Female Trouble

Baltimore's Dawn Davenport (Divine) drops out of high school, rejects her normal suburban homelife, and gets raped while hitchhiking as a runaway in shortie pajamas. After giving birth to an unwanted baby named Taffy, Dawn graduates from hash-slinger to go-go girl to cat burglar in association with pals Concetta (Cookie Mueller) and Chicklette (Susan Walsh). Although lonely Dawn finds her valentine-man in beautician Gator (Michael Potter), Dawn's subsequent marriage irks Gator's Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), who has devoutly prayed for Gator to turn gay. Engaged in a tempestuous relationship with her now grown-up daughter Taffy (Mink Stole), pose-aholic Dawn gets an ego boost when she's spotted by crime voyeurs Donald Dasher (David Lochary) and his wife, Donna (Mary Vivian Pearce), at their beauty parlor. They pay exhibitionist Dawn for the pleasure of photographing her law-breaking activities.

After Dawn's divorce of Gator causes him to leave Baltimore to find happiness in the Detroit auto industry, a freaked-out Aunt Ida throws acid in Dawn's face. Meanwhile, Taffy seeks her birth-father, Earl (also Divine), but stabs him to death when he molests her. As a convalescence treat, the Dashers give disfigured Dawn a present: Aunt Ida, imprisoned in a cage like a pet. After gleefully amputating Aunt Ida's hand, attention-addict Dawn strangles to death prodigal Taffy when she returns to town as a smug Hare Krishna.

During her nightclub debut as a trampoline artist, increasingly demented Dawn asks the audience, "Who wants to die for art?" and opens fire on her fans. Eventually captured and convicted due to the backstabbing Dashers, Dawn regards her imminent execution as her ultimate achievement. Death is her portal to serial killer immortality.

In the pantheon of camp, FEMALE TROUBLE would deserve an honored spot for its ruthless send-up of women's prison films. It is also an incendiary attack on parenthood, a hip repackaging of the philosophy of Jean Genet, and a deliberate inversion of all that American society reveres. When the bizarre character Aunt Ida logically badgers her hetero nephew to become homosexual, there's no doubt as to why this movie makes some viewers squirm.

In John Waters's twisted universe, cosmetology becomes a religion and mass murder becomes the ultimate performance art. When Dawn Davenport aims a handgun at her audience, the film reveals the ultimate conclusion of our fascination with homicidal maniacs--death as the perfect end of an evening's entertainment! If all Waters did was cleverly reverse expectations (e.g. acid-scarred Divine is heralded as more strikingly lovely than before), then FEMALE TROUBLE would be a bit coldly contrived. Instead, it is brimming with vicious life. In a side-splitting caricature of domestic zombie-dom, John Waters celebrates Christmas morning by having Dawn push a Christmas tree on top of her square mother because she did not give Dawn the slutty cha-cha heeled shoes she'd expected. Every sequence chronicling Dawn's rise to major criminal status is a treasure trove of cruel wit.

Reveling in the full-throttle melodrama that made Joan Crawford an icon, Divine and John Waters rummage through Hollywood cliches and re-invent them. Much of the film's demonic drive can be attributed to drag diva Divine, who seethes with lethal disdain. Matching Divine histrionically is the inspired Mink Stole (POLYESTER, SERIAL MOM), who has her greatest role here as the brattish Taffy. Nor can one dismiss the contagious joy of Waters's stock company of non-actors: Edith Massey seems to have just landed on Earth after vacating an as-yet undiscovered leather-worshipping planet, and Cookie Mueller is so deadpan tough as a beehived sidekick that one mercifully forgets how that familiar role has been sentimentalized by Grease and "Happy Days."

Although this may seem like overstatement, these cast members are privileged to utter the best bitchy dialogue since ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). Waters's outre universe isn't that far removed from the showbiz orbit of those hothouse Hollywood classics; FEMALE TROUBLE is also an American success story, only one populated by losers. In Stephen Sondheims's acrid musical Assassins, the killer characters sing out another national anthem "for the folks who never win." That's the chilling idea that underscores Dawn Davenport's downward trajectory.

By coupling crime with glamour, FEMALE TROUBLE confronts its jaded audience with its own complicity in making stars out of criminals. What upsets uninitiated viewers is that John Waters considers this all-American villain-worshipping phenomenon to be equally hilarious and pathetic. (Graphic violence, sexual situations, extreme profanity, substance abuse.) leave a comment