Team Experience is celebrating John Waters for his 75th birthday this week
by Eric Blume
John Waters’ 1981 film Polyester satirizes the “women’s picture” genre, but in the way that only Waters would spin it. His heroine, Francine Fishpaw, played of course by muse Divine, is trapped in a horrific marriage to the owner of the local porn movie palace. Her daughter is a nympho and her son has taken his foot fetish to a comically violent place. Sex and vice surround Francine, and she’s just soldiering on, nobly of course.
The beauty of Waters and his sensibility is this: imagine someone making this movie today. You can’t, because the basic elements are too far out there...
They're so gloriously kinky and uniquely off that somebody would surely stop them before filming for being too “dangerous”. Polyester doesn’t take on any weight by smashing a lot of taboos or being unafraid to go there: the whole team is just having too much fucking fun.
Polyester has joy in it, and that bliss is centered in Divine’s work, which is fully committed within Waters’ specific vision of performance. The acting in any Waters picture takes some adjustment, because it’s so amateurish, and Waters seems to delight in it the more amateurish it is. Waters directs the actors playing Francine’s family to be cartoonishly one-note, jacking up their hyper sexuality and avoiding any actual characterization…it’s a commitment to heightened stupidity. But Waters grounds Francine with Divine’s acting, which, while still wholly stylized, gives the picture some heart and humanity. Divine performs with comic aplomb throughout, wonderfully funny, in a style that is part drag show, part Joan Crawford, part Douglas Sirk, and completely John Waters.
Most comedies peter out in the second half, but if anything, Polyester gets funnier as it goes along. By then, you’re locked into Waters’ bananas energy, where you see he’ll stop at nothing for a laugh. He gets jokes out of abortion, AA meetings, car accidents, and macramé! You get further bliss from the bad lighting, sublimely awful costuming, and consciously junky set design. By the time Francine meets her second shot of love (played by Tab Hunter, lending both Hollywood and gay subtext), Waters has you in the palm of his hand.
During its initial release, moviegoers received an “Odorama” card, and were instructed onscreen to scratch and sniff a number that correlated to the action. It’s just another one of Waters’ crazy ideas, one that reflects his love for movie gimmicks. But it also just reflects his willingness to do anything to entertain you. The movie’s final image is Divine, hugging her “reformed” children and spraying a can of Glade. It takes artistry and balls to end a film with something so ridiculous. And so sweetly American. Waters makes Polyester irresistible, and so perfectly wrong.
More from our John Waters Celebration
Pink Flamingos (1972)
Female Trouble (1974)
Desperate Living (1977)
Pecker (1998)