** SERIAL MOM
“Outside it’s hot and muggy. I buy a carton of cigarettes, ever bitter that I’m taxed so highly (11) on the one purchase that actually brings me happiness. They ought to tax yogurt (12); that’s what causes cancer. A neighbor, who always seems too familiar for her own good, passes me and makes the mistake of saying, ‘Good morning.’ ‘Shut up!’ I snap, making a mental note of her hideous tube top (13) and ridiculous Farrah Fawcett hairdo (14), so popular with fashion violators. And then I see it, a goddam ticket on my car, even though the meter (15) has only been in effect ten minutes. I have to take my rage out on someone! I run toward this fashion scofflaw as she gets into the most offensive vehicle known to man, “Le Car’ (16), and yank her door open as she frantically tries to lock it. ‘Not so fast, miss,’ I bark. ‘There’s a certain matter of this ticket you’ll have to take care of–$16 for gross and willful fashion violations!’ She gives me the finger and peels out, turning up the radio so I hear the voice of the worst-dressed man in music, Stevie Wonder (17), braying in my ears.” –John Waters, “Hatchet Piece (101 Things I Hate)” (1985)
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Neither as energetic and assured as his Hairspray (1988) nor as lackluster and formulaic as his Cry-Baby (1990), John Waters’s Serial Mom alerts us to the fact that the impresario of outrage is getting older and wiser, without ever letting us forget that he still has some fight in him. Pushing 50, the bad boy from Baltimore who made his name over 20 years ago–by inducing an overweight drag queen named Divine to eat dog shit in Pink Flamingos–is actually becoming a little pensive about his shock tactics nowadays. But asking a current audience to think in a movie is probably more of a provocation than asking it to flinch or blanch, and from this point of view Serial Mom is worth 93 minutes of anyone’s time. For all its moments of uncertainty, it still has an irreducible vision to impart.
Nevertheless, there’s an undeniable pleasure in finding a comic imagination based so exclusively on personal quirks and predilections, even when it’s less than wholly adept in telling a story. It’s fairly obvious, for instance, that Beverly’s taboo against gum in her house is inspired by Waters’s feelings of persecution as an unreconstructed smoker, just as the various clips of movies on video that we glimpse during Serial Mom are obviously things that he either loves (Blood Feast and Straitjacket) or despises (Annie)–and whether he loves or despises them is ultimately less important than the fact that he has a bee in his bonnet about them. After all, like every other Waters movie, this one is shot on location in Baltimore, his hometown–a place that he clearly cherishes and loathes in roughly equal proportions–and what gives Serial Mom all its energy is its periodic bursts of this sense of selfhood. If that makes John Waters appear old-fashioned at times, it’s a form of old-fashionedness that we should venerate and nurture, because it’s fast becoming a rare commodity.
