Blu-ray Review: John Waters’s Polyester on the Criterion Collection

John Waters, the director who made his name putting fresh dog doo in the tremulously willing mouth of his leading lady, always wanted to sell out. He’s said so explicitly in interviews, but even if he hadn’t voiced it, the impulse to reach a wider audience is evident in every taboo-busting punk romp he directed throughout the ’70s. On a basic level, you can’t shock an audience that isn’t there in the first place, so coming on like the carny barker was always going to be part of the battle plan. But looking at Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, and Female Trouble again, they’re populated by characters who aspire to some level of prominence and social standing, even if, or maybe even specifically because, they will always be held to the fringes by their ferocious nature. (In that sense, Desperate Living, in which ersatz upstanding suburbanites are through very little fault of their own cast out of high society and into a cardboard-and-firepit Hooverville crossed with a 25-cent glittery fantasyland, feels like the outlier.) Only after Waters had established himself as an outsider artist with a true populist’s heart could he take his puckish smuggling instincts to the next level.

With Polyester, he did just that. His first studio film, his first released with an R rating instead of an X, and at that point by far his most luxuriously bankrolled (at $300,000, a steal against Michael Cimino’s contemporaneous $45 million Heaven’s Gate), Polyester somehow makes sense adjacent to both Desperate Living and Hairspray in Waters’s evolution toward becoming America’s professor emeritus of trash studies. Warmly nostalgic where his earlier films were pugnaciously assertive, Polyester takes an even more overt cue from the Douglas Sirk weepies and Elizabeth Taylor melodramas than Female Trouble before it.

As Francine Fishpaw, Divine arguably executes an even more extreme gear shift, sublimating the Mohawk-sporting, eyeliner-shooting, raw steak-smuggling derecho of destructive energy she brought to her earlier roles by emerging as a God-fearing housewife reliving the Baltimore equivalent of the Book of Job. Her flatulent husband, Elmer (David Samson), runs a dirty movie house and thrives on the kind of bad publicity that consistently puts Francine in an unwanted community spotlight. Her daughter, Lu-Lu (Mary Garlington), keeps a rope ladder fixed to her second-floor bedroom window so he can sneak out at night, gyrate with excitement over beer, and swat at minorities with a broom as she and her greaser buddies race down city streets. And her son, Dexter (Ken King), is something out of a rough trade fantasy, wandering supermarket aisles by day, sniffing poppers, and submitting to his id-iotic fetish of stomping on random housewives’ feet. Francine counts her blessings if she manages to get through a day without a visit from her mother, La Rue (Joni Ruth White), who sneaks twenties from Francine’s purse at the same time as she reminds her, “You’ve always retained your fluids.”

From frame one, Francine is at the end of her rope, and Waters keeps her pinned there, up against All That Heaven Allows-inspired stained-glass illumination. Whether the result of higher production values or Waters’s love for his band of misbegotten misfits, Polyester has an adorable quality no one introduced to his work vis-à-vis lip-syncing buttholes, frantic chicken-screwing, or rabies-infested princesses would ever imagine could apply to him. Not for nothing does one of his’s most beloved Dreamland players, the one-of-a-kind Edith Massey, play a debutante named Cuddles. (And Massey’s exquisite inability to deliver a convincing line reading was never put to better use than here.) Waters’s William Castle-esque gimmick of Odorama allowed audiences, using scratch ‘n’ sniff cards, to experience the film through Francine’s overdeveloped sense of smell, and when a bouquet of flowers held in front of her face is quickly replaced by a pair of fungus-ridden gym shoes, the flatulent bad taste couldn’t be further removed from Pink Flamingos’s Babs Johnson fellating her son, Crackers.

Which isn’t to say that Polyester isn’t without bite. To the contrary, compared to Waters’s earlier films, all of which could be argued to exist within a perverted fantasy land, this one probably cuts closer to the tacky reality of his own upbringing than ever before, sending up the less overt farcicalities of middle-class American existence, depicted as non-aspirational and culturally incurious by default. In one of the film’s funniest absurdist gags, Francine’s mysteriously enthusiastic third-act lover, Todd Tomorrow (played by a sporting Tab Hunter), invites her to a soiree at his own movie theater, an arthouse drive-in showing a Marguerite Duras triple feature, with Iranian caviar and back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma available in the lobby. Francine’s descent from scorned wife to staggering lush is so swift it’s as if the bottle was always a bomb waiting to go off and fill her otherwise empty life, outpaced only by her seemingly same-day decision to go clean and attend Alcoholics Anonymous. And when, spoiler alert, a series of swift dei ex machina deliver Francine and her now-reformed children a long-deferred happy and air-freshened ending, Waters leaves us with no sense that their new normalcy will be in any way more fulfilling than the one they’ve always known.

Image/Sound

While no John Waters film prior to Hairspray probably needs a 4K restoration and, in fact, some may even be somehow spiritually hindered by one, Polyester’s position as a transitional film (it was the first time Waters shot on 35mm) justifies the expenditure. And it looks as good as the shimmer of trillions of microfibers in a red-gelled spotlight. Okay, maybe not that good. Just because Waters’s crew had more money this time doesn’t necessarily mean they were plundering Fort Knox. But the film’s soap-operatic thrift-store panache is accurately reproduced here, with especially blaring greens and blues. The lossless monaural audio is as fine as it needs to be, enough to make it a genuine jaw-dropper when you realize that the introduction to the romantic serenade sung off-screen by Bill Murray an hour in is actually the music Movieclips uses at the tail end of all their YouTube clips.

Extras

Polyester’s bonus features serve as the backbone for what’s clearly the most essential single-disc home-video release of a Waters film to date. (Yes, even including this year’s Shout! Factory release of Boom!, a package that was as much about Waters’s deep appreciation for the film as it was about the film itself.) First and, obviously, foremost, Criterion ports over the original commentary track from their 1993 laserdisc release, replete with witty observations and personal memories. (When a hungover Francine pukes into her own handbag, Waters notes that he stole that image from his real-life experience watching an airsick Edith Massey do the same thing.) The only thing that could’ve been better is if they had recorded a second, 26-years-later track with Waters, so that fans could compare and contrast and see just how many anecdotes the director and his fabulous steel-trap memory repeats.

Then again, in a new 30-minute conversation he shares with columnist Michael Musto, Waters covers more or less the same territory—with a few au courant tidbits, like how Tab Hunter proudly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, rest in peace, won’t be able to in 2020—and gives a sneak peek at his year-end list of favorite films to be published in Artforum. (Hint: Waters, unlike Musto, loved Gaspar Noé’s Climax.) There’s also a breakaway five-minute clip that was clearly recorded at the same time, in which Waters tests out the fresh scents of the new Odorama card included with Criterion’s Polyester release; some of them meet his satisfaction, others were apparently better in their original versions.

There’s also a pair of short documentary clips, one taken from the interview outtakes from I Am Divine, the other a 20-minute profile on the Dreamland players that was originally produced for the Criterion laserdisc. They’re buttressed by a bunch of deleted scenes and archival TV clips shot in the gap between Desperate Living and Polyester, including a vintage local news report covering the hometown hero, as well as a sedate Tom Snyder segment featuring Waters and Divine. Elena Gorfinkel contributes a brilliant set of liner notes on the flip side of the included poster version of Criterion’s cover (which, by the way, is easily the finest they’ve presented in years). And lastly, the disc includes a vintage “no smoking” trailer in which Waters lists every reason why moviegoers actually should light a cigarette—a trailer that still plays before every screening at my neighborhood microcinema.

Overall

As Cuddles says, “Happiness is a picnic in the woods.” And Criterion’s new Blu-ray for John Waters’s transitional masterpiece Polyester gave us ants in our pants.