"Who Wants to DIE for Art?!": “Female Trouble” [John Waters, 1974, USA] and the Artistic Apotheosis of Crime
Dawn Davenport [performing onstage, with gun in hand]: Thank you! I love you! Thank you! Thank you from the bottom of my black little heart! You came here for some excitement tonight and that's just what you're going to get! Take a good look at ME because I'm going to be on the front of every newspaper in this country tomorrow! You're looking at crime personified AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT! I framed Leslie Bacon! I called the heroin hot-line on Abby Hoffman! I bought the gun that Bremmer used to shoot Wallace! I had an affair with Juan Corona! I blew Richard Speck! And I'm so fuckin' beautiful I can't stand it myself! [She shoots her gun into the air] Now, everybody freeze! Who wants to be famous? Who wants to DIE for art?!
Audience member [standing up]: I do!
[Dawn shoots and kills him]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQwPES50N0s]
Last night I watched John Waters's Female Trouble (1974) for the first time, and I think it might represent the pinnacle of the entire horror movie sub-genre of "artists gravitat[ing] toward madness and murder in order to break through the unsatisfying limits of . . . representation so as to discover and work within the Real." Granted, Female Trouble is a dark comedy and not a horror movie, but its comedy is so dark that one could argue that it verges into horror -- or "horrible" -- territory.
A plot summary [SPOILERS AHEAD, OBVIOUSLY]: Divine plays a woman named Dawn Davenport who becomes so obsessed with achieving fame that she commits increasingly atrocious crimes to not only obtain massive notoriety but also to create art of a terrible, and terribly "Real," variety. On its surface, then, Female Trouble satirizes performance and other media artists of the mid-70s who pursued outrageous and provocative interactivity in order to dissolve the boundaries between safely "consumable" entertainment and dangerously unpredictable life. But beyond that, I think, the film makes a far more disturbing point.
For if the other films of the "artists gravitating toward madness and murder" sub-genre have its protagonists discover crime as the ultimate form of art (see The Shining, Images, Theater of Blood, and A Quiet Place in the Country), Female Trouble has its protagonist discover art as the ultimate form of crime. ("Crime IS beauty" is the movie's key line of dialogue.) Dawn Davenport is barely an artist since she does little more than model for the Dashers, a husband and wife team who take photographs of Davenport in lurid poses as she commits crimes. But even before she meets the Dashers and becomes an "artist" Davenport starts off as a single mother who chains her daughter to a bed and supports herself by robbing houses alongside two female accomplices. One could say that Davenport gravitates toward art as a way to justify her life of crime, in opposition to the protagonists of the other films who gravitate toward crime to justify their life of art.
What's so disturbing is that whereas the other films depict their protagonists' journeys as involving a loss of morality, sanity, and self-hood (in most of these films the protagonists become possessed by mental illness, malignant supernatural forces, or both), Female Trouble depicts Dawn Davenport's journey as an apotheosis of morality, sanity, and self-hood. It's not that Davenport goes so far in her pursuit of art that she does something horrifically wrong like committing murder and other abominable acts, but that she goes so far in pursuit of crime that she does something right -- aestheticizing murder and etc. She's a monster, yes, but a monster with bravado, panache, and a delirious level of confidence in the attention she can attract to herself and her acts. Unlike the protagonists of the other movies, all of whom lose the ability to tell the difference between wrong and right, or the ability to know when they've gone too far in attempting to reach the illimitable, Dawn Davenport can tell the difference between wrong and right and knows when she's gone too far -- she just doesn't care if she's chosen a path almost everyone else in the world would designate as utterly despicable.
In this sense Female Trouble also works as a satire of the irredeemable thieves, rapists, and serial killers who've achieved a cult following of interest from the American public due to the charisma and outsized ambition they've displayed in committing their crimes: there's not much that separates Charles Manson and his "family," Ted Bundy, and an innumerable list of gangsters from your run-of-the-mill psychopaths than mere photogenic appearances and a flair for the dramatic. This satiric target has been one of Waters's lifelong obsessions and is also present in the content and thematic concerns of Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom, and (I assume -- I haven't yet seen it) Cecil B. Demented, but it may be possible that in the past ten to twenty years reality has finally outpaced "The Pope of Trash." After all, only five years ago the American public elected to its highest political office a career con man and criminal, and largely in the name of entertainment value. There may come a day in the not-too-distant future when crime is not only aestheticized but looked upon as the greatest resource of our values and principles -- if it looks and sounds pleasing enough, of course.