Moviemaking’s most cherished creepy uncle John Waters once gave Melanie Griffith a wig, a gun and a manifesto to scream: “Death to those who support mainstream cinema!” Cecil B DeMented, Waters’ madcap 2000 satire, remains the filmmaker’s most explicit and passionate defence of his bread and butter: trash cinema. It’s a genre so nebulously defined that it doesn’t even possess a Wikipedia page. But it’s generally interpreted as transgressive underground cinema – movies made with varying degrees of taste, that typically gives the middle finger to conventional notions around sexuality, gender and morality.
Trash cinema is a woman in Jed Johnson’s Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977) getting so tired of her baby’s screeching that she throws it out of her apartment window. It’s kids turning to murder and going insane after one puff of a joint, in Louis J Gasnier’s anti-drug PSA Reefer Madness (1936). It’s the late, great drag queen Divine being sexually assaulted by a gigantic lobster in Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (1970). Trash is a genre that’s un-PC by design, its outré brand of sideshow cinema polarising audiences and attracting the weirdos (that is to say, the gays).
Both Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos (1972), two crown jewels in Waters’ oeuvre, are appearing in the BFI’s Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen season this April, a testament to how Waters’ work has largely stood the test of time: few filmmakers have so successfully and consistently wielded bad taste and shock value for the greater good. In each decade he’s worked, Waters has successfully pissed off the conservative mores of the period. Take the aforesaid lobster assault in Multiple Maniacs. Or the glue-sniffing delinquent in Polyester (1981) running around stomping on women’s feet and getting off to it. Desperate Living (1977) saw a lesbian wrestler undergo spontaneous gender reassignment surgery, then immediately and happily hack it off when their lover rejects it. And lest we forget Selma Blair’s comically gargantuan breasts in A Dirty Shame (2004). Waters has always said that to possess bad taste one must have incredibly good taste, and no one has walked the line better than John Waters.
Sixty years ago, when the actor Mink Stole was just 18, she became a member of the Dreamlanders, Waters’ east coast repertoire of eccentrics and deviants. “I knew what we were doing was probably the most fun thing in Baltimore at the time,” she says today. The annals of cinema will remember a number of legendary double acts – De Niro and Scorsese; Keaton and Allen; Coppola and Dunst – but more perverse moviegoers pray at the altar of Waters and Stole. If you know Stole, a committed character actor and gay icon, then you know she is Waters’ true greatest asset. If you don’t? Well, to quote her flame-haired Pink Flamingos villainess: “I guess there’s just two kinds of people: my kind of people and assholes.”
Stole certainly didn’t expect any of this. She didn’t expect the cat eye glasses she wore in Pink Flamingos, filmed in her and Waters’ houseshare, to become part of the Academy’s permanent collection five decades later. She didn’t expect that Pink Flamingos would eventually be added to the Library of Congress. Will Stole ever make peace with being a legend? “Well, it’s hard to go around thinking ‘I am legendary’ all the time,” she says. “I still have to do my laundry and do my grocery shopping, you know? But I’ve had so many people tell me that laughing at our movies got them through their friends dying of Aids, so I do appreciate it and I’m humbled by it.”
I made the mistake of using the words ‘trash cinema’ on stage with him and it really offended him. I bet even some of the filmmakers included in the BFI programme might not have reclaimed that word
Save for fellow Dreamlander Mary Vivian Pearce, Stole is the only person to appear in all of Waters’ feature films. Divine, with her vixenly growl and Mr Burns hairline, may have been the star that burned bright and tragically passed away in 1988, but it was Stole who caught your eye, disappearing into an eccentric array of shrewish housewives and conniving criminals. Her prominent role in the midnight movie era of Waters’ filmography – his 1970s “Trash Trilogy” consisting of Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living – is why she’s speaking to me today. She appears in the BFI’s Trash season alongside San Francisco drag doyenne Peaches Christ in a cabaret show celebrating their friendship and Stole’s contribution to outsider cinema. “I do occasionally feel like I’m travelling with my own eulogy,” she says. “But it is wonderful.”
For Stole, the controversy sparked by trash cinema is precisely what makes the ragtag almost-genre what it is. “There’s the old saying: ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’,” she says. “With trash cinema, there are people who completely despise it. But then there’s people for whom it’s life-changing, it’s valuable, and carries real meaning. I don’t know what kind of life-changing effect Plan 9 from Outer Space would have on anybody but I do understand why people call it trash and why other people care so deeply.”
For Peaches Christ, trash cinema forms the foundation of her drag and her cultural diet. She grew up as a gay outsider in Maryland, where Waters’ Dreamlanders lived and worked, and became aware of the filmmaker when his 1988 musical Hairspray entered production in the area. “In a weekend I watched Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos. I’m sitting here today at 52 years old as Peaches Christ with all the sacrilege and drag and twisted s*** because I sat in that basement and watched those VHSes.” She became close friends with Stole in 2001 after inviting her to attend a late-night screening of Desperate Living where they met, appropriately, on stage.
The duo have buoyed each other – Christ’s passionate fandom for Stole helped establish the actor’s legacy, and Stole’s appreciation helped Christ transform her then-hobby into a fully-fledged career. In 2010 the drag impresario directed All About Evil, a campy paean to cult horror, starring Natasha Lyonne, Elvira and, of course, Stole herself. She got to express her appreciation for the veteran actor by writing and filming a scene where Lyonne sews Stole’s mouth shut. Suffice to say, in the 25 years that they’ve known each other, Stole and Christ have kept the trash cinema flame burning.
For Christ, “the whole notion of trash cinema has always been about reclamation.” She compares it to the transformation of the word “queer” in the past decade – once a pejorative, it’s now a common descriptor for LGBT+ people. “There’s power in reclaiming things and making them your own,” she says. “John Waters was proud to call his movies trash and to call himself names like the ‘Prince of Puke’.” But not everyone, Christ concedes, has worn criticism as a badge of honour. “I did a show once with Ted V Mikels, an exploitation filmmaker, and I made the mistake of using the words ‘trash cinema’ on stage with him and it really offended him. It’s an interesting thing because his movies would be under that umbrella but not everybody wants to call their work ‘trash’.” She pauses. “I bet even some of the filmmakers included in the BFI programme might not have reclaimed that word.”
It feels, perhaps, like trash is a style of cinema that is fated to be left in the past. For a few years Waters has attempted to adapt his 2022 novel Liarmouth into a new film, which would be his first since A Dirty Shame. A lack of funding has – depressingly – stalled the project. How does Stole feel about the prospect of another, likely final hurrah? “I would have enjoyed doing it very much, I like working with John,” she says. “But, of course, a lot of the people who were fixtures on the John Waters sets are gone. We don’t have Van Smith anymore to do the costumes, we don’t have Chris Mason to do the hair. Vincent Peranio, the production designer, lives in Portugal now. So it would be an entirely different experience with an entirely different crew, and that would make it a little less like home to me.”
If trash cinema might seem like a museum piece that should be left untouched, there’s clearly still a demand for a type of tacky and boundary-nudging comedy. The new Naked Gun was unexpectedly great, and Scary Movie dropped a perplexingly hyped trailer that opened with a gag about gender pronouns. Hollywood is evidently willing to get a little stupid and politically incorrect at this stage, so there’s clearly the ability and audience for Waters to deliver one final middle finger to good taste.
But for Christ, she thinks that the lack of a new Waters film is a deliberate choice. “To John’s credit, having been born out of trash cinema and given life to midnight movies, he’s not willing to make a movie for $100,000.” Hollywood is on its knees and the indie film model that birthed Hairspray and Serial Mom (1994) has died out. Waters has effectively given up on the idea. “Everything is in a really bad place,” says Christ. “So I think John could make a movie again – he really could – but he doesn’t want to go back to those early days, he doesn’t want to struggle, and I respect it.”
Mink Stole and Peaches Christ appear in their new show ‘Idol Worship’ at BFI Southbank on 10 April as part of Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen and are taking their show to Home in Manchester, Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, Cameo in Edinburgh and the Irish Film Institute in Dublin
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