HAIRSPRAY
As John Waters is the first to point out, Hairspray is “a satire of the two most dreaded film genres today–the ‘teen flick’ and the ‘message movie.’” But one of the nicest things about this exhilarating, good-natured pop comedy is that it actually is both a teen flick and a message movie. Satirical or not, it redeems as well as revitalizes both genres while celebrating their excesses.
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As an underground director, Waters was never more than an engaging amateur, a filmmaker whose reputation rested on the dogged literalism of his calculated outrages. The spectacle of Divine, a hefty drag queen, eating dog shit at the climax of Pink Flamingos–the moment that sealed Waters’s fame–was the sort of thing you only had to hear about in order to register or assess; seeing it added nothing to its significance, or lack thereof. Similarly, the overkill acting and gratuitous plot reversals were the recourse of an arriviste with practically no technique at his disposal and only his personality to sell; if the artlessness of a Warhol was relatively studied, Waters’s was definitely understudied.
With the appearance of his first movie with a six-figure budget (Polyester) and his first book (Shock Value) in 1981, a different Waters began to emerge–more literary, humanist, and down to earth. The conceit in Polyester of a plush neighborhood drive-in featuring a Marguerite Duras triple bill was strictly a writer’s fancy, but not the kind that would have cropped up in any of his earlier films, where the gags were a good deal cruder. Domesticating Divine, planting her in the Baltimore suburbs, and matching her up with Tab Hunter represented another kind of adjustment, and the celebrations of Baltimore and trash culture in both his books cinched the bargain in establishing Waters as a dandy and an aesthete as well as something of an unpretentious cracker-barrel moralist, an Oscar Wilde of the American underbelly. Even while he continued to insist that he was apolitical, it was becoming clear that his nurturing of freakish societal rejects in his films–Divine, the late Edith Massey, Mink Stole, and others–was nothing if not a committed social act.
Although Hairspray is as packed with hyperbolic detail as Waters’s previous movies, it differs markedly from them by being much more grounded in reality. One of the articles in Crackpot–written originally for Baltimore Magazine, and fairly bursting with civic pride–lovingly describes the real-life model for The Corny Collins Show: the top-rated Baltimore TV program, which thrived from 1957 to 1964, The Buddy Deane Show. It was hosted by a teenage Committee (called the Council in Hairspray), introduced a new dance step almost every week, launched a good many local teenage stars (including several girls with extreme bouffant hairdos), and eventually went off the air after the NAACP targeted the all-white show for protests. (There was a token all-black program once a month on the show–called “Negro Day” in the movie, a phrase that now drips with surreal period flavor–but no black Committee, and the protests called for integrating the show.)
