Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
John Waters talks about nude prisoners, illegal pubic hair and the unlikelihood of getting laid at New York art parties.
Sep 24, 1998 | For a man who has made movies in which an enormous transvestite shoots up with liquid mascara, wallows in a playpen filled with dead fish and noshes on dog excrement, John Waters lives in a rather tastefully appointed apartment in New York's Greenwich Village -- but that's not the only paradox this legendary underground filmmaker contains in his seedily dapper, whippet-thin person. His latest movie, "Pecker," takes its modest, cheerful hero from snapping photographs of his friends and family in their working class Baltimore neighborhood to success in a Manhattan art gallery, where a black-clad admirer coos, "He's like a humane Diane Arbus." Like Pecker, Waters is a faithful son of Baltimore (he always sets his movies there, and keeps another home in the city), but unlike his shutterbug hero, he finds New York comfortable, too.
"Happy-go-lucky me," gulps the corn-pone music on the soundtrack as Pecker (Edward Furlong) skips good-naturedly through his life, despite a grandmother who inexpertly ventriloquizes a statue of the Virgin Mary, a sister who emcees at the local gay go-go club, a bartending dad who broods about losing business to a lesbian strip joint (called the Pelt Room!) and a kid sister with a perpetual sugar jones. Like all of Waters' movies ("Pink Flamingos," "Hairspray," "Serial Mom"), "Pecker" is full of freakish eccentrics and depravities, but like all of his recent work, it also feels strangely innocent and clean -- even as he's filling the screen with the image of two (patently fake) rats humping. You couldn't find a better argument for gleeful degeneracy than Waters, who seems delighted with life. His enthusiasm infects everything he creates -- especially "Pecker," which he calls "a feel-good movie for lunatics."
Your title for this film manages to be obscene without actually being censorable.
I would argue that it's not obscene, although it's certainly vulgar. You can't talk dirtily with it -- no one says "Suck my pecker." Men don't use it, but women do, to slightly make fun of someone and take away a little of the power of the penis. It's a word I've always wanted to use because it's funny and almost no one ever says it anymore.
What about "peckerhead"?
That's an insult, and a Southern one, a white trash word. No black people are peckerheads. A peckerhead is a dumb white person, a hillbilly.
Did the name come first, or was it the concept of the young photographer?
The name. I'd had a series of characters in movies whose last names were Pecker, including one character name Rodney Pecker, who was a stalker of a movie star and was going to be played by Johnny Depp. I liked the name because writing it and saying it out loud made me laugh. And I thought that I could get away with it, which so far I have, barely. The Motion Picture Association of America first said we couldn't, but we got it overturned. The foreign translation is tricky, though. It should be "Willie" in England, but then my explanation for his nickname doesn't work, the idea that his family calls him that because he pecks at his food. Because there's nothing especially sexual about peckers in the movie. Like everything else about Pecker's family, in context it's completely normal. Out of context, people snigger and laugh. Irony changes everything.
Many people are going to see this film as autobiographical.
I think they'd be wrong, although it's a fair question. The difference is, I was in on the irony of my career from the beginning. I was ambitious. I read Variety from the time I was 12 years old. I was very anxious for someone from New York to discover me, and it didn't happen accidentally. I tried for eight years to show my films in New York.
My irony was intentional. It was terrorism against hippies, really -- even though that was my audience -- glorifying violence and everything. I remember one of my friends tried to volunteer for the Venceremos Brigade to go pick sugar cane but she had eight-inch heels, bleached blond hair, red lipstick and looked like Jean Harlow, and they said, "Get out!" That was a political sin, to be a lipstick communist. All my friends were lipstick radicals and gay yippies, which was pretty rare then.
Get Salon in your mailbox!