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Interview: John Waters on Multiple Maniacs, Taste, and Politics

Waters discusses the changing politics of the ’70s, Divine getting raped by a lobster, and more.

Interview: John Waters on Multiple Maniacs, Taste, and Politics
Photo: Greg Gorman

In his 1985 memoir, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste, John Waters explains how he used to fantasize about “the beginning of the Hate Generation” in response to sitting in the mud and listening to Joan Baez at Woodstock. It’s easy to see from Multiple Maniacs, Waters’s second feature film, why the concert represented a lame sort of progressivism; its misfit band of scheming and hostile thieves and weirdos wouldn’t be caught dead swaying to music that represented “love and peace.” Instead, they, like Waters himself, seek a radical means for stunning onlookers, whether through sexually irreverent acts involving a rosary or devouring human body parts to prove it’s no big deal. Yet there’s also a prodding political awareness to Multiple Maniacs, which is no better articulated than in an early scene when Lady Divine (Divine) smokes “grass” with her topless daughter, Cookie (Cookie Mueller), and her boyfriend, Steve (Paul Swift). He’s a “weatherman,” and the pair met when some tear gas went off at a protest. As Cookie tells it, “We ran to the bushes, smeared Vaseline all over their faces, and put wet handkerchiefs in their mouths. Then we just laid there and made love.” Steve quickly chimes in: “And fucked.”

I spoke with Waters about shifting political climates during the 1970s, navigating the terrain separating the arthouse from the grindhouse, and the peculiar particulars of having Divine be raped by a lobster.

What was your mindset like when you began making Multiple Maniacs?

[laughs] That’s a good question. My mindset was political, like hippie-political. That was when the most radical left-wing politics was going on. I made fun of hippies, even though lived in that world, so I was a closet punk, even though we didn’t know what “punk” was. I was very interested in what could still be legal and surprising to my audience, because all of the censorship boundaries were collapsing daily. And the next thing [after Multiple Maniacs] was porn was legal, which is why we made Pink Flamingos. This one was trying to say, “What’s the temper of the violence?,” with eating hearts and all that. And then Pink Flamingos was eating shit, because that was the only thing left. It was all done for humor and for political actions against the tyranny of good taste. But I don’t know that we ever had that meeting to plot it [laughs]. There was no conspiracy, it just happens internally.

But you did consciously think of Multiple Maniacs as a political statement of your own perceptions at that time, right?

I think that’s more in hindsight that I see that. But certainly at the time, I remember what was going on. There were riots everywhere, there were bombings, there were assassinations. It was a very volatile time and we were in the middle of it. We went to riots. So, to me, it was reflecting our sense of humor and our excitement at the radical change that was happening in society at the time.

And you made this film, along with Mondo Trasho, at such a young age, in your early 20s.

Oh yeah, and I’d made movies even before that! I had done the Kennedy assassination with Divine as Jackie [Kennedy] a few years before that, in ’66. So yeah, these were early, and sometimes I think, “How did I ever do that? How did I get these made?” Because we certainly never had permission to shoot any of it. There was no location manager. I didn’t ask the city [of Baltimore] if we could shoot or anything. We would just show up one morning and do it. And run! It was kind of like Cecil B. DeMented in that way. It was definitely guerilla filmmaking—but it’s the same thing kids do today on their cellphones, though different. My camera was a lot heavier!

Is it possible for you, though, to trace that passion that drove you to make not just shorts, but features on your own? Because now, though digital makes filmmaking an easier task, most anyone making a feature goes to film school, spends years paying their dues, and wouldn’t even think about the possibility of a feature until they’re in their late 20s or early 30s.

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Here’s the thing: If I had gone to film school, my films probably would’ve looked technically better, but at the same time, no film school at that time would ever have allowed me to make Multiple Maniacs. Now, and I think I’m partially responsible for this, you can make a snuff film at NYU and you would get an A.

What was your relationship with cinema like in the late ’60s? Were you seeing all sorts of stuff or homing in on a certain kind of filmmaking?

I always saw all exploitation movies. From nudist camp movies on. But mostly, foreign movies. Ingmar Bergman was a huge influence. All those movies like 491 and Night Games. All the Swedish shockers, I, a Woman, all that kind of stuff was a huge influence. But at the same time, we went to the drive-in and saw Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, and all that. So I was trying to make exploitation films for art theaters. That’s what they were. I think Harmony Korine has made exploitation films for art theaters. But there aren’t that many. Still.

It’s always struck me that your films are about navigating that space between the arthouse and the grindhouse and showing that the two aren’t actually far apart. Do you think there has been a greater recognition on the part of distributors and exhibitors of this over the years?

Can there be any more proof of that than Janus Films, the distribution company? That is the ultimate validation of my theory that the worlds could meet. When I went to see what’s probably my favorite Bergman movie, the first one I ever saw, Brink of Life, it featured three women in a maternity ward. I’m sure Janus Films brought that to me.

But that wasn’t the way it was from ’68 to ’70, so I’m struck by the posters for Cul-de-sac and Teorema in Cookie’s room. Did these posters—

Well, that was my house.

Oh yeah?

It was. That was the upstairs bedroom of my apartment. It looked exactly like that. That’s why I keep saying now with the restoration: “I have that ashtray still!”

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So these are your posters that stayed on the wall for the shoot?

Yeah, that was my house, that was how it looked, and those are all the posters. But yes, they were influences, definitely.

I ask because those films are a kind of art cinema that deals in “difficult” material, but also has an equal interest in aesthetics and visual style. They are potentially transgressive, but they also fit neatly into the art house paradigm of their time.

We only did well in art theaters though. The richer the neighborhood, the better we’d do. Still! The real grindhouses never worked, because the audience secretly knows I’m making fun of the genre. They don’t like that. They thought those movies were sexy for real. They’re jerking off to them, not laughing. So, I think, in a way, I was paying tribute to that. Certainly I, a Woman, as there are many shots that resemble that movie, which played forever at the time. So I followed the business very well. I read Variety every week because it was the only place that reviewed a lot of movies. So Variety was my film school, really. They even reviewed porn for a while!

After the film was made and screened, what was the first response you received from the censors? Was there immediate encouragement to change the film or cut parts out?

When the movie came out, it didn’t have to be seen by censors because it wasn’t playing in a real theater. The two worst things happened later, first when I tried to get Canadian distribution. A distributor asked me to send them a 16mm print. So I sent it, and never heard from ‘em. So I called and all I got back was a receipt from a carrier censor board that said “destroyed.” I think that’s the best review I ever got. But then the Baltimore censor never saw it until after Pink Flamingos was a hit and it finally crossed over to movie theaters at midnight to play at the Charles Theater. This was when were filming Polyester in 1980. So for the first time, the censor board had to watch it. So this censor woman [Mary Avara], she was my enemy, but she was so stupid that she was on national television. And a very Catholic woman. I thought, “I’m gonna get a murder charge here because she’s going to die from watching this movie.” And she did cry, she said. But then she was so outraged because there was no law that they could actually bust it. There was really no nudity or anything, so she sent it to the judge and the judge said that his eyes were insulted for 90 minutes, but it wasn’t illegal. And that was the challenge. To get away with things that were, of course, going to make people crazy. And that’s where I got the idea that I tell every film student ever: Just come up with a movie that gets an NC-17 rating and has no sex and no violence. I don’t know what that would be, but you’ll have a hit.

The use of Divine’s voiceover during the lengthy scene inside the church strikes me as your most daring break from an otherwise kind of ironized cinema-vérité aesthetic. Did you always plan the sequence this way or was it more spontaneous?

Not spontaneous. I knew we were going to shoot that scene. It’s a little long, I agree. But I knew we were going to do the Stations of the Cross. I knew we were going to do that and cut it together with a voiceover. But at the end, I wrote the narrative that Divine speaks, and he recorded that upstairs in my little attic editing room in Baltimore and read the whole thing after it was edited together. And Mink [Stole] too. But I wrote that for them later because it had to be the right length, so I couldn’t write it before it was cut together.

The voiceover has a sort of dreamy quality to it when Divine speaks, almost like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

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To be honest, and I wish I could take credit for that, but I think it was very badly recorded.

The rape scene with the giant lobster…I’m sure almost everyone asks you about that, but I’m struck by the fact that it’s preceded by another rape scene on the street earlier in the film, so you’re introducing an actual instance of rape that’s paralleled by this utterly absurd one. What does that contrast mean for you?

I’ll give you one thing: I’m a radical feminist and I believe I’ve never had a feminist be against either of the rape scenes in Multiple Maniacs. One is done by a lobster. And it could be viewed as worse because it pushes Divine into a new lunacy where he embraces his hideousness more than ever. And the first time, he’s raped by a bearded drag queen, but then the Infant of Prague, my favorite Catholic saint, whose motto was “the more you honor me, the more I will bless you,” which is rather narcissistic, I think, and who leads Divine to the church. So, he’s saved and both things affect him spiritually and in a demented way. But when I was filming those things, did I think it was rape? Not really. It doesn’t seem like rape to me. And it still doesn’t, to be honest.

Right. The arrival of the lobster wholly confounds the “peace and love” ethos of the time.

Well, we’re making fun of that certainly. But the thing is that you need to go to the next dimension of madness. And that’s what happens with the lobster. Because, you know, we all took LSD a lot, so that kind of thinking was quite normal, really. And the lobster was taking Divine to the next level, saying, “You’re finally there, Divine. You’re finally there.” So, in a way, that drove him to be the monster he always wanted to be. Divine really was my Godzilla in this movie. And everybody roots for Godzilla, don’t they? The National Guard kills him in a very traditional end to a monster movie.

Was moving from this film to Pink Flamingos a complicated process for you as a filmmaker and artist or a natural extension of this?

Natural. It was the logical next step. Multiple Maniacs was trainer wheels for that. We went to color. People say now, “Oh, Pink Flamingos looks so cheap.” Well, for us it was a fortune! Multiple Maniacs cost $5,000, and Pink Flamingos cost $10,000. It was an exercise in poor taste and I even had sort of porno in it. Even though people had to memorize three pages of dialogue where there were saying ludicrous things. But it’s a logical step in that it was still trying to deal with limits and deal with what could be funny. And celebrating…friendship, really. And people that are proud not to fit in. Today, everybody wants to be that, which is why I want to be an insider now that everyone wants to be an outsider. It was also celebrating complete sexual confusion and no separatism in any way. And people that were proud of their mantle of filth, which I am today. And at the same time they were jealous perverts challenging you, which I don’t think happens for me.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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