After Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, Pecker and Cecil B Demented, it seemed John Waters could do no wrong – no matter how hard he tried. The once-reviled films of cinema’s finest purveyor of trash were suddenly beloved by snobs and philistines alike. That was until he directed his final film to date: A Dirty Shame, another tale of sexual perversion in suburban Baltimore.
After experiencing a roadside concussion, repressed Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) develops an addiction to oral sex and is recruited into a cult of like-minded deviants by charismatic leader Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville). The troupe of libertines and sex pests wreak havoc on the once-safe neighbourhood of Harford Road, and a resistance movement of self-proclaimed neuters is born, with Sylvia’s mother Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd) at the helm.
Ray-Ray and his motley crew’s hedonism, we are told, is bound to bring about a “resur-sex-tion” only possible through the cultivation of a truly original and never-before-seen sex act.
Waters has always had a fascination with cults; he spent many years campaigning for the early parole of close friend and Manson family killer Leslie Van Houten. He maintains that Van Houten could have easily become a member of his own gang of cinematic collaborators: the Dreamlanders. “[She] always seemed the one who could have somehow ended up making movies with us instead of running with the killer dune-buggy crowd,” Waters wrote in his 2010 essay collection Role Models.
The psychic bond between cults and cinema is never so clear as in A Dirty Shame. Often the film plays as though it’s trying to indoctrinate us into its own cult of transgression. Throughout, on-screen subliminal messages flash in bold letters: “H-O-R-N-Y”. In another experiment with text, Waters uses deliberately misleading subtitles: “Do you like to have sex?” instead of “Do you have AAA batteries?”; “You sure I can’t see your tits” as opposed to “You sure these are the right ones?” Through these dissonances, the once-prim Sylvia confesses to us her subconscious desires.
Moments like these hark back to the brash film-making approaches in Waters’ early work, such as the famed Odorama from his 1981 film Polyester, where a scratch-and-sniff given to cinema patrons allowed them to experience disgust first-hand.
Unfortunately, A Dirty Shame never reached commercial success in cinemas after being bludgeoned with an NC-17 rating. Waters pleaded with Joan Graves, then-head of the rating board, asking what could be cut. Her reply: “After a while, we stopped taking notes.” A butchered, sanitised copy of the film – aptly titled the Neuter Version – was eventually made for cable and airline distribution.
The title became a self-fulfilling prophecy and A Dirty Shame was doomed to be seen on the small screen. It’s only right, then, that the film would find its home on Netflix (an appropriately “H-O-R-N-Y” streaming platform). Twenty years on Waters’ flagrant disregard for polite society remains potent.
“It’s not safe out,” decries Marge the Neuter (played by longtime Waters muse Mink Stole) early in the film. “People are shaving their crotches as we speak. There’s pubic hair in the air everywhere!” An emergency meeting is organised for disgruntled townsfolk by Big Ethel and Marge, allies in asexuality. The locals agree: diversity is tantamount to depravity. Swingers and bears must go. Exhibitionists and adult babies are not welcome in Harford Road!
In all his obscenity, Waters finds an accomplice in Jackass star Knoxville, playing crass cult leader Ray-Ray. The Jackass movies, Waters has said, are the “closest films to my own early cinematic atrocities”, where “blue-collar dads and their teenage hetero sons happily [bond] while watching male nudity and a hipster daredevil sticking a toy truck up his ass”. Here is a cinema celebrated – rather than condemned – for its vulgarity. Profanity for the whole family!
A Dirty Shame has the same sophomoric humour. It is an ecstatic abomination. Waters challenges the puritanism and censorship of cinema and culture at large, proposing a ridiculous and impossible lifestyle of total pleasure. As in his previous films, each of Waters’ characters is bestowed with a singular obsession, whether it’s pleasure or its prevention. It’s pure, filthy spectacle. A Dirty Shame is for thrill seekers with a taste for distaste.
A Dirty Shame is streaming on Netflix. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
