John Waters’ new film: The Good Bad Ghost of the Eighties returns

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With John Waters the good spirit of the eighties returns

As of 3:04 p.m | Reading time: 2 minutes

John Waters made his last film in 2004

What: WireImage/Jesse Grant

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He was considered the “King of Bad Taste” in an era when that title was desirable and hotly contested. Then director John Waters took a long break from filming. Now he’s spinning again. A reason to celebrate in these gloomy neo-bourgeois times.

Dhe ’80s were gender fluid before the word even existed and became deadly serious. All pop musicians challenged gender stereotypes. Women styled “manly” like Grace Jones or challenged traditional notions of beauty like the Siouxie Sioux, the slits and poly styrene. Men flirted with homosexuality so aggressively that it was not even noticed if some were actually gay.

It was the climate in which a physically powerful drag queen could rise to become one of pop’s biggest stars: Divine, born Harris Milstead. With songs “Shoot Your Shot” and “I Think You’re a Man” (produced by the typical 80s producer trio Stock Aitken Waterman) he helped to establish the then still new music genre dancefloor. After his early cardiac death at the age of 42 (he last weighed 170 kilos), he lives on, among other things, as the external role model of the sea witch in “The Little Mermaid”.

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However, Divine’s career did not begin with music, but with the director John Waters, who corresponded to the post-punk zeitgeist of the late seventies and 1980s with his deliberately tasteless films. So much so that his film Hairspray became a hit Broadway musical. His autobiography is proudly called “abnormal”. Divine became legendary for eating dog poop in a scene in the Waters film Pink Flamingos to earn the title of the dirtiest person in the world. Back then, queer people didn’t want to be mainstream, but prided themselves on challenging the mainstream by their mere existence.

It all seemed over like a distant fairytale, Divine has been dead for 34 years. All the better that at least John Waters is still alive and has now announced that he will be shooting again at the age of 76 after almost 20 years – the film version of his novel “Liarmouth”, which is about three women – grandmother, daughter and granddaughter – who all want to kill each other.

Waters is quoted by Variety: “‘Liarmouth’ is the craziest thing I’ve written in a while, so it’s fitting that the novel was shocking enough to restart my film career.”

The return of bad taste and good humor is cause for celebration. Some of the punky snot and ease of the eighties would do well for the neo-bourgeois and gloomy 2020s.