Open Post: Hosted By John Waters Saying Bad Taste Is Dead
Up is down, right is left and John Waters is on the cover of Town & Country wearing a $3,300 smoking jacket. In the accompanying interview, America’s preeminent arbiter of bad taste says he’s not even sure it exists anymore. Not since Donald Trump made a habit of eating dog turds off the carpet in the Oval Office on national television. Metaphorically of course.
Of course, he’s right. Things have been upside down since John Travolta tried to slip into Divine’s cha-cha heels to play Edna Turnblad in the movie of the musical of the movie Hairspray (please, check my math. I dare you). I honestly believe Travolta inadvertently caused a disruption in the spacetime continuum with that performance and I’m not even sure we’re on the real planet earth anymore. John didn’t have anything to say about that particular event horizon, but he did say that Donald Trump not getting that Baltimore’s rat population is a cherished and beloved community in that town, marked a turning point. According to T&C (Catherine Zeta-Jones cannot believe this is happening in her magazine!):
Wherever you consider Waters’s station, matters of taste are always shifting, and the last several years scrambled our most traditional notions of decorum and decency. When Donald Trump called Baltimore a land of rats and other rodents, Waters went on television to defend his hometown and its vermin.
“I mean, Ricki Lake wears a roach dress as Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray. She kicks a rat off her shoe when she has her first romantic kiss!” he says. “Trump wasn’t in on the joke. Even bad taste wasn’t fun. Those Christmas decorations? He thinks that’s good taste. He ruined bad taste.”
Waters stops for a moment and reconsiders. “Bad taste. I don’t even think there is such a thing anymore. I think what used to be called bad taste is now American humor,” he says. “When I started, it was sick jokes: ‘That’s about as funny as an iron lung.’ Now the kind of stuff I had in my early movies is normal. That’s why my movies are now playing on television, which I never thought would happen. Ever.”
Earlier in the interview John expressed incredulity over the fact that his 1970 film Multiple Maniacs, in which a “travelling sideshow ‘Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions’ is actually a front for a group of psychotic kidnappers, with Lady Divine herself the most vicious and depraved of all – but her life changes after she gets raped by a fifteen-foot lobster,” is currently streaming on HBO Max. It’s also in the Criterion Collection. But all is not lost. John calls Machine Gun Kelly a “contemporary purveyor” of what he calls “good bad taste,” which is when “people are in on the joke of their own ostentation.” So damn. Fringe culture is over over.
Here are more pics of John in Town & Country:
Pic: Douglas Friedman/Town & Country