USA comedy
1981
color 94 min.
Director: John Waters
CLV: $54.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1362L
Remember those inane
but innovative gimmicks that duped a movie audience into having the time of its
life even when the movie stunk?There was Percepto in William Castle's The
Tingler (1959), a device consisting of a buzzer rigged into selected
theater seats which jolted viewers into believing that the critter of the
film's title (a dormant organism aroused by its host's fright) was alive in
their spinal columns. Less effective but more fun was Illusion-O, Castle's
gimmick for 13 Ghosts (1960) similar to 3-D glasses except that you
could see the spools if you looked through the red lens but couldn't if you
looked through the green.
John Waters fondly remembered these gimcrack
gimmicks and resuscitated them for his 1981 film Polyester, shot in
fabulous Odorama. This, in the first above-ground picture made by the director
of such subterranean dementia as Mondo Trasho (1969) and Pink
Flamingos (1972), was a cinematic breakthrough more profound than Dolby
sound or Cinerama. For an audience that previously had been olfactory-deprived,
able only to SEE but not SMELL a movie, Waters provided special
scratch-and-sniff cards enabling you to fill your nostrils with whatever scent
or stench that the film's heroine, Francine Fishpaw, was inhaling. These
aromas, which ranged from the pungent perfume of pizza to the foul fragrance of
flatulence, reinforced the film's all-important moral: Some things in life just
plain stink.
Francine Fishpaw (played by Waters' longtime diva, the divine
female impersonator Divine, aka Glenn Milstead) is a suburban housewife who
wins the Woman's Movie Trifecta, enduring alcoholism, juvenile-delinquent
children, and divorce. Fortunately, V, as the title intimates, is a 100%
unnatural comedy, a satire of middle-class America tickling the conventions of
the mainstream domestic melodrama. It was the first of Waters' Bourgeois Trash
Trilogy that would later include the 1987 Hairspray and the 1990 Cry
Baby, all films lampooning middle-class values.
Poor Francine Fishpaw.
She lives on a secluded cul-de-sac in suburban Baltimore, a dead-end in more
ways than one. Sure, Francine seems to have everything: the house, the husband,
the Empire furniture upholstered in Jordan Almonds colors (white, lavender,
pale pink). But she is having a Bad Air Day. For this woman with a nose keener
than an anteater's sniffs something rotten in her plush paradise.
Is it the
moldy tomatoes thrown by the picketers outside her house, protesting her
husband's porn theater, currently playing the XXX-rated movie, My Burning
Bush?Is it the cheap perfume worn by her slutty daughter, the one in the
spandex disco pants and the Farrah Fawcett 'do? Or is it the angel dust smoked
by her punk (as in rocker AND delinquent) son, a foot-fetishist sought by the
police for his serial crime of stomping the sandaled feet of pretty
women>?
There';s no one Francine can turn to for help or advice. Her mother
is interested only in money. Her husband is busy diddling his secretary. Thus
the vodka bottle becomes solace for Francine, a picture of full-figured pathos
who looks as though she's simultaneously channeling Liz Taylor, Anna Magnani,
and Smirnoff.
Waters knows -- and he knows that you know -- that the
convention of women's movie melodramas dictates that she who has everything
must be punished for being better off than those in the audience. Yet Francine
suffers more than most. Her daughter comes home pregnant, with a straight-F
report card. Her son is expelled for truancy, arrested for his foot-stomping,
and sent off to what used to be called "the laughing house." Then there's her
empty-bed blues. Could it get any worse? Imagine what it's like for Francine to
reach for a snort and find that her mother has handed her a jigger of
gasoline!
For she who suffers, the woman's movie melodrama also provides
deliverance. Will Francine be saved by that hunk in the white Corvette, Todd
Tomorrow (Tab Hunter)? He is the opposite of her philandering husband:
attentive, tender, PLUS he runs a drive-in theater showing a triple-feature of
films by Marguerite Duras, the highbrow novelist-feminist whose movies are as
tedious and opaque as Waters' are peppy and transparent.
With Todd, Francine
enjoys a "Happy Interlude," that montage sequence in the woman's movie where
everything goes right for the heroine. The couple horseplays feeding ponies,
they chase butterflies, they take a roll in the hayloft. But Waters know -- and
he knows that you know -- that the "Happy Interlude" is just the upbeat prelude
to the downbeat melodrama that inevitably follows.
Happily, Polyester
has an unexpectedly cheerful resolution. Francine is reunited with her children
who have learned that instead of committing crimes, they can make art about
them. In the stale genre of woman's movies, Polyester may not be a
breath of fresh air, but it is definitely a waft of air freshener.
--
Carrie Rickey
CREDITS
Robert Shaye and Michael White present John
Waters' Polyester starring Divine and Tab Hunter
Executive Producer:
Robert Shaye
Music: Chris Stein and Michael Kamen
Producer, Writer,
Director: John Waters
Director of Photography: David Insley
Art Director:
Vincent Peranio
Costumes and Make-up: Van Smith
Assistant Director,
Casting: Pat Moran
Associate Producer: Sara Risher
Line Producer,
Production Manager: Robert Maier
Lyrics: Deborah Harry
Vocals: Tab
Hunter, Bill Murray, Michael Kamen
TRANSFER
This new digital
transfer of Polyester, in its original 1.85: 1 aspect ratio, was made
from the 35mm interpositive and original three-track mono 35mm magnetic tracks.