DON'T DREAM IT! BE IT!!

John Waters’ films are Camp (google “Note on Camp” by Susan Sontag) manifested – it’s a word that encapsulates an aesthetic as much as it does a sensibility that very much implements Queering devices such as irony, pastiche, a love of exaggeration and stylisation and a commitment to breaking apart heteronormative culture. Another key pillar of Camp is the idea of taste – when you’ve heard the idea of something being “so good because it’s so bad”. Yup, that’s our JW – a totem of Bad Taste. He has famously been cited saying that you must have good taste in order to appreciate Bad Taste – otherwise you have, well, just bad taste. Can you imagine a worser thing??! It’s in that space of irony, of having good taste in order to underpin an appreciation of Bad Taste, that allows us to pull apart our ingrained social contracts and to explore those fissures with curiosity, exposing them and then ultimately transcending them. Bad Taste is here to stay – and where the Pope of Trash goes, we shall follow.  

Most vanilla audiences know of his big mainstream hits, Hairspray (1988) starring his long-time drag superstar collaborator Divine and Ricki Lake that sprung multimillion dollar deals with a 2007 remake and a Broadway stage musical; and Serial Mom (1994) starring a titillatingly foul-mouthed Kathleen Turner. Yet the film that kicked off his cult camp status was his low-budget shock-fest: the truly infamous and inimitable, Pink Flamingos (1972). Armed with little else but his 16mm and his expired morals, John Waters and his gaggle of merry queer companions set out to assault our senses with a tale of Babs Johnson (played by Divine) who lives a beautifully carefree trailer-trash life with her chosen oddball family. One day, a tabloid newspaper announces that Babs is the filthiest person alive which angers our aggressively “heteronormy”-coded couple Connie & Raymond Marble who proclaim that it is THEY who are the filthiest alive… thus proceeds a tit for tat cacophony of out-filthing one another with some casual kidnap, murder, incest, animal loving, and some legendary dog poo eating along the way. Just your regular all-American family-friendly matinee show. 

I can’t say much about this film that hasn’t already been retched out into the world! Surely no one now can be a self-confessed John Waters virgin? He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame now for dirty shame! Nearly 50 years on this film still makes audiences squirm with discomfort because that’s what being filthy truly means: to Queer up your life uninhibitedly. As a high-art educated disruptor, John Water’s Bad Taste makes him the anti-hero we all didn’t know we needed.

OG Gay-sian Gregg Araki was a leading figure in the New Queer Cinema movement (coined by B. Ruby Rich) of the early 1990s alongside the likes of titans Todd Haynes & Derek Jarman, breaking out with his HIV-fuelled gay “Thelma & Louise” offering, The Living End (1992). He is a director who knows how to capture the visceral pain of teenage nihilism with such ethereal beauty and raw unflinching excess within the boundaries of uber shoe-string budgets. I imagine that if you cut him (with a rusty blunt razor no-less) his films would bleed out of his veins – which is why he is an out-and-out Queer indie icon.  

Nowhere (1997) is his third & last film in his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy – following from Totally F*cked Up (1993) and The Doom Generation (1995) – which follows Dark (played by a pre-Donnie Darko emo hunk James Duval), his bi-sexual girlfriend Mel (played by fresh-off-The-Craft Rachel True) and their hodge podge circle of friends as they gossip, party, cheat, moan, cry, smash, and lament their way through their disaffected yoof.

Araki proclaims that this film is “Beverly Hill 90210 on acid” (which may also explain the wonderful casting of Shannen Doherty as an airhead Valley Girl) and he’s not afraid to plunge us into the darkest substratum of pain. These dysphoric teenagers cut themselves, starve themselves, eat each other out, drink until they vomit and speak with profanities that only god forgives. Proper dumpster-fires of angst and sexual turmoil. His hyper-stylised, pop-arty set designs and costumes rub up against the bleakness of the ennui to invoke a palpable sense of alienation (and there are literal aliens). That, all against his signature soundtrack of dreamy shoe-gazer melodies (think Slow Drive and Cocteau Twins) and dirty doomy rock (think NIN and Jesus and Mary Chain) concoct a world that is a teenager’s soul turned inside out.

Araki’s cult canon later gifts us with Mysterious Skin (2004), starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt – which is also a massive must see.

Fun Fact: Araki has always had a bloody good eye for talent - many of his films offer a catalogue of “before they were about to get uber famous” folk: Rose McGowan, Christina Applegate, Heather Graham, Ryan Phillipe, Denise Richards, Mina Suvari to name a few.

Director Nagisa Ōshima was a prominent figure in the Japanese New Wave scene in the 1960s & 1970s (when you think of his US counterparts as the likes of Coppola and Scorsese you can begin to understand the massive cultural impact of his work in Japan and internationally). A boundary-breaking time for Japanese cinema, these filmmakers were the children of a post-Hiroshima & Nagasaki destabilised Japanese identity. You can see why they wanted to unpack hundreds of years of rigid social constructs by exploring the changing roles in society and radical politics – racism, sexuality, social delinquency, insubordination. It’s a hell of an exciting time for young impressionable Japanese minds and a great social landscape to explore coded Queerness.

Ōshima’s most famous picture is his divisive art-house porn flick In The Realm of the Senses (1976) (google it.. then the egg scene!) and his beautifully homo-erotic classic Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) starring David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Gohatto (1999), translated as “Taboo” is Ōshima’s last film – literally made the year he passed away – and what a film to go out with. It tells a Tokugawa period (1600-1800s) story of a tightly knit group of elite (and all male) Samurai warriors whose only living duty is to protect the shogunate. Japanese history buffs would tell you that the Tokugawa regime were in power for an unprecedented 265 years, during which time they managed to unite Japan and temporarily put an end to feudalism. With no challenges to the power of the Shogunate and no big wars to fight, the lives of these Samurai warriors became essentially defunct (which is where the idea of the ronin comes from: an aimless, masterless Samurai). So what are our Samurai to feel when they’re not doing the thing that they’ve given their entire lives for? Nothing – because they’re not meant to feel. They train… they keep their swords sharp... until into their lives arrives the young, beautiful and enigmatic Kanō – who manages to unearth all manner of repressed desires and homo-erotic tensions amongst the ranks.

A big theme generally around these Japanese jidaigeki films (translated as period drama films) is the duty vs desire dichotomy – so to place a queer coded tale within such a conflicting paradigm provides the perfect opportunity to explore such inner turmoils. The tragedy of repressed desires, unfulfilled forbidden love, the appreciation yet suppression of the aesthetic and beauty – all are poetically woven together here. This film makes you ache to the core because of the empty spaces, the unspoken – the corporeal void that gives rise to feelings that were once repressed. Indeed, some of this can be attributed to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s beautifully melancholic score. Plus it also boasts a legendary cast of Takeshi Kitano and Tadanobu Asano – who play the stoicism of Japanese uber toxic masculinity so well. I mean, two men… dallying with their long, hard, unsheathed swords…

Queerness, horror and eroticism – a holy trinity – go way back into the realms of the Gothic of the late 18th century – when the “return of the repressed” was a common theme amongst the art and literature of the times as a reaction to social, political and religious unrest. Gothic fiction traverses modernity and antiquity with romanticism – the idea of old souls, the eternal living “crossing the oceans of time” transported to a modern world – grappling with it, making sense of it. Vampires are the perfect vessels in which to explore such existential ideas, often raising questions within us such as “what would you do if you could live forever?” – would you grow tiresome? How would you stoke the fires of alive-ness (raising a mischievous brow)? The correct answer, of course, is sex, drugs (and blood) and rock and roll.

This film precedes Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) by a good decade – but you can see the parallels so clearly. Hot modern vamps seducing hot young things, hypnotic unions of blood and lust, tragic misadventures. Daughters of Darkness (1971) opens with a scene of a young beautiful couple, Stefan and Valerie, consummating their marriage in a sleeper train as it chugs its way across the Belgian countryside. All is blissful as they stop off for a couple of nights to honeymoon at an eerily empty opulent hotel until late one night the mysterious Countess Bathory and her beautiful assistant/slave/lover Ilona check in. The charismatic and mesmerising Countess immediately covets the young couple, Valerie in particular, and proceeds to seduce them towards her dark forces.

Delphine Seyrig plays The Countess with audacious bi-sexual icon Marlene Deitrich-inspired energy. She swaggers, dominates & takes what she wants, when she wants. I guess because when you live forever your desires become primordial and all is fair game. However, the pleasures of the flesh are fleeting as mortal flesh eventually dies and decays – so what happens when a vampire falls in love? Their immortality frames the big L word as a soul-crushing tragedy because often we know it to be only a temporary love. As powerful as she may be and as long a life as she has lived, The Countess’ desperation to win Valerie over exposes her very vulnerable fear of loneliness and her need for a companion – a very familiar aspect of the Queer experience. The OG vamp Dracula himself literally made himself an eternal slave in Renfield, not least because he needed a daytime dwelling servant but because he needed someone to be his man companion through time (though he’d never admit it – they never do).

Vampires are an essential Queer archetype because under every pulsating vein the blood runs crimson all the same – and we’ve all gotta eat!