Beginning in the 1960s, Female Trouble introduces Dawn, an "awful," "cheap" and "fat" high school girl who defiantly attacks her parents and runs away from home for not getting the "cha-cha heels" she wanted for Christmas. On the road, she gets pregnant by hitchhiker Earl Peterson (also played by Divine in macho drag) and later gives birth to a bratty daughter named Taffy (Hilary Taylor, Mink Stole). After engaging in stripping and street prostitution to make ends meet, Dawn is recruited by "morally bankrupt" beauty salon owners Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce) to prove that "crime and beauty are the same." They have Dawn commit crimes by promising her fame, photographing her offenses to stroke her ego and rewarding her with gifts, money and drugs. Dedicated to infamous Manson Family member Charles "Tex" Watson, who Waters visited in prison, Female Trouble is a dark comedy about the lengths an American misfit might go for her 15 minutes of fame, and it's also a critique of voyeuristic audiences that demand increasingly salacious content.
Waters pulls off his sensational plotline with his now signature irony: a camp aesthetic which exaggerates bodies, costuming, space, color, light, performance, and of course, hair. As a result, he reverses our tastes--bad is good and ugly is pretty--and subverts conventional politics as they pertain to gender, sexuality, marriage, family and class. Divine, a popular drag queen and Waters' larger than life muse, performs Dawn to these ends, even crooning the jazzy title song in character. Waters also irreverently mixes genres. The film's theme, "crime is beauty," refers to two French arthouse capstones: French writer Jean Genet and the ending of The 400 Blows (1959). Yet, both supposedly 'highbrow' allusions are rendered vaudevillian in the film. If the send up of bourgeois straight tendencies in ethos or style weren't obvious enough, characters like Ida Nelson (Edith Massey) hope her nephew Gater will "turn nelly," telling him that "the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life" and "queers are just better. I'd be so proud if you was a fag." Female Trouble's playful vulgarity is thus unlike the other films of the era with openly gay content: horror films or tragic melodramas, cautionary tales about creepy queers or the sorrows of being homosexual.
Despite reveling in the grotesque, Waters doesn't make fun of his characters. Shot in Waters' native Baltimore and features his raucous troupe, the Dreamlanders (Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey, and Cookie Mueller), the camera is strangely tender, particularly toward Dawn, reminding us that he is a filmmaker who roots for dissident outsiders; he mocks high art and ridicules authority. It is no wonder that Andy Warhol, David Bowie and William S. Burroughs all loved the film. Moreover, Female Trouble has paved the way for and inspired what are often labeled "Water-esque" queer comedies with a similar balance of smut and sensitivity, such as those by Jamie Babbit (But I'm a Cheerleader, 1999) and Bruce La Bruce (The Misandrists, 2017). So foundational is Female Trouble to Waters' oeuvre and to cult queer cinema that Los Angeles' NuArt Theatre called it "John Waters' Citizen Kane."
By Rebecca Kumar
