John Waters has shocked and awed audiences for decades with his transgressive cult-classic films. For his new art exhibition at Spr&uuml;th Magers, the filmmaker and provocateur takes on his touchiest subject yet.

Photography Devin N. Morris

&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t say anything these days,&rdquo; says John Waters. &ldquo;One could argue,&rdquo; I reply, &ldquo;that you&rsquo;ve always said things you weren&rsquo;t supposed to say.&rdquo; He pauses. &ldquo;Yes, I have. But it&rsquo;s a thin line, and somehow I have always gotten away with it...I haven&rsquo;t had a &lsquo;cancel&rsquo; attempt yet because I make fun of the things I love, not hate.&rdquo;
Waters&rsquo; love-not-hate quip is one I recognize from his past press, repeated, perhaps, to diffuse relentless scrutiny of the most provocative aspects of his work, which spans six decades of <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/full-list-2021-oscar-nominations-academy-awards-mank-promising-young-woman" target="_blank" rel="noopener">filmmaking</a>, performance, non-fiction writing, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/arts/design/john-waters-baltimore-museum.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fine art</a>. His films in particular, critically venerated for their gonzo flamboyance, are popularly remembered for their salaciousness. When I agreed to profile Waters, I promised myself to defy the obvious, to sanctify his satire, to approach him as an acolyte formed rather than shocked by his signature grot (I played Edna in my high school&rsquo;s production of Hairspray&mdash;adapted from his 1988 film of the same name&mdash;and found 1972&rsquo;s Pink Flamingos soon after). When a straight acquaintance asked me who John Waters was, however, I resorted to clich&eacute;s and memes: &ldquo;He took midnight movies to <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/sex-and-fashion-in-ryan-murphys-hollywood" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hollywood</a>! His muse was an obese <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/best-drag-queen-fashion-of-all-time-rupauls-drag-race" target="_blank" rel="noopener">drag queen </a>named Divine, and she ate literal dog shit at the end of Pink Flamingos, which was banned in several countries, and one continent! Remember Hairspray? The original? That&rsquo;s him!&rdquo; My flaccid attempt at Waters 101 defaulted to the most widespread&mdash;vanilla!&mdash;fixations on his work. And now here I was, with my idol on the horn, implying &ldquo;one could argue&rsquo;&rsquo; that the Pope was Catholic.

Jacket LOUIS VUITTON Shirt, pants, and shoes JOHN’S OWN

&ldquo;We were making fun of hippies,&rdquo; beams Waters, 74, from his Baltimore home, referring to his early films: microbudget collaborations with a repertory cast and crew known as the Dreamlanders. &ldquo;Even though we were sort of <a href="https://www.lofficielmonaco.com/fashion/70s-styles-in-modern-collections" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hippies</a>...we made movies to make hippies nervous. And I still do that: make liberals nervous, even though I am a liberal.&rdquo; Waters made his first feature, Mondo Trasho, in 1969; after that came Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974), each centered on a woman&mdash;always played by <a href="http://www.dreamlandnews.com/divine.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Harris Glenn &ldquo;Divine&rdquo; Milstead</a>, who was a man&mdash;devoted to perversion and crime. Waters&rsquo; Dreamland skewered the fringe lifestyles of its denizens: gays, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/pop-punk-resurgence-music-fashion-tiktok" target="_blank" rel="noopener">punks</a>, poor folks, fat folks, and so on. The tension between laughing-at and laughing-with ignited the arthouses and college campuses where the films played. Perhaps Waters&rsquo; legacy, and my own bewildered gravitation toward his work, springs from the line he draws between yesterday&rsquo;s &ldquo;hippies&rdquo; and today&rsquo;s &ldquo;liberals.&rdquo; The former had a sense of humor; the latter don&rsquo;t, and I&rsquo;m piqued when Waters identifies himself as such. By the end of the Trump era, &ldquo;liberal&rdquo; had emerged as a pejorative among my peer group, disillusioned as we were by the righteous ineptitude of the Democratic establishment. We began to shed the moral certainties of doomscroll wokeness and clickbait <a href="https://www.lofficiel.com.cy/travel-gourmet/dominique-crenn-woman-chef-and-activist-who-is-changing-the-world" target="_blank" rel="noopener">activism</a> without quite renegotiating our pieties toward issues of race, class, gender, sex, death, or history. &ldquo;Fun&rdquo; and its &ldquo;making&rdquo; remain unfashionable at best.

You've got to laugh. Sometimes you laugh the hardest when it's the most painful.

A 2006 diptych of C-prints by Waters titled &ldquo;9-11&rdquo; is featured in Hollywood&rsquo;s Greatest Hits, a retrospective of his mixed-media works showing this spring at <a href="https://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/john-waters-hollywoods-greatest-hits-los-angeles/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spr&uuml;th Magers</a> in Los Angeles. Photographed on film in front of a television, &ldquo;9-11&rdquo; presents the title cards of Steve Carr&rsquo;s 2001 film Dr. Doolittle 2 and Brian Helgeland&rsquo;s A Knight&rsquo;s Tale from the same year. This duet of commercial <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/snl-john-krasinski-phoebe-bridgers-first-shows-2021" target="_blank" rel="noopener">comedies</a>&mdash;which, per Waters, &ldquo;no one remembers&rdquo;&mdash; garnered nearly $300 million in ticket sales between them. They were also the films scheduled to screen on American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, which were hijacked by terrorists and flown into Manhattan&rsquo;s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. When the artist reveals this to me, I laugh from my throat. &ldquo;You laugh,&rdquo; says Waters, clocking my nerves, &ldquo;but it is a joyous piece in a way, because they never got to actually play them. It would have been worse if you were crashing into the World Trade Center watching Dr. Doolittle 2. I&rsquo;m always an optimist!&rdquo; Taken literally, &ldquo;9-11&rdquo; could be read as a cynical<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/best-trench-coat-vintage-celebrity-style-inspiration" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Hollywood </a>send-up, packaged to crash and burn. The work, however, emerges not far in Waters&rsquo; oeuvre from Cecil B. Demented, a 2001 film about a scuzzy gang of underground<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/miu-miu-tales-isabel-sandoval-shangri-la" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> filmmakers</a> who capture an A-List actress (Melanie Griffith) and force her to act in their midnight movie. The slimy film buffs&mdash;tattooed with the names of arthouse heroes like David Lynch, Pedro Almod&oacute;var, and Spike Lee&mdash;radicalize their hostage, who memorably screams &ldquo;make good movies or die!&rdquo; at the film&rsquo;s climax, just before her hair catches fire. If &ldquo;9-11&rdquo; sends lowbrow cinema hurtling to its demise, Cecil B. Demented burns its highbrow equivalent at the stake. &ldquo;Taste&rdquo; itself&mdash;arguably a bourgeois affectation of the &ldquo;liberal&rdquo; sphere&mdash;warps and bends under Waters&rsquo; ruthlessly playful gaze, giving way to a disarmingly sincere ethic of cultural consumption. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to laugh,&rdquo; insists Waters. &ldquo;Sometimes you laugh hardest when it&rsquo;s the most painful.&rdquo;

Jacket, sweater, and scarf JOHN’S OWN 

Toward the end of my allotted time with Waters, the call drops. I frantically redial his assistant&rsquo;s phone. It rings, my thoughts drift: how did I wind up on this call? I&rsquo;m not a journalist, and until recently, I have rarely been published. I&rsquo;m an actress and former <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/black-models-fashion-history" target="_blank" rel="noopener">model </a>known primarily for being competent and <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/10-trans-models-fashion-designers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">transgender</a>. Sure, Waters and I are loosely connected as public-facing Hollywood queers reckoning with straight audiences, but where straight &ldquo;nervousness&rdquo; excites him, it has at many points tormented me. I Googled myself a few years ago, and the top related search was an inquest into whether or not my character on a <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/filming-bridgerton-season-2-london-netflix" target="_blank" rel="noopener">popular television</a> show was a man (it was my first time playing a character on screen that wasn&rsquo;t expressly written as transgender). My name-search plunged me into a months-long depression that culminated in eight cosmetic facial procedures; it occurs to me that the same discovery might have delighted Waters, had the tables been turned.&nbsp;

Humor, that&rsquo;s how it works. You go in and you embarrass the enemy and you make them feel stupid. And you win.

When he greets me for the second time, I tell him that I want to hear about Elizabeth Coffey, a relatively unsung Dreamlander best known for her cameo as Chick with a Dick in Pink Flamingos. In the film, she exposes her tits and eponymous dick to a flasher, who runs for the hills. Waters is three steps ahead of me: &ldquo;Coffey was getting the [sex] change five days later! She said, &lsquo;I did that scene because I knew that I could own that joke forever. And nobody could ever make fun of me.&rsquo; And no one ever did.&rdquo; He goes on for several minutes about Coffey, her bravery, her bohemian spirit, as well as her advocacy for housing for trans elders in Philadelphia, where she lives today. I smile; his love for Coffey is clear and deep. Waters, an artist who might glibly be taxonomized as a &ldquo;cisgender male,&rdquo; leveraged the body of a transsexual woman for a sight gag in a midnight movie five decades ago&ndash;and it worked. It still works!&nbsp;
&ldquo;Humor,&rdquo; says Waters, who has never been canceled. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s how it works. You go in and you embarrass the enemy and you make them feel stupid. And you win.&rdquo;

1969: After developing a series of no-budget shorts—"Hag in a Black Leather Jacket," "Roman Candles," and "Eat Your Makeup"—a college-aged John Waters makes his feature film debut: "Mondo Trasho," a hit-and-run narrative starring his forever muse Divine. With their minimalist dialogue and repeating images and family-like casts, the Baltimore artist’s early films forecast the blueprint for work he will make down the road.

1972: "Pink Flamingos" is Waters’ pop culture breakthrough and the first episode in what Waters dubs The Trash Trilogy (which also includes "Female Trouble" and "Desperate Living"). The exploitation comedy flick became beloved by film critics and the LGBTQ community, but sparked outcry from more prudish sectors for its playful crescendo of depraved acts such as cannibalism, sodomy, vomiting, castration, and incest.

1988:  "Hairspray," Waters’ first PG-rated film, chronicles the life of a Baltimore teen. The film was relatively successful at the box office, but became a cult favorite via its distribution on VHS in the early 1990s.

1992: "Divine in Ecstasy," an image depicting his collaborator who passed in 1988, is Waters’ first official artwork.

1995: Waters makes his gallery debut with the legendary Pat Hearn and Colin de Land at the now-defunct and revered American Fine Arts. The exhibition, "My Little Movies," showcases Waters’ first steps into photography with a series of comic-strip-like narrative collages that echoed the multi-channel experiments he’d made early on.

2000: "Cecil B. Demented," Waters’ action-comedy, premieres.

2003: "Hairspray the Musical," a Broadway adaptation of Waters’ original, wins eight Tonys.

2005: The New Museum begins to tie together the narrative of Waters’ fine art career and filmography with his first survey show, "John Waters: Change of Life," which includes both his early films as well as a substantial amount of his film still photo collages and prop-like sculptures.

2006: Waters appears in the George W. Bush era-inspired group show, "Defamation of Character," at MoMA PS1, which features artists Ricahrd Prince, Karen Kilimnik, and Hélio Oiticica.

2009. The artist hosts simultaneous solo shows at Gagosian Gallery and Marianne Boesky, both titled Rear Projection, which include a little bit of everything: sculpture, video, drawing, and photography.

2012: Waters gives himself a botched Photoshop facelift in a self portrait titled “Beverly Hills John.”

2015: The artist connects with Sprüth Magers and hosts his first survey show in London, "Beverly Hills John."

2018: "John Waters: Indecent Exposure" opens at the Baltimore Museum of Art, giving the artist his first hometown retrospective.

STYLIST Rasaan Wyzard&nbsp; GROOMING Cheryl Kinion&nbsp; PHOTO ASSISTANT Amina Hassen&nbsp; SPECIAL THANKS to the Ivy Hotel

John Waters is Uncancellable

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