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'I'm SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL I CAN't STAND IT MYSELF': Female Trouble, Glamorous Abjection, and Divine's Transgressive Pe

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'I'm SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL I CAN't STAND IT MYSELF': Female Trouble, Glamorous Abjection, and Divine's Transgressive Pe CUJAH MENU ‘I’M SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL I CAN’T STAND IT MYSELF’: Female Trouble, Glamorous Abjection, and Divine’s Transgressive Performance Paisley V. Sim Emerging from the economically depressed and culturally barren suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland in the early 1960s, director John Waters realizes flms that bridge a fascination with high and low culture – delving into the putrid realities of trash. Beginning with short experimental flms Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964), Roman Candles (1966), and Eat Your Makeup (1968), the early flms of John Waters showcase the licentious, violent, debased and erotic imagination of a small community of self-identifed degenerates – the Dreamlanders. Working with a nominal budget and resources, Waters wrote, directed and produced flms to expose the fetid underbelly of abject American identities. His style came into full force in the early 1970s with his ‘Trash Trio’: Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974). At the heart of Waters’ cinematic achievements was his creation, muse, and star: Divine.1 Divine was “’created’ in the late sixties – by the King of Sleaze John Waters and Ugly-Expert [makeup artist] Van Smith – as the epitome of excess and vulgari- ty”2. Early performances presented audiences with a “vividly intricate web of shame, defance, abjection, trauma, glamour, and divinity that is responsible for the profoundly moving quality of Divine as a persona.”3 This persona and the garish aesthetic cultivated by Van Smith aforded Waters an ideal performative vehicle to explore a world of trash. Despite being met with a mix of critical condemnation and aversion which relegated these flms to the extreme periph- ery of the art world, this trio of flms laid the foundation for the cinematic body of work Waters went on to fesh out in the coming four decades. Waters conceived gaudy and subversive works that extolled abject and margin- alized identities, unconventional sexualities, the excesses of celebrity, and al- lure of crime with Divine at the helm as a pre-punk jezebel fueled by shock val- ue. Divine’s artistic strategies of resistance lay in her energetic, transgressive performance, and a celebration of abjection. THE DREAMLANDERS APPROACH ABJECTION Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva’s post-Freudian theory of psychoanaly- sis “Approaching Abjection” is an onerous read. Kristeva presents a theory of the abject which stresses a prerequisite mastery of Freudian and Lacanian schools of thought and acknowledgement of the fuidity of the conceptual “I” and the “Other”. “Approaching Abjection” describes a state of being cast of as the moment when a child’s indistinguishable relationship with its mother is terminated irrepara- bly, the habitual expulsion of bodily substances such as menstrual blood and excrement evoke this separation. Simultaneously, this separation and cleansing – the experience of abjection – “establishes bodily boundaries by facilitating the introduction of a distinction between the inner and outer, and then be- tween the ego and non-ego. It encapsulates the memory of the violence of sep- aration from a level of existence prior to the establishment of object-relations, and that memory is reactivated by the expulsion from the body of abjected substances. The abject is also evoked by the ritual ceremonies of deflement and purifcation that repeat and re-inscribe the universal tendency to regress to the archaic level”.4 Bridging psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literature, Kristeva delves into the sub- jective relationship between object and non-object, ego and non-ego, also ex- ploring one result of the experience of abjection – the stray. She proposes that once boundaries are established there is an implied threat that these partitions can be compromised. This would throw the subject into a realm devoid of rea- son or meaning with the potential to revert back to a stifing and bygone rela- tionship with the image of one’s mother. There is an implied threat of a return to the chora – a motherly space, a receptacle, the natural mansion, the womb. The fear of being absorbed back into the chora relates to the mother being a potential cannibal who could devour one’s subjectivity. Within the psychoanalytical context of Kristeva’s work, the abject also applies to the state of being cast of: grasping for a place within the symbolic order of the world while simultaneously inhabiting a space outside it. This interpreta- tion of the stray or the abject, routinely relates to women, people of colour, those impoverished, the disabled, gays and lesbians, and trans-gendered peo- ple, et al. In being relegated to an abject space, an individual will experience the presence of “an Other […] in place and stead of what will be ‘me’.”5 The “Other”, established within a symbolic order, hinged on semantics, precedes and pos- sesses the ability to identify an individual as abject. On account of the “Other”: “a space becomes demarcated, separating the abject from what will be a subject and its objects.”6 This efectively casts the individual outside of the structured symbolic world. John Waters worked intimately with the Dreamlanders7 – a close-knit posse of disenfranchised barmaids, go-go dancers, porn stars, convicted criminals, out lesbians, beat poets, queer activists, under-class women, and HIV-positive out- cast-turned flm actors. The Dreamlanders collectively recognized that they have been placed outside of certain orders by virtue of their sexual orientation, histories, and beliefs. They were organized around a celebration of marginal- ization which relates to Kristeva’s statement about the space that engrosses “[…] the deject, the excluded, [which is] never one, nor homogenous, nor totatliz- able, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic.”8 Together this group found a symbolic existence that thrust aside the norms and social graces of safe, suburban America. Waters is “fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself [as author] into it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language – style and content.”9 The cinematic conventions, costuming, and or- namentation of the world created in these flms generated a new visual lan- guage and physiognomy unique to the Dreamlanders. This aforded the group a means of expressing their shared abject desires and burgeoning culture. The Dreamlanders included the renowned newspaper heiress and convicted bank robber Patti Hearst. Kidnapped and kept as a political prisoner by the ex- treme Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974, Hearst was ‘brainwashed’ and helped the SLA rob a San Francisco bank.10 She was convicted of her crimes because she refused to testify against her fellow guerillas. Her transgres- sions have since been twisted into a public interest story. Heart was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001. Haight-Ashbury run-away turned poet Cookie Mueller also appeared in many early flms, before her untimely death from AIDS. Mueller’s memories recount tails of hitchhiking, LSD and ketamine binges, and unbridled sexual exploits in and around San Francisco in the late 1960s. She was unafraid to express her sexual desires and pleasures, to speak her mind, and bare her naked body on camera. Edith Massey11, a short, stout, 250-pound barmaid with terrifc man- gled teeth began acting in Waters’ flms at the age of ffy-two. Framed by a mess of peroxide blonde hair, Massey paraded around triumphantly in skintight one-pieces with slits up both sides revealing her enormous chest and myriad of stretch marks. These women are uninhibited in their real lives and brought that energy and depth to their performance on screen. Upon frst viewing Waters’ work, it is apparent that traditional acting qualifca- tions have been thrown out the window in favor of passionate and imperfect refections of the abject. Though untrained, these performers brought raw en- ergy and zeal to the screen, rather than verisimilitude or proper diction. Their leaky bodies seem unnatural and untamed because they defy standards of beauty and composure. The Dreamlanders were not practiced performers by any means; they were an organized band of social misfts that lef flm critic Rex Reed asking, “where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn’t there a law or something?”12 ‘GO FUCK YOURSELF’ Art has always been a medium to explore the spirit and exploits of the abject. Kristeva refers to literature “from Dostoyevsky to Céline [which is] haunted by the threat of the extinction or collapse of meaning and is therefore character- ized by its constant and horrifed evocation of the abject.”13 John Waters was not haunted by this collapse. By every indication he aimed to devastate society through his art. Though met with aversion, Waters developed an audience base, due in large part to his position as the de facto leader of Baltimore’s under- ground. Waters’ following thrived because of their ability to identify with the abject personalities and trash presented on screen. The Dreamlandersprove that there is the potential for subversion in numbers. Waters created flms for and by a specifc crowd that were invigorated by their rejection by mainstream culture. Waters consistently presented shocking, abhorrent scenarios on flm. Most fa- mously, he had Divine solidify her title as ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in the World’ in the flm Pink Flamingos.14 Dressed up in a gold halter top with a full face of makeup, Divine waits for a miniature poodle to defecate on the side- walk, at which point she picks up the shit and eats it, all while sporting a wide, self-satisfed, shit-eating grin. Waters’ pre-eminent assault on society is his 1974 flm Female Trouble, sets a glittering stage for Divine and her criminal exploits through juvenile pranks, motherhood, marriage, stardom, and criminal desertion. Viewers are thrown head-on into unruly hyperbolic teenage delinquency as they follow 300-pound “jezebel” Dawn Davenport,15 who, having not received the ‘cha-cha’ heels she expected for Christmas, upturns her family Christmas tree.
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