John Waters is one of the icons of these post-Andy Warhol times.

Once hailed as a “Master of Sleaze”, the man with the creepy pencil mustache and the look of a drained vampire shunning the sun behind big swoopy sunglasses, John Waters has, with his films and books, subtly shaped the atmosphere of hip taste and pop intellectualism. It now drapes around him as comfortably as a well-made suit.

As the picture at left quietly attests, he is the essence of courtliness and chic, reminiscent, oddly, of Zachary Scott, the silky, duplicitous playboy who so brings our Joan to grief in Mildred Pierce. Yes, the bard of Baltimore has become stylish — after all.

Stylish and one of our sharpest gay humorists.

More culture critic, than funny man, his refreshing — at times, startling — takes on recent cultural events such as Britney’s MTV debacle or his own surprising commercial success with the musical Hairspray were on offer in an interview he gave a North Carolina newspaper, The Independent, before his talk there at Duke University.

Anyone who had seen one of his films would know what to expect.

John Water’s brand of snarky gay-revenge humor has been treasured by midnight audiences since the early Seventies, when he brought a series of homemade outrage comedies to the screen, starring the outlandish body and devil face of spoof drag-queen Divine, a 300-pounder crammed, most memorably, into a hot-pink Viva Las Vegas flamenco gown. The master conceit of these films was that Divine was simply the Most Beautiful Woman in the Universe — that is, Baltimore.

Divine had a way of not so much speaking her lines as snarling them. Her delivery, like the dialogue Waters wrote for her, brimmed with gay rage and a screamingly funny inverted cultural critique. As a trailer-trash Liz Taylor drowning beneath gelatinous slabs of flab and two demonic eyebrows, set like a V (for Vicious?) on her high balding pate, Divine was Waters gold standard of beauty, just as the low-rent backwaters of Baltimore and the city’s middle-brow suburban tracts with their pretensions to Southern gentility were his garden spots of the world.

Everything was scaled to fit this skewed Waters universe: all values and virtues aspiring to “good taste” were reversed into negatives , while such deadly sins as gluttony, sloth, lust and envy were supersized to depraved — one is tempted to write Divine — proportions, then embraced and celebrated.

For viewers in the know, John Waters’ films have alway been Revenge of the Nerds, Gay Style. A Take No Prisoners gay style.

This may come as a surprise to our tender young readers who know him only as the man behind the somewhat harmless Hairspray, his last collaboration with Divine in which she was cast (regrettably, I think) against type as a good-hearted Baltimore hausfrau. Hairspray would be remade as both a Broadway musical and, just this past summer, a movie musical with John Travolta doing a workmanlike but, alas, insipid imitation of Divine. Even encumbered by the numbing niceness of the role, Divine always managed to slip in a few fiery eye flashes, a stray satanic leer.

Buoyed by the stage success of Hairspray, another Waters film, Cry Baby — an Elvis Presley Jailhouse Rock spoof that starred Johnny Depp — is set to debut next Spring on Broadway with a new musical score.

From the John Waters interview in the Independent:

Britney Spears: “I saw her opening act for the MTV Video Music Awards, and I thought it was the opening act for the adult video awards they have in Las Vegas. She didn’t look fat — I think every heterosexual male would fuck her. I think it’s insane to say she looked fat. Did she look talentless? Yes! I could lip-sync that number better than she did.”

Gay Goes Mainstream: “I had more fun when it was illegal to be gay. I don’t want to get married and I don’t want to go into the army and all that stuff, though I understand people’s right to want that. I am for gay trouble. I like gay troublemakers. I am most gay when I am in a voting booth.”

The Strange Reversal of Fortune: “When I go to signings for DVDs of my movies, the audience has always been young. Now, when I have old people coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, I love your movies,’ I tell them, ‘Uh, you loved Hairspray, I don’t think you’d love Female Trouble‘. I think there is an audience that only knows me through Hairspray, and then they go and find my other movies, and then they call the police.” [ "Female Trouble" happens to be Nightcharm's favorite and the most biting of the Divine films, in which crime=art and Divine equates dying in the electric chair to winning an Academy Award.]

The Disneyfication of Divine: Waters mentions that, to his surprise, he was invited to provide commentary on Disney’s re-issue of The Little Mermaid, discussing how Divine influenced the look of Ursula the Sea Witch (right). In a related matter, he confides that his next movie, pending studio approval, will be “a very wonderful children’s Christmas movie entitled Fruitcake. I would say it’s for tweens and adults — it’s not for 6-year-olds. Well, when I was 6 years old, I would have liked it.”

Player Haters: “If you’re traveling, you can’t be racist, you can’t be homophobic. I think the only way you can be racist or homophobic is if you never leave the neighborhood you were born in, and you hang around with stupid people. So I’ve always thought that someone who was really racist should be sentenced to travel, but that’s not very practical.”

Stars Take the Waters Cure: “If they work for me, they can get rid of their image. Johnny Depp did it — he didn’t want to be a teen idol. Traci Lords didn’t want to be a porn star, Patty Hearst didn’t want to be a kidnap victim. They wanted to make fun of those exact images and they came to me…. When you make fun of yourself, they can’t use it against you anymore — I was calling my work Mondo Trasho from the very beginning. If you make fun of your film first, it’s hard for anyone else to!”

As far as provocative titles go, Nightcharm also remembers such in-your-face Waters titles as Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Eat Your Makeup, Pecker and the outrageous suicide bio-pic The Diane Linkletter Story, based on the LSD jump from a window of a beloved TV host’s daughter — the host, an avuncular family-values type who made a fortune writing advice books with titles like “Kids Say the Dardnest Things.”

Of course, Divine played Diane.

hattip to jockohomo