A Dirty Shame
I've been a huge fan of John Waters since the moment I heard that he
made a film where for the final scene, the lead actress—a 300-pound
drag queen—ate dog shit live on camera. After spending the whole decade
of the 1970s making a series of underground films each more obscene,
trashy and hilarious than the last, John Waters suddenly and
unexpectedly went mainstream, helming films like Cry Baby and Serial
Mom, which were still campy and offbeat, but appealed to a much wider
audience. Now, on the eve of the breakthrough success of the Broadway
musical version of his 1988 hit film Hairspray, John Waters makes a
calculated move back into obscenity and audience-baiting, with the
NC-17 rated A Dirty Shame. The premise of the film is pretty simple:
Tracy Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles: a normal housewife in an
upper-lower class Baltimore neighborhood who gets whacked on the head
and becomes a raging sex addict. This sets in motion a conflict between
a religious cult of sex addicts led by Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville) and
the normal, sex-hating neighbors, who proudly refer to themselves as
"neuters." The plot exists merely as an excuse for Waters to pack in as
much juvenile potty-humor, sexual euphemisms and pet fetishes as
possible. The movie revels in its own bad production values, from
trashy set design to terrible CGI effects. Good performances are truly
beside the point for actors in any John Waters film, as the script
basically consists of a series of monumental declarations and absurd
monologues in which every word is viciously screamed. The real value of
a John Waters film is the laughs and the groans, and this film has
plenty of both. I learned about sexual fetishes I hadn't been aware of
previously, including mysophilia (sexual attraction to dirt and germs),
and lots of old favorites like autoerotic asphyxiation, infantilism and
"bears." There's a great scene where Sylvia picks up a plastic water
bottle using a method I've only ever seen at a Tijuana donkey show.
Waters also includes an affectionate homage to the late, great director
Russ Meyer with the character of Ursula Udders (Selma Blair) the
prodigiously endowed stripper desperate to escape her past. There is
also some startlingly blasphemous material here, seemingly tailored as
a response to The Passion of Mel Gibson, as the head sex-addict Ray-Ray
eventually takes on Christlike qualities, healing the blind and walking
on water. In the final analysis, it seems that this particular
assemblage of scatological jokes doesn't hold together nearly as well
as John Waters' best work (see Female Trouble or Pink Flamingos), but
the film still has a manic energy and infectious joy that make for a
very entertaining trip to the local arthouse or gay porn theater.