Who's the rube?

As I often praise films that are joyous and refrain from moralizing about sexuality, it should come as no surprise that I have a wee soft spot in my heart for John Waters. To be fair, I'm not all that wild about watching people eat dog poo, as per the infamous Pink Flamingos scene, but the purity of his unapologetic sexual glee in a movie like A Dirty Shame, in which the notably flat-chested actress Selma Blair is transformed into something of a mammary anomaly, in which Tracy Ullman works her campiest, leopard-printiest charms, and in which Johnny Knoxville peers deep into my soul, well...it's a comedy that actually made me laugh. He's somehow managed to key into a counter culture for which I can think no term more apt than "queer," in a manner that plays to a kitsch sensibility of the highest order. He's like Pedro Almodovar without the Spanish heartbreak. And with more poo-eating.

And while Waters' stories do seem to well up from the Baltimore queer underground, they somehow don't alienate an audience the way that films made via the vehicle of queer-culture pastiche, for a exceedingly insular queer-culture audience alone, most certainly do. Of course, over the years, assorted write-ups testify to the fact that Waters is capable of riling up an audience now and again. But what strikes me as so ridiculous about all those uptight, prudish, scandalized reviews is that they pretty much feed Waters' fire. He's pressing buttons just for the fun of pressing buttons. And he's something of an equal opportunity button-presser-- by which I mean, surely, at some point, you'll see yourself (no matter what variety of stereotype in the smack-dab middle of which you find yourself) depicted in an insulting manner in one of his films. But then it's on you, dear audience member, to decide whether or not you can take a joke.

Now, one might imagine that I'm writing a post about John Waters so soon after the release of the big-budget remake of Hairspray because I have something to say about THAT movie. Really, I'm not. I don't have too much interest in seeing the new Hairspray. The Waters' version was campy and full of lousy acting and had a message about how segregation was bad and we shouldn't judge fat girls. The new one looks fizzy and watered-down. And altogether too sparkly and expensive. Also, Waters' grassroots approach to casting means that half your laughs are aroused by poorly delivered lines. How'm I supposed to laugh at Queen Latifah in such a manner? Casting the damn thing with real actors spoils a good portion of the fun.

So, instead, I'm gonna talk about Pecker, which is quite possibly the best John Waters film ever. And it was on cable night before last. Oh, how I love this movie. And upon repeated viewing (well, 3rd or 4th, this time) I think I began to appreciate it on a whole new level. Lately, I've been reading Greg Bottoms' new memoir/art response (it's not exactly criticism or history, either one) book, The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys into Outsider Art. It's an interesting text because, pervasively throughout, Bottoms seems deeply and personally troubled by questions of intended audience for religious fundamentalist art and the commodification thereof. And truly, he's not sure which is the more sinister force: the artists who are espousing a bigoted, often illogical-bordering-on-clinically-insane, fundamentalist Christian perspective or the liberal hipsters who buy the stuff because they think it's cool to be cultural tourists in the overwrought world of revelatory religious visions and quirky, obsession-generated art.

Now, perhaps it's just that I happened to watch Pecker once again during the course of my reading of The Colorful Apocalypse, but I really do think two resonate with each other, both in terms of sensibility and by mere coincidence. For those who've not yet seen this 10-year-old film, Pecker is the story of a cheerful, ostensibly culturally oblivious kid who finds a crappy 35mm camera in his mom's thrift store. He begins taking grainy black-and-white pictures of everything in his life--rats fucking, his laundromat manager girlfriend yelling at people, his big sister playing emcee at a gay bar, his creepily sugar-crazed kid sister, his best friend shoplifting, the pubic hair of strippers from the local lesbian stripclub, and other assorted scenes of glorious depravity. By chance, some schmancy agent from NYC happens into the sub shop dive where he's having a "show" and voila! he's the toast of the New York art scene. Of course this proposed persona of innocent and uninformed "outsider" artist is a pretty disingenuous conceit on the part of Waters--Pecker's eye for underworldly seeminess and basic photographic composition are clearly far too accomplished. The photos in the film are actually pretty great.

When Pecker's fame begins to accumulate, his family and friends back in Baltimore (home-base for all Waters' cinematic confections) begin to give him the whole "you're a sell-out, Pecker!" song and dance. And so, he relocates his operation to his very own gallery/lesbian strip club/pit beef stand/gay bar in his Baltimore neighborhood. On the walls, he hangs revealing and insightful and slightly insulting pictures of the fancy New York hipsters, taken on the night of his New York debut. Again, the knock-you-over-the-head message of the photos is far too clear, given the keenly cultivated innocence of the Pecker character. But, the point is still made.

Pecker's family and friends are, as is the case with pretty much every Waters protagonist ever, ridiculously provincial in their perspectives while simultaneously being happily liberated about and accepting of all things queer. For example, Pecker's Memama (uh, grandmother) has devised her own interpretation of the Catholic liturgy, such that a giant puppet of the Virgin Mary (whose "miracle" is that she repeatedly squeaks "Full of Grace!" while Memama's lips mysteriously move) becomes part of her very own sacrament. Meanwhile, Pecker's sister Tina calls everyone "Mary," attributing the term of endearment to the Baltimore-specific gay scene. While the artists that Bottoms profiles in his book seem to be pretty universally anti-queer, they are otherwise very similar to these characters. They're prone to interpreting fundamentalist religion in intensely idiosyncratic and non-capitalist ways. They sometimes seem comically insular and bumpkinish, despite Bottoms' valiant--and mostly successful-- effort towards portraying them with dignity.

And while it's troublingly tempting to make folk heroes out of these people, both Waters and Bottoms manage to resist that old impulse towards fetishization. Waters characters ARE goofy, awkward yokels. And the Bottoms' artists ARE scary in their rabid views that lean, not just towards a conventional brand of homophobia, but also towards a very weird revisionist-history version of anti-Semitism that contends that the people commonly denoted as "Jews" are actually merely dirty, money-grubbing Hebrews, while the term "God's chosen people" really refers to "white people." Whew! I'm sorry, but talk about crackpot! Still, they are passionate, creative and steadfast, not only in their beliefs, but also in their drives towards artistic expression. And the Pecker's rift with his family that results from the onset of his fame is hardly atypical. Though they do not intentionally model their lives after the Romantic idea of "the ArtEEST," certainly, these folks make personal sacrifices for their art. It would be difficult for me to NOT respect that.

Bottoms and Waters also have virtually identical presentations of art world vultures. In the film, a busful of citified Pecker-enthusiasts (hehehe) take a little jaunt down to Baltimore, and upon arrival, someone at the front of the bus yells, "This! Is! Baltimore!" And all the New Yorkers cheer. They're so horrendously excited about their little venture into the wilds of urban Maryland. Similarly, Bottoms describes a couple of encounters with various art critics and buyers who are trying to apply the vocabulary of art criticism to work that comes out of a very different impulse than the more usual sorts of gallery art, which he describes as "fueled by aesthetic concerns." Outsider art pretty much always defies art criticism, and so, the folks that seem so committed to putting it into an art-world framework wind up making themselves appear to be pretentious assholes.
The real kicker, however, is that Bottoms is an English professor, well-versed in the business of critical writing, and John Waters is really no longer the cinematic pariah he once was. Both of their oeuvres are well-informed by all the rest of the critical and creative work that has come before them and continues to happen around them. I would hedge my bets that the both of them are more likely to identify with this latter group of derision-attracting sophisticates, rather than the former pack of impassioned hayseeds. So then, my question with which I've titled this post becomes absolutely central to both of their concerns. Waters never really needs to make a decision about who he thinks is the biggest asshole, because he is so democratic in his parcelling out of light-hearted ribbing. Bottoms, though, tortures himself with guilt over his own discomfort with fundamentalist Christianity. He doesn't WANT to judge these guys... but it's so HARD not to, especially when they are so open in their hatred of queers, Jews, Masons, Buddhists (how do you hate a Buddhist?) and everyone else who isn't a card-carrying Jesus freak.
And so he does that clever liberal-guilt-absolving thing (dammit, I'm pretty sure I'm good and guilty of this one myself) wherein he saves up all his best critical skewers for the folks most like himself, in a show ever-so-slightly tinged with self-loathing, while offering a moderately cool reportage of his interviews with the artists themselves. Midway through the book, he virtually interrupts himself to quote Janet Malcolm's book, The Journalist and the Murderer:

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance of loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

In all honesty, if I didn't so easily identify with Bottoms' writerly plight, I would, perhaps, find it a little overwrought. After all, it's just the next iteration of the age-old artistic concern that, if your subject matter is something other than your own innermost, most abstract thinking, you necessarily open yourself to the criticism that you are an "exploiter." For me, however, this awareness makes the landscape of Bottoms' memoir one in which I feel pretty comfortable. Were it handled any other way, I'm not sure I could say that.
As one final point of ironic comparison, I'd like to point out that Waters presents his hometown of Baltimore as the anti-New York. It's homier and more rustic and appears to be stuck in the 70s, even though the film is ostensibly set in present-day and was filmed in 1998. And all of its denizens are blissfully unaware of their lack of sophistication. Meanwhile, the real Baltimore is home to what is probably this country's biggest hub for outsider art: The American Visionary Art Museum. Bottoms spends a good chunk of his book in this museum, generating a running commentary on how everything therein has been so absurdly commodified, manufactured, spun and spat out for the consumption of the average outsider-art-museum-goer (a decidedly different crowd than the outsider-art-makers, themselves). I daresay, Baltimorians probably aren't so removed from New Yorkers as Waters might have us believe.
Can I just say that I love the serendipitousness of the manner in which I receive aesthetic input? As I've been reading The Colorful Apocalypse, I never would have stopped to relate it back to Pecker, had it not, just by chance, graced the cable listings late on a Tuesday evening.