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Cecil B. DeMented
Directed by John Waters
With Stephen Droff, Melanie Griffith.
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There is no doubt that John Waters has an incredible knack for hitting that queer, ironic cultural nerve. From Pink Flamingo, with its scornfully celebratory vision of white trash life, to Polyester's skewering of middle-class norms, to Serial Mom's dissection of female maternal perfection, he had his finger on the ever weakening pulse of US culture. And certainly the idea of his new film Cecil B. DeMented is great: its eponymous hero (Stephen Droff) is a mostly insane, independent filmmaker who heads a cult of movie mavens called the Sprocket Holes, bent on destroying Hollywood and promoting their own radical brand of art. They live in an abandoned old 1930s grand movie palace and have dedicated their lives to destroying bourgeois art and shocking middle-class sensibilities. Cecil's master plan is to kidnap fading Hollywood starlet Holly Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) and force her to be in his new movie which, in true cinema verité, will be filmed in a series of planned guerilla theater events. The joke is, of course, that after some resistance Holly sees the error of her ways and becomes a full-fledged member of the Sprocket Holes, happily participating when Demented and crew crash a city-sponsored luncheon for Hollywood bigwigs, or disrupt a screening of mainstream schlock like Patch Adams: The Director's Cut. Demented, as true an activist as he is an artist, means business, and Sprocket Holes's guns are as loaded as their cameras. In the end, Honey becomes-- literally-- the flaming goddess she has always wanted to be.

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If this sounds great on paper it is. The problem is that it's just not that interesting on film. There are a handful of jokes that pay off-- along with some throwaway lines, parts of Griffith's bitch persona, the occasional demented glint in Stephen Droff's eyes. But for the most part, Cecile B. DeMented feels like an 88-minute movie that should have been an eight-minute skit on Saturday Night Live. What went wrong?

In the early and mid-1970s, John Waters was the great hope of a daring, dada-esque school of American movie-making that took chances, pushed boundaries, and gave offense. This was a historical moment when audiences who wanted alternatives to traditional Hollywood cinema could turn to foreign directors like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luciano Visconte. Even within the Hollywood system, people like Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, and Richard Lester were making exciting, "non-Hollywood" movies. What Waters brought to the table was a huge "fuck you"-- bad taste, sloppy editing, low production values, often horrid acting: all carefully arranged so as best to outrage good taste. More important, Waters actually began to say something. When Dawn Davenport (Divine) in Female Trouble holds her audience hostage at gunpoint in the end of the film ands demands to know, "Are you willing to die for art?" we knew that Waters was in complete comprehension of the interplay between art and audience. Even after Waters went more Hollywood-- a thought that would never have crossed his mind in 1970s-- in films like Hairspray (1988), he still had something to say without losing his basic thematic structure of "Us vs. Them," "Rebels vs. Society."

That is why Cecil B. DeMented so disappoints, for while the basic theme is still there, it's a structure supporting almost nothing. Early John Waters films work because-- as much as he wouldn't ever say it, or make it a big deal-- they had moral integrity. He understood that mainstream culture-- from sex roles, to the idea of good taste, to commercialized art-- was vacant and corrupt. Now in Cecil B. DeMented, he has strayed from that vision. While ostensibly it is still Radicals vs. Bourgeoisie, nothing really matters very much.

Cecil and his crew seem as supercilious and pointless as their "corrupt" antagonistic Hollywood counterparts. Even Waters's choice of satire seems lame. Making fun of Hollywood with Patch Adams: The Director's Cut is far too easy, sloppy to the point of embarrassment. The old John Waters knew how to push buttons: exactly who here is he trying to offend? Robin Williams? An edgier choice would have been a mean, wicked parody of Life is Beautiful or even Boys Don't Cry.

The problem is not so much that Waters has "gone Hollywood" but that he has fallen back on Hollywood's own tried tricks and clichés. His casting of Melanie Griffith mimics traditional Hollywood casting against, or aggressively with, type (Liz Taylor as the aging Martha in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf; Bette Davis as an aging star in All About Eve). And his use of Eric Roberts or Ricki Lake (who made such a hit in Hairspray) is no longer the daring move it might have seemed when Tab Hunter was the romantic lead (against Divine) in Polyester. Even his conceptual casting feels worn and tired. Casting Patty Hearst in Serial Mom seemed funny and apt-- here was an icon from the 1970s whose crazy life-history seemed to embody the insane contradictions of politics and celebrity (today's heiress is tomorrow's revolutionary is tomorrow's pop star). But the use of Hearst here has no meaning. This is shocking given the fact that the basic plot of Cecil B. DeMented is based upon Hearst's life and kidnapping. But Waters-- who has been so perceptive in the past about using life to explicate art and vice verse-- wastes his chances here. Nothing pushes our buttons, nothing shocks, or even makes us think.

There is, though, a playful feeling here that's been emerging in Waters's films over the past decade, and his attitudes toward sexuality-- and homosexuality-- are friendlier and more erotic. The boys are cute and there are more overt gay characters and sexuality than we usually find in Waters's films, but the jokes are silly. A character named Fidget (Eric M. Barry) keeps playing with his dick; Lyle (Adrian Grenier) is a straight boy in love with a gay man and suffering for it because he can't get over his heterosexuality. Even the porn parody featuring Cecil's girlfriend, a porn actress named Cherish (Alicia Witt) features gerbils crawling over her butt-- old cable-TV material. In the end, Cecil and his troupe make their statement against Hollywood and are destroyed for it, even as Honey redeems herself and her art. The problem is that Waters doesn't have any real statement and, alas, is also destroyed for it. Having hit the bottom of the artistic barrel, maybe Waters can retrench, go into revolt again and-- like Cecil B. DeMented-- dedicate himself to making us squirm in our seats in discomfort and pleasure.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com