A Dirty Shame

I'm not too well-versed in the films of John Waters. I've seen a few, like Cry-Baby and Hairspray. I had a chance to see Pink Flamingos back in college, but heard that a character eats dog feces, and I decided I really didn't need to see that. It seems that lately Waters' films have been more sweet-natured, although still celebrating bad taste. I took a look at A Dirty Shame yesterday.

The thing about John Waters is that he's a very entertaining personality. I'd rather watch him be interviewed for an hour and a half that watch his films. He's a throwback to all those interesting people who used to be on chat shows, like Oscar Levant or Truman Capote. While A Dirty Shame has its heart in the right place and a gleeful sense of debauchery, it's not a very good film.

As usual with Waters, the film is set in Baltimore. Tracy Ullman is an uptight housewife who gets whacked on the head, and she becomes a sex addict (specifically, she becomes a "cunnilingus bottom"). Her daughter, played by Selma Blair, is also a sex addict, and has to be kept locked up, lest she run wild and resume her identity as stripper Ursula Udders, complete with comically enlarged breasts. When Ullman's inner whore is released, she falls in with Johnny Knoxville and his apostles, all of whom are sex addicts with some particular fetish. Meanwhile, Ullman's mother, amusingly portrayed by Suzanne Shepherd, attempts to lead a decency campaign to rid the area of perverts.

A Dirty Shame has a nice message about tolerance--it's even spelled out at one point: as long as the sex is between consensual and doesn't hurt anyone, anything goes, but I think does a disservice to real sex addicts, who are tortured people. The characters in this film are like cartoons, constantly getting whacked on the head and changing from nymphos to puritans, so there's no semblance of reality here, but the lampooning of twelve-step programs, which have helped so many people, felt wrong.

In a very long behind the scenes on the DVD, Waters discusses how he did research on various fetishes. In my position as smut editor, this is something we did all the time, too, discovering fetishes that probably no one has. Waters amusingly defined such things as "felching" and "plate-jobs," and speculated that no one has ever actually done those things, but it's amusing to think about.