Female Trouble

Female Trouble is the highlight not only of the early underground phase of Waters’s career, but actually of his entire filmography. In the film, Waters takes on a variety of classic women’s roles found in Hollywood popcorn flicks, e.g. rebellious schoolgirls, exemplary mothers taking care of their families and their own beauty, suffering heroines of heart-breaking melodramas about women who have gone astray. We could almost say that he cut out his own version of Sullivan’s Travels. However, his aggregate of classical Hollywood genres and conservative ideals is not self-adoringly affected by them, but it rather enhances them with a Waters’s typically campy queer trash-chic optics. He deforms and disfigures them into a boisterously hedonistic form, while revealing the atrociousness and absurdity of the original concepts through caustic jokes. Waters’s gang perversely appropriates and delightfully desecrates the degenerate phenomena of beauty ideals and the myth of stardom, from which they build their own monument to infectiously likable ugliness, tastelessness and perverse hedonism. Standing dominantly at its peak is the phenomenal Divine. Though she is spectacular and magnificent in every film, this one gives her the role of her life. And not just because Female Trouble allowed her a drag/straight dual role and a scene in which she has sex with herself on a urine-soaked mattress in a gutter. (18.03.2023)