1974: An Ode to "Female Trouble" and Taffy Davenport

by Nick Taylor

As regular TFE commenter par pointed out in the comments for my Tina Holmes piece last week, there’s a lot of supporting actresses from 1999 who I could honor this Pride month. It’s a very tempting idea, and though many of those women will likely get their flowers later in the year - who wouldn’t want to pick over Election as the nonsense of the US Presidential race really starts heating up? - I think this is a terrific opportunity to hop across major eras and remind folks that, hey, queers have been around and making films for a long fucking time. We’ve been rubbing our grubby hands all over cinema since its inception.

If we’re talking about queer cinema, and if we’re talking about a peak among peaks, there’s really nowhere else to go but Female Trouble, John Waters’ inspiring ode to troubled teen flicks from the ‘50s, and the perfect performances of Mink Stole and Hilary Taylor as Taffy Davenport . . . .

The majority of this write-up will focus on Stole’s work, but it’d feel wrong not to highlight Taylor’s brief role as seven-year-old Taffy. She only appears in one scene, but she dominates it completely. By this point in Female Trouble we’ve already seen the formative years of her mother Dawn Davenport (Divine), a Baltimore native and high school dropout who happily takes up a life of sex work and armed robbery to support herself and her child. Or as she puts it, “I’m a thief and a shitkicker, and I’d like to be famous.” Dawn also supports Taffy by not enrolling her in school, because no one needs their heads filled with all that useless information, and refusing to let her have friends, because one hungry mouth causing a ruckus is already too goddamn much. 

Taffy isn’t having that shit. I’ve never seen anyone jump rope with as much outrage as Taylor does here, screaming a nursery rhyme at her mother in protest of her shitty six-year-old life. Taylor arguably screams louder than anyone else in the movie, which is a goddamn feat. It'a a battle cry from an abused child, but crucially for Waters, Taylor, and Stole, it’s also a display of hatred from an awful brat who is every inch her mother’s daughter. Even when she’s not talking, Taylor is physically “on” in a way Waters’ actors aren’t always asked to be, with her arms crossed, her posture shifting in disdain, and her face holding tight to a pissed-off expression when she isn't sticking out her tongue. Taffy is cruelly punished for this outburst, but Taylor gets her claws into the film so quickly I wish we got to see more of her. 

It’s an illuminating passage, one of many bizarrely thought-provoking scenes in Female Trouble. Watching an actual child scream the vile, often cartoonish insults that populate Waters’ scripts so naturally gives it an entirely different perspective. For all the horrifically grown-up actions committed, the characters have the giddy pride of children excited to play with swear words and out-gross each other. No wonder Waters made Kiddie Flamingos - it’s too brilliant. But why it didn’t happen til 2015, and why hasn’t he filmed more kiddie table reads of his films??? Anyways. Did Taylor have fun being hauled up the stairs of a crummy apartment by a drag queen? Do you think she knew what kind of movie she was in? Surely she had to - Disney isn’t showing children being forcibly chained to their beds. Taylor certainly seems like a game performer, judging by the way she throws one of her arms into a manacle for absolutely no one to fasten. She’s also an unexpectedly forceful screen presence, which makes it only right that Taffy evolves into the being known as Mink Stole.

The next time we see Taffy she’s fourteen years old, played by the twenty-seven year old Stole in a storky pantomime of stunted childhood awkwardly, angrily becoming a teen. Stole’s Taffy is still styled like a child. Her first outfit looks like a child’s white nightgown sewn and proportioned to fit an adult woman, and almost everything she wears afterwards has the same effect on her silhouette, with the waist cut well above her hips to shrink her torso and extend her legs. Her makeup looks like a kid playing with mom’s lipstick. If you told me this poor child cut her own hair I’d believe it. Taffy’s relationship with her mother is still the same: hateful. Stole’s introduction to Female Trouble has Taffy balk in horror at walking in on Dawn and her new husband Gater (Michael Potter) mid-fuck. She’s mortified, sure, but she’s also hyped for an opportunity to insult her mother and the shitty life they’re living. They trade insults, and Stole somehow modulates her petulance from the already-high level it was at. Then she asks for ten bucks so brazenly that Dawn gives her the money, and boy are we not ready for what she decides to spend it on.

Taffy is largely separated from the grotesque glamor of the rest of Female Trouble, even as she boasts her own irreducible weirdness, and Stole’s stylized acting is similarly in-and-out of step with her film and the people around her. Where Divine & co. get plenty of mileage out of languishing in their garbage-chic filthiness until they have to pack up their words with some devious criminality, Stole’s Taffy corkscrews her lips, fidgets with the hem of her dress, shifting her weight every second and jutting out her arms on her hips to maximize elbow pointiness. She’s a brat just like her mother says. She’s a bitch just like her mother, to boot. Stole and Waters refuse to make Taffy a punching bag for Dawn, but neither is she the entitled child rudely begging for her mother’s conformity. There’s a strange humanity to Stole’s performance, a hideously earnest desire to belong to someone or something besides her abusive mother. Even her anger is sympathetic at its base, even as Stole is bravely willing to be as nasty and gratuitously cruel as the rest of the cast. Taffy is an abused child rebelling against her mother’s rampaging narcissism, and Stole holds this as centrally to her characterization as her brattiness.

Lest I get too caught up in validating Stole’s great acting primarily through a dramatic lens, let me remind myself that she’s damn funny, too. Watching Stole play a pre-pubescent teen is an inherently goofy premise, and she leans into the bit with her physical mannerisms and petulant tantrums. Taffy hates her mother. She loves spoiling Dawn’s fun and bothering her intimates whenever some new freak pervert wants to visit. I’m pretty sure the only time we see them get along is when Dawn asks her daughter to destroy someone else’s property. The one moment we see Taffy “playing” is so fucking odd, and Stole plays this scene with the fevered commitment of a child getting lost in the sauce of her own imaginary world. But why on Earth is that world Cronenberg’s Crash? You just know if this kid ever heard about the Parker-Hulme case she’d be soooo jealous of those twerps for achieving her wildest dream and killing her mom. How come they get to commit matricide and Taffy doesn’t, especially when here mom is so much meaner than Mrs. Parker? Stole relishes every neurosis and wild insult she can get her hands on - hers is the broadest, biggest performance in Female Trouble, and she reaps so many notes and colors from meeting this deranged film at its level.

Stole also benefits from the gravity Waters threads into Female Trouble. For all the violent nonsense filtered through camp hilarity, there’s real a tragedy to several key sequences that’s shocking to witness. One such scene is Taffy’s visit to her father Earl Peterson (played by Divine out of drag), hoping that he might provide her the love and high-class ordinariness Dawn repudiated. She’s so excited to finally meet her dad that she leaps and wraps him in a full-body hug as soon as he opens the front door. The joy doesn’t last, and their interaction is one of the most truly uncomfortable things I’ve ever seen in a Waters film. Stole is tremendous here, using her overemphatic body language to show Taffy frightfully receding into herself as her dreams die. She can’t raise her head to look at Earl when he tries to assault her. I’m not even sure Stole’s eyes are open when Taffy violently fends off her father, screaming “NO!” over and over again at the top of her lungs until she runs crying out of his house. The terror and shame Taffy experiences is tonally unlike anything else in Female Trouble, and it wouldn’t land as powerfully if it wasn’t for Stole’s performance.

Taffy returns home, processing this latest abuse as she’s thrust back into the old role of her mother’s tormented, awful daughter. Potential for one new life vanishes, and Stole holds this trauma in her bearing and line readings as Taffy considers a new way to save herself. The path she chooses might lead to genuine salvation, and Stole plays that salvation as sincerely as she’s played Taffy’s pain and the boiling venom inside her, but it’s an escape that inspires a wave of outrage from Dawn so powerful she might actually kill the girl. 

And you know what? I don’t think Taffy would have it in her to leave her mother if she couldn’t turn back around and rub it in her shitty face. Maybe a lesser performer would be thrown by this apparent contradiction, but Mink Stole isn’t. She holds these truths together as easily as she throws a bowl of spaghetti. Stole is a damn good actress, the most talented and crafty artist to have acted for Waters. It’s a different talent than Divine’s blazing screen charisma, but it’s just as valuable and under-appreciated. If this reads as me being hyperbolic for the sake of a bit, I promise I’m not. I love Stole’s performance, and her character acting is as essential to Waters’ filmography and ‘70s American cinema as any other titan from that era. She’s a star, goddammit, so treat her like one.

Female Trouble is currently streaming on The Internet Archive, and can be purchased from The Criterion Collection.

Comments

[TOM]

I've said it before - John Waters deserves an Honorary Academy Award. He has created his own signature style and has filled it with dazzling characters.

[Amy Camus]

"I've done everything a mother can do. I've locked her in her room. I've beat her with the car aerial. Nothing changes her. It's hard being a loving mother."

I've always been fascinated by Hilary Taylor since the first time I saw Female Trouble. I even asked John Waters about her when I met him at a special retrospective of his films. (Apparently she was still living in Baltimore and doing fine.)

Actually, I would rather he not get an Oscar. He's too good for it, and I like him better as an outsider. The Oscars shouldn't be allowed to try to validate themselves by associating their name with his.

[Johnny Certex]

Good article. You ask why Taffy is playing Crash? Because, quite simply, Waters himself used to do that as a child, and his parents used to take him to junkyards as a kid to look at crashed cars. He says (maybe jokingly) he masturbates to Crash. Lucky his parents never had a spare car aerial lying around...

https://au.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/john-waters-looks-back-i-was-worse-than-ed-wood-508/

[Nick Taylor]

@TOM and Amy Camus - I thought for a minute that Waters was awarded an Honorary Oscar, but it turns out I had it mixed up with his Hollywood Walk of Fame Star. I would really love to see him get an Honorary, and I'm gonna be rooting for Liarmouth to get him some flowers whenever that's released. Yes, he's too cool for the Academy, but I just love any opportunity for him to be publically recognized as the artist he is.

@Johnny Certex - Thank you for telling me that! I had no idea, and getting to explore a junkyard sounds like a pretty cool thing for a kid. Gonna make that scene even funnier next time I watch Female Trouble.