John Waters, trash purveyor extraordinaire, is an unabashed, full-throated, out-and-proud, screaming-from-the-rafters…bookworm. “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books,” he once quipped, “don’t fuck ‘em.” Has truer dating advice ever been given? Waters claims to own many libraries, across multiple homes, which are apparently voluminous and wide-ranging in their variety. Within those collections of tomes, one genre holds a large footprint: true crime. Books like The Stranger Beside Me and Helter Skelter, which have as much to do with celebrity as they do murder, rank among his favorites.
By the early ‘90s, in the aftermath of achieving commercial success with the PG-rated Hairspray, Waters wanted to put his own stamp on that grisly genre. He already had, in a way. His 1974 film Female Trouble told the story of a juvenile delinquent named Dawn Davenport (played by the immortal Divine). As it progresses, Dawn rapidly descends into criminality, and eventually commits mass murder, simply for the sake of notoriety. In a pivotal scene, another character underlines the film’s central theme that “crime enhances one’s beauty.” According to this philosophy, “the worse the crime gets, the more ravishing one becomes.” Female Trouble remains an obvious exaggeration of Andy Warhol’s ramblings about fame. Waters was so committed to the gag that he dedicated the movie to Tex Watson, the Manson Family member convicted of multiple, brutal slayings. (In his 2010 book Role Models, Waters expressed sincere regret for “using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way.”)
Two decades later, John Waters decided to pay full tribute to his beloved genre and, for once, infused it with a whiff of plausibility. The result is the 1994 comedy Serial Mom, which stands as his most conventional and polished movie ever, one that still harmonizes with the most outrageous entries in his catalog (such as Female Trouble, clearly, but also Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living). But unlike Hairspray and Cry-Baby, cuddlier siblings by contrast, Serial Mom draws fresh satirical blood. The film portrays, as a note-perfect premonition, the media frenzy soon to come once the O.J. Simpson trial exploded national airwaves and became the sensationalized “Trial of the Century.” And it’s always played, deliberately, with a straight face.
Like every Waters film previously starring Divine, Serial Mom is, first and foremost, a star vehicle. But this time, it’s one that’s driven, with crazed determination and supercharged gusto, by the incomparable Kathleen Turner. Landing Turner as the lead for Serial Mom was a monumental coup. Waters literally scrambled onto a train from Baltimore to New York to plead for her to take the role, the same day the screenplay arrived in her mailbox. His pitch, and the script, were persuasive enough for her to say “yes.”
Beverly Sutphin, our “Serial Mom,” endures as one of John Waters’ greatest creations. She’s real, in the sense that Beverly’s triggers, which become the basis for many slayings, come from real life (they all stem from Waters’ mother, and her particular annoyances, such as gum-chewing.) But Beverly is also a work of fantasy, a foul-mouthed “Karen,” so outraged about white shoes being worn after Labor Day that bloodshed is the only answer.
Divine’s Dawn Davenport is, of course, the blueprint for Beverly Sutphin, the deranged June Cleaver (ha ha) of Waters’ deeply dark 1994 comedy. Little did the director know a forthcoming podcast would become a national sensation, one that would spawn many imitators of its own. It centered on a tragic killing that occurred just a short drive from one suburban Maryland town to another. Serial seemed monumental at the time, and then it gently faded. All these years later, Serial Mom continues to sear.
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