Desperate Living: John Waters Darkest and Most Ruthless Film

 

I was walking through the Tianguis Cultural del Chopo one ordinary Saturday when a guy approached me carrying a huge black plastic bag, as if he had a treasure, or dismembered body parts, inside. He asked if I liked movies. I said yes. He wanted to know my favorites, and instead of naming titles, I told him about directors. I mentioned David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and John Waters.

The moment I said "John Waters," his expression changed. He asked me to wait a second, reached into that giant bag, and pulled out a disc. He handed it to me without saying much else. It was a pirated copy with two words written on it in permanent marker: "Desperate Living". I had been looking for that movie for a long time without success. I paid him right there and walked away with the feeling that I had found something very few people had in their hands.

Almost thirty years have passed. That disc is still stored among the few belongings of mine that remain at my parents house. Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos are, for many, John Waters most celebrated works. But Desperate Living is the holy grail. Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, and Serial Mom could be found without any problem in any record store. Cecil B. Demented, recently released at the time, was also available "legally." Desperate Living, on the other hand, was almost impossible to find. That’s why that afternoon at El Chopo was pure luck, thanks to the black market.

Released in 1977, Desperate Living marked a break even within Waters own filmography. If in the early seventies he was already making punk cinema, this film was hardcore punk. Lesbianism, anarchy, fascism, everything mixed together with no intention of softening any of it.

I recently watched a YouTube video in which Waters himself narrated how he built the town of Mortville on a farm outside Maryland, using junk collected from the trash in Baltimore. He populated the place with real homeless people, who happily acted in exchange for a couple of sandwiches. Waters had created a fantasy town, or rather, a nightmare town, populated by vagrants, drug addicts, and lowlifes. He filmed at breakneck speed before the police discovered them or before the rain and lack of toilets caused the set to collapse. That’s how Waters underground cinema was made in the 70s, and Desperate Living was his last great statement as an outlaw guerrilla filmmaker.

Mink Stole, Waters inseparable collaborator, appears as Peggy Gravel in one of her most hysterical roles. Jean Hill joined the "Dreamlanders" as Grizelda Brown, a character who unhinges you the moment she appears on screen. This was also Waters’ first film without his great muse, Divine. The legendary Edith Massey shone again in an unforgettable role as the brutal Queen Carlotta, in what could well be the most twisted and perverse version ever imagined of Alice in Wonderland mixed with The Wizard of Oz.

Desperate Living is the blackest comedy Waters ever filmed. Or maybe it was actually a horror movie. Orgies, murders, rapes, backyard surgeries, cannibalism. A genuine gem, made only for strong stomachs. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but funny... or something like that. The lesbians were furious: "How could a man make a movie about lesbians?" (Did someone say, "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant"?)

Desperate Living is a grenade thrown at a very specific moment, when the echo of Nixon’s Watergate still hung in the air and a new wave of oppressive conservatism was beginning to rise over the United States. Desperate Living was counterculture in its purest form, and it even predated British punk rock and the aesthetic that Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren would later make famous with their Sex shop. Not bad for a movie whose title Waters took from a lesbian magazine he found thrown in the trash. Desperate Living is the darkest film of his entire career.