John Waters’ Desperate Living from 1977 is not a film. It is a fact of life. It is something that was made simply to be dealt with. It has no aim, no purpose and no reason for being except for people to feel rewarded from being able to sit through it.
But there’s no real point in dumping on it too heavily because, to scream out against it is simply to empower it. With a film like this, the more the general populace hates it, the more powerful it becomes because, in fact, it wants to be hated, reviled, abhorred, and so on; that’s half its charm. Of course, plug the name of any of Water’s films that predate 1981’s Polyester in the first sentence of this article and the statement doesn't change.
John Waters' Early Films
The story, like all of Waters’ early films, revolves around a quest through disgusting violence and abnormal sexual miscreants. This one takes place in the fictional town of Mortville where the heroes are cast after they are involved in a murder. In Mortville they come across the usual parade of outcasts, vagrants and genuine perverts that generally populate the Waters universe. And that’s it. End of story.
The problem with the Mortville setting is that it and its inhabitants lack any distinct characteristics that set them apart from the Baltimore that Waters had used as his backdrop in all his prior films. The characters are no more perverse or violent, the situations no more obscene. Mortville is then just a different backdrop for more of the same.
Thus, the satire of Waters’ potentially tasty premise (a place where all the degenerates in life are forsaken to go) is so transparent that it barely exists and instead the realization rises that, no matter what the setting, all early John Water’s films boil down to achieving the same purpose: pushing the boundaries of good taste.
Director John Waters Loves Exploring the Perverse
There is certain admiration in the lengths that Waters will go to push those boundaries; his films certainly go places few others dare to and are never boring, but Waters takes the actions of the narrative to such extremes that he misses his own point completely.
Satire (and Waters has proven that, if nothing else, he is a satirist) succeeds just as much in what it can keep out as how much it puts in. By going all in at all times, Waters pushes the film so over-the-top that it fails to achieve anything but pure titillation: these films are peep shows that allow audiences to peep until there is nothing left to the imagination, essentially defeating the aim of the peep in the first place. John Waters is his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
What Waters fails to realize is that, by restraining nothing, he is simply reducing everything to the level of taboo. But the very essence of the taboo is that it exists away from society, behind the closed doors of those who engage in it. In Waters’ world there is no distinction between the taboo and reality (a necessity for satire) and therefore there is no comedy as the spectacle of the perversion becomes the point of every scene.
There’s a scene before arriving in Mortville for example in which a police officer pulls the heroes over, reveals that his is wearing lingerie, forces them to remove their underwear, puts them on himself, makes them kiss him, and then falls to the ground in convulsions. But the scene is not funny because every character is like this so there is nothing for it to work against. Comedy, after all, in essence, lies between comparisons.
Now look at John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus as a comparison. Both films are filled with explicit sexual material, but Mitchell’s film deals with taboos by admitting that they exist and then focusing instead on the people engaged in them from a human perspective. In terms of sexual content, the films are about equal, but in terms of aim and purpose, Shortbus is compelling because it comes from a genuinely human place. Desperate Living, and all of John Waters’ early body of work, comes from a place of perversion and titillation and never manages to go anywhere from there.
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Mike Lippert - I am 22 years old and am currently living in the small town of Walkerton Ontario. I Spent fours years at Wilfed Laurier University in ...
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