Female Trouble: When Fame Devours Crime

 

In 1972, when Pink Flamingos literally made audiences vomit in theaters, John Waters had already grasped a truth America denied: violent crime sells better than sex, and fame has redemptive power over any horror, no matter how repulsive. Two years later, with Female Trouble, he not only predicted our Netflix obsession with serial killers but wrote the playbook for a society that feigns horror while eagerly devouring every grisly detail in the media. Two decades before Natural Born Killers, Waters dissected how America turns monsters into mass market commodities. And he did it with sharper edge.

Dedicating the film to Charles "Tex" Watson was no cheap stunt. Waters frequently visited the most sadistic member of the Manson Family in prison, not as a morbid tourist but as an anthropologist of American evil. As the hippie counterculture bled out in its own naivety, he documented the mutation live: Manson proved you could kill and land covers on Life Magazine, thousands of fan letters, and award winning documentaries. Dawn Davenport, embodied by the legendary Divine with double barreled fury, as both antiheroine and her own abuser, is the bastard child of that twisted promise. She doesn’t chase the American Dream, she tears it apart on prime time. Think of Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968 and later inspired cults with her SCUM Manifesto: Waters wove those radical fringes into his story.

Female Trouble traces the arc of celebrated psychopathy with surgical precision: a teenager runs away from home because she didn’t get the platform shoes she wanted for Christmas, becomes a neglectful mother whose daughter kills her rapist father, then murders that daughter when she embraces Hare Krishna seeking redemption. Every crime is a performance, every atrocity a consumable spectacle. Waters held up a shattered mirror where Richard Speck’s 1966 murder of eight nurses in Chicago reflects alongside morning talk shows. “Crime is beauty” wasn’t a metaphor: it was prophecy. Every mass shooting, every viral manifesto, every memefied killer, think Aileen Wuornos, executed in 2002 after inspiring Monster, or the Columbine shooters whose endless media coverage spawned imitators, confirms Waters filmed the future on 16mm with a shoestring budget.

Waters’ DIY aesthetic, colors saturated to the point of nausea, over the top performances by the Dreamlanders, birthed punk before it had a name. When the Ramones played CBGB in August 1974, the same year as Female Trouble, they shared identical DNA: demolishing the establishment with cheap tools, spitting on bourgeois good taste, crowning the marginal as the sole refuge of truth. The Fugs, New York Dolls, and The Stooges had planted the seed, but Waters watered it with bodily fluids and deliberate bad taste. Sync that with Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols launch in 1975 or Iggy Pop’s raw, feral performances: it wasn’t coincidence but a cultural fever breaking through at full speed.

His visceral influence hit David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar head on, who took his obsession with the grotesque and polished it for festivals. Lynch tamed it in Eraserhead, his surreal, industrial nightmare, like a softened Pink Flamingos. Almodóvar transmuted Waters’ queer transgression into Madrid’s movida with What Have I Done to Deserve This?. But both sanded down the edges for digestibility. Waters never yielded. He kept dedicating films to convicted killers, laughing while academics hunted metaphors in unfiltered brutal truths. That undercurrent echoes in films like Harmony Korine’s Gummo or Todd Solondz’s Happiness.

Female Trouble is more than cult cinema: it’s the forensic report of the moment America stopped distinguishing fame from infamy, celebrity from notoriety. The Manson Family ended the Summer of Love with blood in Benedict Canyon, Waters wrote the epitaph in cheap Technicolor. When Dawn dies in the electric chair screaming that crime made her beautiful, it’s not satire: it’s indictment. Dressed in trash glamour, the critique passes as entertainment, just like the country it exposes. Think of Ed Gein, whose 1950s crimes inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Waters turned real terror into pop art.

Today, with true crime dominating streaming, killers with TikTok fandoms, and school shooters’ manifestos going viral before the bodies cool, Female Trouble isn’t transgression: it’s prescient journalism. Waters didn’t invent anything; he had the audacity to point it out half a century ago while we feign surprise. Punk ended up in museums, his cinema remains too raw for that. That’s his victory.