Multiple Maniacs

                      
The cinema of John Waters always fills me with nostalgia for my upbringing in Baltimore. Seeing the cobblestone streets of my childhood in his 1970 film Multiple Maniacs brings me a pang of tristesse that I can't expect non-natives to feel. I was first exposed to Waters as a teen, in the 1970s, when his films played the midnight movie circuit. I remember the first one I saw was Pink Flamingos at Johns Hopkins. I was nonplussed, but should maybe stomach it again. Female Trouble remains my favorite. Every one of his features prior to Polyester is a window to Baltimore in the 70s. His verisimilitude is better than Barry Levinson's because of his one step ahead of the law, cinema verite style. The distinctive Bawlmer accent is heard best in his oeuvre. Seven or eight of the cast have dead on accents; especially Cookie Mueller. In all five seasons of The Wire, an excellent show, there were only three actors who nailed the accent. 

Multiple Maniacs is an impressive first sound feature, despite its shaky tripod and overuse of zoom. Waters wears his influences like a tattoo: exploitation films, William Castle, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Kenneth Anger, Tod Browning, Bergman, CB DeMille, Bunuel, and Pasolini (see above) and, especially, Warhol. Warhol's silkscreen of Liz Taylor graces Divine's pad as do an interesting array of movie posters with a certain bent from the late 60s: Boom (Liz again), Vixen, Teorema, etc. Despite spastic zooms, a recurrent vice of the late 60s, Waters is fairly chaste with his camera. His setups are as elemental and direct as Feuillade or Sam Fuller. He shares with those cinematic titans an innate sense of camera placement. Take the low angle shot of the shocked bourgeois patrons of "The Cavalcade of Perversion". Waters frames his tableau of bad wigs and "shocked" expressions against the white scrim of the carnival tent. Waters makes it plain who the true grotesqueries are in his cracked scenario.

Waters displayed his love of his fellow freaks by enshrining them in his stock company. part of the appeal of Multiple Maniacs for Waters aficionados is witnessing the beginnings of his Dreamland troupe. Seeing Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Divine, Edith Massey and the rest of Waters' merry band gives me a bittersweet pleasure: joy at seeing them so young at the beginning of their journey, sadness that some of them are gone forever. I get a similar vibe from Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death, a film that also features actors in tableaux against a white background. No matter how despairing Fassbinder's work is or no matter how provocative Waters is, there is a core of sweetness in the work of both directors and their respective stock companies. Both share an appreciation of the business of show for its own sake that truly make these film labors of love.

"The Cavalcade of Perversion" is a mask for criminal activity, one of Waters' most heartfelt obsessions. Indeed, the process of making Multiple Maniacs mirrored the theme: the non-union production had to be shot one step ahead of the cops and Waters had to dicker with the Maryland Censor Board. His sympathy is for those outside societal norms: be they hippies, queers, freaks, drug users (huffing paper bags here) thieves, and, most cast out of all, unattractive women. Waters, like Tod Browning, Fassbinder, and Warhol, identifies with the freaks and not the bourgeoisie.

Multiple Maniacs is hardly a perfect work. The last fifteen minutes or so drag on before Divine is gunned down in an odd prefiguring of the upcoming tragedy at Kent State. There is an overlong David Lochary monologue. Perhaps Waters was wrong to extend the film after its real climax when Divine is raped by a giant lobster in a surrealistic coup. This is a great example of Waters' love of artifice. Part of the "let's put on a show" joy of the scene is its falsity. The lobster cannot possibly be thought of as real, but that is not the point. The show is the thing.

Waters shares with Warhol a feeling for art as a celebration of the everyday. They are both ambivalent about this and that is why a camp sensibility is employed by both. The two also share an ambivalence to Catholicism. They both love the pageantry of the Church, but find its teachings, texts, and rituals ridiculous. Waters slapdash style in Multiple Maniacs is a mock epic one. The "Jesus" passages in the film are shot like most silent Biblical epics (particularly the original King of Kings), but the actors are egged on to over emote and push the scenes into absurdity. Similarly, Divine's (hmm, that name) entrance is a mock epic one. Lying on a cot in a carnival tent, Divine is naked and viewed from the rear, gazing at her own reflection in the mirror. The shot seems to be a burlesque of Velazquez's Venus at Her Mirror; a neat trick.

To me, the best scene in Multiple Maniacs and one of the best in Waters' canon is Mink Stole's seduction of Divine. A sequence which climaxes with Ms. Stole sodomizing Divine with a rosary in a church pew. This mock epic scene culminates in mock ecstasy, a telling Waters moment which highlights his eye rolling view of romance and religion. Waters had more to offer, but Multiple Maniacs shows he was already a fully formed auteur.

"Being Catholic always makes you more theatrical."

 John Waters, Shock Value, 1981