Early Shorts by John Waters

Hag in a Black Leather Jacket
1964
17 minutes

Roman Candles
1966
40 minutes

Eat Your Makeup
1968
45 minutes

John Waters, the filthiest filmmaker alive, has finally accrued enough respect to nab a prestigious career retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The event takes a long, hard look at the muck and mire that Waters has heaved upon insatiable viewers for fifty years, with most of his films screening in 35mm or 16mm (the exception being Polyester, sadly, which is perhaps Waters' most well-rounded and accessible flick). All of Waters' films deserve a gander, especially if you've never been exposed to the unflinching auteur's singular brand of moral degradation and depravity, but for those who want to dig a little deeper and see the seeds that sowed the John Waters style, his early shorts are required viewing.

Shot on the cheap at Waters' house with the aid of his friends, including a young Divine (not yet adorned with his iconic look), these early shorts are rough. If you go into the shorts expecting to see long lost masterpieces, you'll likely leave agitated. So don't do that. They work best when viewed less as legitimate, cogent films and more as the seeds that would blossom into Waters' style. Roman Candles is especially difficult viewing. It's 40 minutes of three separate, unassimilated films playing at once, in three squares (the screen is split into four squares, though the bottom left corner is inexplicable left blank). Waters splices together arbitrary shots of his friends and family doing things like watching TV and smoking, and one strange, fleeting moment in which Divine, wearing a wig, hides behind some shrubs. Someone also apparently shoots up heroin. You can see the tracery hints of Waters' voyeuristic style and disregard for aesthetic beauty here, though the most interesting bit is how banal everyone's life seems. We're used to characters saying and doing outrageous, disgusting things in Waters' films, and here, heroin user notwithstanding, nothing really happens.

It's actually a little shocking how innocuous it all is. Of course Waters' affinity for the licentious is present, as well as rampant drug use, sexual violence, and all manner of incoherent abrasion that only exists to shock viewers, but Waters maintains an almost jovial tone throughout. Starting with Polyester, Waters started to make capital-F Films instead of the shoestring-budget, fuck-off experiments of the early '70s: these films had perceivable plots, and sort of followed a three-act structure (sort of), and almost made sense to those not yet initiated into Dreamland. He continued to lace every film with his usual subversive wit, but his films were becoming less mean, less abrasive. The last, and most accomplished of his shorts, Eat Your Makeup, has a similar affability. It's likable in the way high school home movies are likable, and you have to admire the effort that went into it. Save for a deranged fantasy in which a young man (Divine) envisions himself as Jackie Kennedy at the moment of her husband's assassination, Eat Your Makeup doesn't try to ostracize its viewers because it was intended to be seen only by Waters and his friends. As Divine says in I Am Divine, (streaming on Netflix), Waters and co. didn't anticipate anyone ever seeing these shorts. They made them to occupy themselves, to stay out of trouble, and to express themselves in a world that didn't understand them. Like personal essays or visual diaries, these shorts capture the embryonic rebelliousness of John Waters and Divine.

In Eat Your Makeup Waters displays little to under understanding of, or perhaps just total apathy towards rhythm and editing. The short is like a fever dream in its short attention span and surreal imagery. It's also gaudy as fuck, and that's fine; this is Waters at his most parodic, and the messy visuals, the soft, sketchy, squalid hues and the barely discernible static of pop-songs and voice-overs lifted from various films all coalesce into a fascinating prophesy of what would soon become the John Waters style. There's a horror house in which the horrors are all represented by hoary everyday middle-America life: folks watching TV, eating dinner, sitting on couches, curling their hair. The horror, Waters implies, is that they may become like their parents and accept a boring suburbanite life. Waters pokes fun at the counter culture while indulging in the counter culture's penchant for drugs and political insolence. Waters claims that he and his friends weren't hippies--they ate meat and white sugar--but they smoked a ton of dope, and used smack, and huffed whatever they could get their hands on. This free-flowing reservoir of drugs is satirized in the form of a vending machine in the middle of the woods, festooned with the word DOPE in big white letters, and an assortment of goodies (pot, heroin, something that might have been Quaaludes) inside.

There are some great physical comedy and pun bits, too (the Scare-O-Chair is great, though it goes on too long). But the real stand-out moment is the Kennedy assassination, which was shot just two years after the real assassination. (Apparently people didn't appreciate Waters' homage.) It's memorable not only for its complete eschewing of social graces, but because it's the first real glimpse of Divine's adventitious energy. Defying the leptosomatic norm of female models, Divine (the man) embraced his girth, and Divine (the persona) flaunted her size on screen. (In I Am Divine Waters makes a clear distinction between Divine and his character, so I am as well.) She would later play a gaggle of trashy women, many of whom displayed a fierce mean streak, but in Eat Your Makeup Divine is all smiles and cordial hand-waving. He's a dreamer.

Waters has gone to great lengths to keep his early shorts off the internet, and they'll likely never see official distribution, since the expenses to cover the copyrights of the multitudinous sounds and clips he uses would cost an exorbitant amount of money, so the only way you can see the shorts is in a digitized, DVD-quality version. Waters ripped the films onto discs to preserve them (8mm has a tendency to corrode over time). Catch them while you can--they're free, and they're filthy.

Early Shorts by John Waters plays at the Film Center Amphitheater September 11 at 5pm. Tickets are handed out an hour before the screening. 

Early Shorts by John Waters get three hits of a big fat joint and one 'lude out of five