. I'm not trying to do `edge' anymore. I have never tried to top the ending to Pink Flamingos. I'm not looking to shock. I want to make people laugh."

What makes Waters laugh -- and cry -- these days is the current state of pop culture. Just because he's ventured near the mainstream doesn't mean he has to like it -- from Seinfeld ("I saw it only once and was totally mystified by it. I felt like a Martian.") to O.J. ("I hated him when he just ran through airports and didn't kill anyone") and the Internet ("I can't type and jerk off at the same time"). Waters accuses twentysomethings of lacking imagination in defining '90s pop culture. "Sorry, but a '70s revival just isn't enough," he scoffs, encouraging slouching alterna-teens to kick up some good old-fashioned juvenile delinquency.

However, the decade so far has served up enough deviancy to feed even Waters's obsession with good bad taste. And that, he believes, is where the future lies. "Diaper-pail fraternities" in which men eroticize themselves as babies and "sploshing," a fetish in which participants get off by dumping food in a loved one's lap, bring a perverse glint to Waters's eye. No surprise that the filmmaker savors Showgirls ("It's dirty, stupid, expensive and fun, all the things a movie should be") and trails the tabloid exploits of voluptuary Anna Nicole Smith. "But I don't particularly want to work with her," he adds hastily.

What does he behold as the next pop-culture wave for the new millennium? Bemoaning the recent "Disneyfication" of drag queens, he predicts "drag kings," women dressed up as men, will nudge RuPaul and his pouty sort into the annals of pop history. On the film front, Waters relishes the thought of "instant movies" in which filmmakers would read the morning paper and complete a picture on the most sensational story before the evening edition hit the streets.

He also fantasizes about making a movie about a nudist camp populated by the likes of Ed McMahon and Cicely Tyson, and an animated children's feature called Toys That Kill in which the retail world's annual list of dangerous playthings comes to gory life. But for his next project, Waters hopes the studio will just let him keep the film's title, never mind its plot line. Pecker is the story of a boy photographer who's earned his moniker by -- surprise -- pecking at his food. He becomes the toast of the Manhattan art world when he's hailed as a genius for his unusual portfolio of family portraits. Still editing the script, Waters has already taken flack from the Motion Picture Arts Association for the film's coy title. "If we can have Octopussy, we sure as hell can have Pecker," says the director, who plans to wage a legal battle to keep the name.