Baltimore is the “Town Without Pity” of Gene Pitney’s song in John Waters’ classic 1988 high-camp bubblegum musical comedy now on re-release, about a youth TV pop show of the early 60s whose executives are resisting integration and black music even as their teen fans demand it. It’s a film that satirises racism and body-conformism, and 35 years on, it looks more than ever like a left-field riposte – part critical, part supportive – to the extravagant nostalgia of Grease, American Graffiti and TV’s Happy Days.
Hairspray spawned a stage musical version and a remake, but neither had the flavour of this first film. Despite the high production values and relatively family-friendly script, Hairspray has the spirit of provocation in Waters’ early underground movies, a spirit which survives most obviously in the gross-out scene where a spot is burst in gruesome closeup.
Ricki Lake plays Tracy Turnblad, a teen whose dreams come true when she gets to be on the local TV station’s dance-party music programme, The Corny Collins Show (a kind of down-home version of American Bandstand), in which girls and boys are featured wholesomely bopping away in front of the camera to the latest hits by Connie Francis and Lesley Gore. Toe-curlingly, the station features a monthly “Negro Day” in which black music is featured with great condescension. Waters’ totemic drag performer Divine plays Tracy’s disapproving mother Edna (with Jerry Stiller as dad Wilbur); she tells her daughter: “Act white on television”; and in frequent moments of stress says warningly: “My diet pill is wearing off …” In male garb, Divine also plays the TV station’s racist owner Arvin Hodgepile.
Tracy has a blonde pal called Penny Pingleton (Leslie Ann Powers), who falls in love with a young black music fan, Seaweed Stubbs (Clayton Prince), the son of the station’s “Motormouth” Maybelle Stubbs, played by R’n’B legend Ruth Brown. But Tracy has a mean blonde rival, Amber Von Tussle (Colleen Fitzpatrick), whose parents are snarling bigots: Franklin (Sonny Bono) and Velma (Debbie Harry). Waters has a cameo as a hypnotherapist wanting to cure teens of their wayward impulses, and a New York beatnik is played by Pia Zadora, a cult figure for her role in the much derided Butterfly, but the only member of the cast who had worked with Orson Welles.
Some of the dialogue crashes into what contemporary audiences may or may not find acceptable as period language from the late 80s or indeed the early 60s: “Stuck up little spastic!”; “She’s such a queer!”; “Special Ed? But that’s for retards!” The film affectionately shows Tracy’s earnest naivety – “I wish I were dark-skinned!”; “Tracy, our souls are black!” – which is of course seen as preferable to the integrationist reactionaries of the older generation. Hairspray shows that Baltimore is the natural home of twisted legends and gothic subversives: Edgar Allan Poe, Dr Hannibal Lecter … and John Waters.
• Hairspray is released on 9 June in UK cinemas.
