He turned 76, released his first work of literary fiction, Liarmouth, and continues to tour the country with his one-man show. What will we ever do without him?
As a director, he’s always had an eye for pleasing sleaze, like drag queen Divine eating a handful of dog shit with glee. As a writer — he wrote about hitchhiking across the country in 2014’s— he knows exactly how to make you laugh while gagging.
. His latest offering is a debut work of fiction that again thrills in the most wretched way:Waters’ house is nondescript, but he does have a small sign taped to a desk in front of his door, “authorizing” any deliveries to be left outside. His signature adorns the bottom as if it were a legal document and not the equivalent of a Post-it. When he opened the door, he waved me into his opulent salon, which was awash in red brocade curtains, tchotchkes, precious ephemera, and several tables covered with giant coffee table books.Waters poses in the sitting room of his home in Baltimore, Maryland. John Waters has two smiles. One is a polite “thanks for coming to my home” smile, which I saw when he ushered me in. The other is a little Cheshire cat grin that spreads across his face, slowly, like an ooze, usually when he is about to say something perversely funny. Over the course of the two hours I spent in his home, it was thrilling to see him erupt in that smile over and over again. There are 9,000 books in Waters’ home — in this one, at least; he has more in his New York apartment and Provincetown house. He also has a film archive elsewhere, where many of his prized movie possessions are kept. He claims all of his books are cataloged online so he knows which ones he owns. Does that mean he can find a particular book if he’s looking for one in his house? “Ehh,” he said, guiding me up a twisting staircase, past some decals of kittens on the wall, to his bedroom, which is almost preternaturally tidy and unremarkable, its queen-size bed tucked tightly with crisp white hospital corners. Conversely, one of his bathrooms appears to just be a storage room for colorful blazers and nothing else. Another crawl space was just for windbreakers. Waters has so many desks I lost count, but I only saw one television, which appeared to be 40 years old. As he continued his tour, I glimpsed a sliver of a recognizable face on a canvas. “Oh, a Michael Jackson portrait,” I said. “Yes!” Waters said, closing a closet so I could get a full view. “Michael Jackson looking through a glory hole!” Then he motioned to a little wooden structure propped up on a side table — a birdhouse. “It’s the Unabomber’s house,” he said. If you feel like no one sees you, or if you feel like you stick out too much, his movies are a salve. Freaks like us get to be the good guys, finally. Indeed, the birdhouse was a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, windowless and all — just shrunken down. Next to it sat a horrible doll that looked like it had been electrocuted, waterboarded, and then set on fire. “Bill,” he said. “My fake baby.” Waters has a lot of Kaczynski-themed art. He showed me an eerie framed photograph of the former location of Kaczynski’s cabin, with only the FBI fencing intact after the cabin was taken away as evidence. Waters’ attic also contains a hidden room that’s a recreation of the interior of Kaczynski’s cabin, to scale and replete in stunning detail. “Every single thing you need to make a bomb is in here except gunpowder,” Waters told me while I gawked at the piles of documents and dust that’s collected over the years. “That’s his wife’s pubic hair there.” When I asked him why he had so much work dedicated to the Unabomber, he reacted as if I asked him what the point of music was. “It’s an art piece!” he said before wandering off. We went downstairs and passed a life-size portrait of a man urinating on himself. “That’s Tony Tasset,” he said when I stopped to stare. “It’s calledEnron had it in their office or something.” Nearby, wedged between two doorways, sat a butler’s tray, covered with plates of fake nuts, raisins, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Waters, a former smoker, still displays ashtrays, like an original piece by Yoshitomo Nara, now worth thousands of dollars. “Too young to die” is painted on the side. The inside of Waters’ house is what I imagine the inside of Waters’ brain is like: strange and funny and totally surprising, every crack of it full of something else incongruous and unpredictable. His work has always been punk, a measure of rebellion and chaos. I asked Waters, as so many people have, whether the proliferation of online pornography has made it harder for him to shock his audience — after all, it’s a lot easier to find footage of a woman eating shit now than it was in the ’70s. “We didn’t do that for sex,” he said. “We did it for anarchy!” He said that] was a huge hit because it’s funny. No one jerks off and laughs.” I haven’t stopped thinking about that line ever since — can you turn someone on while you tell them a joke?a John Waters film, you’ve likely seen at least one John Waters quote, usually gussied up in pastel letters on Bookstagram: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.”Actually, one more: “The other thing is, if they have books in the bathroom, don’t fuck ’em,” he said, giving an elaborate example of someone sitting on the toilet, grunting and straining while reading joke books on the john.The novel is a kind of “celebration” of rimming, Waters told me, and it ends at an analingus festival, which is stupidtimely. “In a way, I am hopefully embracing and making fun of political correctness in this book. Is there such a thing as analingus rights, and are they being discriminated against? Is it? I’m trying to come up with new minorities!” he said. “No one makes fun of themselves. I make fun of everything I love, and I make fun of myself first.”makes fun of everyone, but especially anyone who’s ever had a sexual urge in their life: tickle fetishists, cum rag rimmers, you name it. “All that moaning and thrusting and humping with another human. Swearing. Drooling. For what?” Waters writes in“Even grown men who dress up like babies and wear diapers?” I asked him.Macmillan Publishersfollows the same traditions of most John Waters productions: It’s gross, unerotically sexual, shocking, offensive, and rowdy. The novel follows Marsha Sprinkle, a dog-hating, sex-negative, pathological liar who steals wallets and identities and hope. Her entire life is about deception — and she does it with gusto. She snaps at little kids. She sneers at men and their disgusting penises that want so desperately to slither inside of her because she is still beautiful and svelte. Really, she hates just about everyone, from people in the military to families with children to airline customers with disabilities . Pooping is also too obscene for her to participate in; Marsha eats nothing but crackers to ensure that her bowel movements are delicate little pellets. She has a daughter, having been impregnated by a man while still a virgin via a series of butthole-related mishaps that I won’t ruin for you here. “She did have a reason to be traumatized,” Waters said. “She was with child from a cum rag rimmer!” The sex in Waters’ projects works because it’s depraved, and it speaks to that monkey element in our brains that wants to throw shit and piss and see where it lands. Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s also hilarious, the most important hallmark of any Waters project. It’s why he’s been able to get away with the shock of, say, a woman having sex with a chicken in. And the humor works because Waters never punches down. For most of his career, he was the one on the bottom, aiming upward at conservatives, anti-gay creeps, racist losers, and anyone who can’t take a fucking joke. Punching up is how he’s gotten away with so much. “Empathy is important,” he said. “Especially if you’re the child of a cum rag rimmer. There’s not a lot of support groups if that’s your complaint.” Some of Marsha’s characteristics are inspired by an old friend of Waters’ who also loved to ritualistically lie. “Lying made her happy. It’s why she got up every day,” he said. “She told people the wrong directions.” Before the pandemic, she would tell people there was a terrible pandemic going around. “People believe anything! She would tell people in line at the airport terrible things, [like]The novel is another example of Waters turning an utterly distasteful woman into a kind of folk hero. He has always been able to take repellent, rude, crude, slimy women and make them iconic. Marsha is probably the worst person I’ve ever read in modern literature and yet I still rooted for her. IPink Flamingos“Villainous women are good parts, that’s all. I can write them well,” he told me, though he doesn’t necessarily agree with this categorization. “I didn’t think Divine was the villain in. Divine was just living her life in nature, doing her memoirs when she was attacked by a jealous pervert!” There is a kind of order in Waters’ world, even if it seems fucked up. “The rules in my movies are the people that are judgmental and don’t know the whole story are villains, and the people that are proud of their morals — even if they’re completely wrong and insane — are the heroes as long as they don’t try to hurt anybody else first,” he said. “They use what society says against them as a style. They use it as a personality — not a disorder.” The point of Waters’ career, ultimately, has been to make fun of whatever social norms constrain us. In the 1970s, for example, hippie culture was all the rage, so he mademocked the tedium of racists afraid of losing their place in the world. 1990’swas about class warfare and white trash teens telling squares to get lost. If you watch a John Waters movie and intrinsically, it means you’re a part of a community of like-minded weirdos. People who belong nowhere can find themselves among their people in a John Waters movie.“Everything I’ve done has made fun of censorship. I made fun of underground art movies. I made fun of political correctness today, of gay rules,” he said. “In my spoken-word shows, I talk about how we should scare straight people again. I’mof being accepted.” He suggests that the way to make straights scared again is for gay men and lesbians to start having sex with each other. “I always say: Men, consider the oyster; ladies, talk into the mic.” It is a very Waters way to view transgression; he is always lamenting the death of hookup culture. “If you want to be a radical, say you love sex. No one dares say that anymore.” In Waters’ world, dysfunction is beautiful, degradation is powerful, and there’s nothing to fear because the grotesque is proudly on display. And while Waters’ work has always focused on the fringes, he’s become something of a mainstream cultural touchstone. He’s been in everything from
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