John Waters knows what makes a “John Waters movie,” but he isn’t sure movie critics do.
“I hate those movies, because they just mean they’re gross, or they have one drag queen in it,” Waters tells me over the crackling receiver on his San Francisco landline.
Waters has spent years creating universes where people are as bad as cable television cop shows and the latest conservative talking points would have you believe. You’ve almost certainly heard of him through “Hairspray,” his 1988 film staring Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad, an overweight teenage girl who helps integrate Baltimore public television in the 1960s.
If you know your cult classics, you may have seen his breakthrough film, “Pink Flamingos.” In the X-rated film, the late drag performer Divine plays a criminal who holds the title of “Filthiest Person Alive.” The movie tries to constantly one-up itself with how revolting it can be, culminating in Divine eating real dog poop on camera.
It’s true that Waters is most associated with the taboo and the gross — The Baltimore Sun, his hometown paper, once called him the “Pope of Filth.” But reducing Waters to his filth and campiness, however, ignores the love interwoven in his art. That’s what has kept his career going, even as cultural norms shift.
“If you stick around long enough and you make fun of yourself and you’re not mean-spirited — which I don’t think I’ve ever been, I make fun of things I love, and I think that’s why I don’t get canceled really,” Waters tells me.
Waters is taking his newest spoken word show, “End of the World,” on the road. You may have seen him when he toured “False Negative,” his show about living through COVID, when it toured last year. That’s the thing about Waters: he never seems to run out of ideas, even after more than 50 years in entertainment. In 2022, he wrote his first fiction novel, "Liarmouth."
“I just wanted to try something I hadn’t tried,” Waters says. “I read a lot of fiction. I like fiction. So it’s the next thing to try, to try and better myself.”
On the other hand, Waters embodies the very things that conservative Americans hate. His work is raunchy and vulgar. His work does feature a man performing in drag. I had to know what he thought about some of the recent political fireballs that the hard-line right has lobbed at marginalized groups, particularly the LGBTQ community.
“I built a career on being banned,” Waters tells me when I ask for his thoughts on the recent trend of schools banning books deemed inappropriate for kids. “Nowadays if they ban a book it’s the best thing that can happen, because there are sections in bookshops — right up front, near the cash register — that say ‘banned books.’”
As you probably guessed, Waters also doesn’t see a problem with drag, and kids learning from it. He does think the concept is funny, though.
“I just picture little Billy coming home from school and Dad saying ‘How was school today?’” Waters tells me, “and he says ‘Oh, Little Miss Hot Mess taught me how to put on bottom lashes!’ Get it girl!”
He talks about all of this and more in his new show.
“I’m not saying I believe in all the extremes, but I’m fascinated by them,” he says. “That’s what my new show’s about, the extremes of things going wrong, and ‘Can anything ever go back to the way it was?’”
When talking about his own extremes, he calls Hairspray “the most radical movie I ever made,” because of the commercial success. He’s seen the show performed in schools since being transformed into a musical, despite the fact that the plot is heavily focused on race and class.
“It was about a fat girl who got the guy in a city that no one talked about,” Waters says of his biggest commercial success.
So, I had to know: what makes a John Waters movie, if not the filth?
“There’s all sorts of universes, and there’s different rules in each one, but there is a right and wrong in each one,” Waters tells me. “Mostly, you should never decide that if you don’t know the full story, and nobody ever knows the full story, even your shrink.”
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