Female Trouble (1974)

I see John Waters's 1974 film on lists of Christmas movies fairly often, though I'd hesitate to categorize it as such myself. The movie features an extended opening set during the holidays, but at 13 minutes, it's a small portion of the overall runtime. I still wanted to say a few things here, since the movie's Christmas sequence is both memorable and used innovatively. More on that in a moment.

First, I should say a few things about the movie, or at the very least attempt to do so. Female Trouble is, by design, a weird, off-putting, offensive movie. Waters gravitates towards taboo subjects, finding humor in grotesque imagery. I believe this is the first NC-17 movie we've written about on this site, and the movie earns its rating.

None of that is meant to be presented in either a positive or negative light: frankly, I'm not at all sure how to formulate an opinion on this as a film. I found quite a bit of it funny, though I was just as often repulsed by what was onscreen. To be clear, that was absolutely the movie's intent: this was meant to be repulsive, to find humor within that repulsion, and to explore the hypocrisy around what is and is not considered inherently repulsive. Female Trouble is better understood as a work of art meant to be uncomfortable, and in that respect, it's kind of a masterpiece, regardless of whether I liked it or not.

Which is good, because I honestly don't know how the hell I feel about this movie.

Let's jump right to the Christmas stuff. Female Trouble opens with a thirteen-minute sequence set at Christmas that serves to both establish the movie's style and mock social conventions and attitudes towards the holiday, as well as media about Christmas and American culture in general. It's the first part of that - the establishment of tone - I find the most interesting.

Waters is exploring the inherently campy nature of American Christmas celebration. While the decorative elements feel almost subtle five decades later (this was a low-budget, independent production, after all - don't expect it to look like a Hallmark movie), Waters recreates the sort of idyllic family Christmas you'd expect from sitcoms of the '70s, complete with a large tree, bright decorations, and parents dressed in holiday pajamas.

He then of course has Divine's Dawn tear it all down. But prior to that, the setting is fairly conventional, even if Dawn and her friends are over-the-top from the start. Aside from them, the high school they attend is depicted fairly conventionally, as is Dawn's family. Afterwards, the movie is set in a sort of depraved, grotesque world parodying mainstream fears about counter-culture.

You could view this a couple of ways. When Dawn tears down the Christmas tree and runs away, you could look at this as her tearing down the concept of normalcy and abandoning it for the warped, grotesque world of the movie. But at the same time, there's already something a little warped about Christmas, with its gaudy decorations and cheesy music (it's notable Waters uses an upbeat song, rather than something wistful to highlight this). Christmas is a point where "normal" is warped into something not entirely dissimilar from Waters's vision.

I suspect both were intended. The movie certainly delights in tearing apart and mocking convention, but the use of a moment where normalcy is already absurd can't be ignored. It allows Waters to shift into a twisted world populated with grotesque characters naturally. That's certainly a fascinating twist on how the holidays are typically explored in comedy (or any other genre).

Christmas is also when Dawn is sexually assaulted (by a second character also played by Divine), resulting in her pregnancy, yet another mockery of the holiday's associations with children and infants. It's all played for camp, of course, as is everything else in the film.

After this, we leave the holidays behind, though they leave their mark in the form of an exaggerated reality the film never backs away from. Its characters, plot, and design are all absurd (and intentionally so). Dawn is a sort of sociopathic narcissist encouraged to devote herself to a life of crime by a couple looking to exploit her behavior for personal gain and amusement. The movie delights in escalation, culminating in her murdering her daughter, gunning down audience members, and being executed by electrocution. It never takes any of this serious and delights in mocking the sort of melodramatic media it's parodying, just as it delights in mocking anyone offended.

Female Trouble (and Waters's filmography in general) are immensely important to the development of both camp as a style and to queer cinema. Whether this is something you should track down is a question best answered by your interest in those areas. I'm not in a hurry to see more of his work, but I'm glad I finally got around to this. On top of everything else, the opening minutes of Female Trouble likely helped formulate the concept of Christmas camp in media.