John Waters needs no introduction – his name is a definition in itself. Not just for radically transforming everything that is trash and camp (it’s no surprise that his most notable successors include Harmony Korine, Albert Serra, and Pedro Almodovar, though they couldn’t be more different), but for the way his cinema tackles the most pathological, hilarious excesses and contradictions of the American psyche. His films blast the hypocritical underpinnings of the strict morality of the 1950s (and thus anticipating the neocon atmosphere of the ‘80s) through extremely frontal and explicit provocations: from scatological and macabre humor to the most outrageous depictions of all kinds of orientations, gender identities, fetishes, and sexual behaviors outside the heteronormative spectrum.

After all, he is known as “The Pope of Trash” – and any rare opportunity to see his films on the big screen in Romania (I recall, for instance, the epic screening of his seminal film, Pink Flamingos, organized by the Queer Cineclub at the Union Cinema) is a must for any cinephile who hasn’t yet left the capital for the summer. I would also say that watching one of his films in a city as hysterical as Bucharest is quite fitting, a match made in heaven – it’s no wonder Waters liked Radu Jude’s latest film so much that he included it in his legendary end-of-the-year list.

Restored 40 years after its release and included in the prestigious Criterion Collection (which also features Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs, and Female Trouble), Polyester, Waters’ sixth film, is a unique (but not atypical!) title in his filmography, being his first project made with the financial support of a studio (i.e. New Line Cinema). Not that the funding was too generous, even by the standards of the times ($300,000), but it was more than enough for someone used to making films for not even 10% of that amount and who was more than ready to move beyond the cult/midnight movie sphere. “I wasn’t yet safe to like,” he said in an interview on TCM. On the other hand, in another interview, he said, “I don’t think you could say that making a movie in Odorama with Tab Hunter and a three-hundred-pound drag queen is exactly selling out.” Still, he was not ready to compromise on his outrageous humor or his small eccentricities, inspired by the naive scientific innovations of the fab fifties: the audience was given cards called Odorama featuring ten “scents”, which they were encouraged to scratch off when the corresponding number started flashing on the screen during the film’s prologue. Here you can read the full list of fragrances, or rather, stinks – and a review of them! The tagline? It will blow your nose!

Any “sensitive” nose would be put off by the plot of this pestilential parody of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, led by Waters’ diva, the one and only Divine – who here fully embodies what the filmmaker affectionately called “Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla put together”. Here, he stars as Francine Fishwater, a housewife with a heightened sense of smell and quite an appetite for alcohol, whose family comes straight out of the darkest nightmare of the middle class. There’s something here that reads as both a satire and a candor-filled, empathetic look at ‘traditional’, ‘typical’ femininity – see the scenes with her best friend Cuddles, as well as with her mother, who seems to have clawed her way straight out of those fairy tales with malevolent maternal figures – which is subverted not so much by Divine’s histrionic drag queen performance or by the often absurd situations the script puts her in, but by the way its quirks and characteristics are pushed to extreme, pathological heights.

Although it’s Waters’ first film to receive an R-rating (unlike his previous ones, which went straight to the strictest level, that is, X-rated), let us not doubt for a second that he didn’t push all the buttons that would drive any Christian fundamentalist into a fit: Francine’s unfaithful husband is the unscrupulous manager of an adult movie theatre, her daughter seems almost ecstatic at the idea of having an abortion, and her son is a crackhead with a killer foot fetish. But the prestige audience doesn’t escape unscathed, either: in a late scene, Francine is invited by the muscular Todd Tomorrow (played by Tab Hunter, one of the heart-throbs of the late Golden Age) to visit his open-air arthouse cinema, where a Marguerite Duras (!) triple bill is playing. And while the ads for popcorn and soda are replaced by ones for caviar and champagne that invite viewers to “reflect on the intellectual meaning of cinema,” Francine is flipping through an issue of Cahiers du Cinema – and her befuddled face while doing so is worth a million bucks.

Without giving too much away – for all the hyper-dramatic plot twists in this film, backed by delicious, insanely quotable lines, are well worth experiencing without any sort of spoilers – I would conclude by saying that there’s something in the extreme levels of ridiculousness that Polyester reaches that feels almost like a harbinger of both the trash TV phenomenon and of other filmmakers who will probe into the American psyche: the way the hidden rot of strict suburban morals bubbles to the surface in all its garish colors, in all its kitsch, in all the violence that is meant to be swept under the rug, but which the domestic space accelerates to delirium and hysteria. That’s not so much because Waters and his band of Dreamlanders were, at the end of the day, “ordinary” people (but very much willing to take on a completely insane bet) who were far from the glitz of Hollywood. Rather, it’s because of all these over-the-top histrionics that feel at home within this house decked with merry macramé, floral wallpapers, and massive furniture – the Fishwaters’ house is definitely the film’s second (inconspicuous) protagonist, its cheerful nightmare arriving to the screen just ten years shy of the pure nightmare that the audience was to discover within the house of the Palmer family in Twin Peaks.

“Polyester” will be screened on Saturday, July 13, as part of the CineMasca program.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.