Polyester

Director: John Waters

1981 / 86min / 35mm

Having already exploited and exhausted every avenue of flagrant repulsiveness at a rather young age, Waters found a way to be still more objectionable by producing a full-blooded Sirkian melodrama. In her last appearance for Waters, Cookie cameos briefly as the victim of the Baltimore Foot Stomper, while the ever sublime Divine stars as Francine Fishpaw, a big-boned housewife who’s subjected to relentless humiliations by everyone in her family and social circle, believes for a brief moment she’s found redemption by way of a budding romance with arthouse drive-in impresario Tab Hunter, then finds herself facing still-deeper substrata of degradation. All of this, by the way, is very funny.

“I spent a lot of my childhood in cheap wigs. I’m sure my parents saw them as they were: ratty and synthetic. But in my imagination they were undetectable lace-fronts and I was incandescent. The way John Waters frames and lights Divine like Elizabeth Taylor (Divine’s idol), makes Polyester an almost unbearably tender movie to me. But because Divine is now playing a pious, nervewracked housewife after years of eating shit and deepthroating dead fish, it’s also a screamingly funny one. Nothing makes me cry like Billy Murray singing ‘The first good thing to happen to Francine.’” —John Early

Distributor: Park Circus

Introduction by John Early on Sunday, May 17th

Part of Thrust It! The Films That Inspired Maddie's Secret