#288: Desperate Living
Release Date: May 27th, 1977
Format: DCP (Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA)
Written by: John Waters
Directed by: John Waters
3.5 Stars
I wrapped up my review of John Waters’ Female Trouble with the sentiment that “no matter the depravity you’re witnessing on screen at any given moment [of a Waters’ movie], you just love spending time in his little, disgusting world.”
Maybe his 1977 film, Desperate Living, challenges that sentiment.
The imagery of this movie is nauseating. The characters are gross, and the setting - a slum called Mortville - is simply putrid. At one point there is a closeup of a live cockroach crawling across a character’s bare ass, and I’m not convinced it was even staged. Watching Desperate Living, I could imagine vermin existing all over this set, until one day a roach decided he wanted a little screentime.
The movie is about a hysterical housewife named Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) and her maid Grizelda (Jean Hill) going on the run after Grizelda smothers Peggy’s husband to death with her huge ass. While on the run they are intercepted by a perverted police officer who will let them escape to Mortville in exchange for letting him try on their panties. Seems like a good enough deal to Peggy and Grizelda.
Once in Mortville they rent a room from a trans ex-wrestler, Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), and her lover, Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay). It doesn’t take long in Mortville for Peggy and Grizelda to learn that the slum is ruled by Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey, who rivals Divine as my favorite of Waters’ regulars) and her rebellious daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivan Pearce).
The outcasts of Mortville seem unified in their desire to overthrow the evil Queen Carlotta, except, ironically, for our protagonist Peggy, who finds the Queen’s brand of fascism intoxicating.
I really liked the movie, but not as much as the two Waters films that bookend it, Female Trouble (1974) and Polyester (1981). You can’t deny that the absence of Divine hurts the film a bit.
As for the disgustingness, I gotta say I admire it. After the warm reception of Female Trouble amongst Waters’ core audience and beyond, especially from those beyond, maybe Waters caught a whiff of suspicion that he was softening as an artist. Maybe there was a perception that Waters could grow into, if not mainstream film, at least more socially acceptable genre fare.
Nope. Instead John Waters gives us Desperate Living and the wretched Mortville, ruled by Queen Carlotta, who wants to poison her subjects with rabies, and a protagonist who agrees with her. The town is filled with dirty degenerates, nudists, and homos anyway.
When Peggy is violently confronted by her armed former friends after she joins Queen Carlotta’s goon squad, she defiantly replies, “A single gunshot can never destroy the beauty of fascism!”
Isn’t it nice to imagine John Waters smirking to himself at his typewriter as he writes lines like this?
