Bodies, taste and pleasures: the cinema of John Waters
This thesis focuses on bodies, taste and pleasures in the films of John Waters. Through a textual analysis of the film texts, this thesis studies the bodies on screen, the cultural ramifications of their taste, and the place they occupy in the social world. I argue that Waters’ aesthetics of bad taste contain a joyous world of visual excess that upends hierarchies of distinction, parodying the categories of gender, race and class, and celebrating the dethroning of seriousness (Sontag 2018). Building on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, I read the body as a site imprinted by power and knowledge, regulated by gender and taste. By placing the body at the centre, I aim to re-evaluate the critical consensus around Waters’ cinema.
‘Pope of Trash’, ‘Prince of Puke’, and ‘People’s Pervert’ are some of the titles awarded to filmmaker John Waters, whose career has been studied as the paradigm of the cult auteur. This thesis aims to further the discussion of Waters’ cinema beyond the impasse of transgression. By granting similar importance to Waters’ underground, independent and Hollywood years, I expose the limits of the domestication discourse, which suggests that his late-career lost edge and got assimilated by the system (Levy 2015, Moon and Sedgwick 1994). Scrutinizing the critical points of proximity and distance between the earlier and later works, the thesis addresses the importance of laughter in Waters’ cinema and argues for the film’s running representation of queer utopia.
This thesis is organised thematically, albeit those themes order the films in almost chronological order. It examines the underground years1 and its grotesque world of cheap thrills; beauty, ugliness and the revolting woman; the strategy of queering suburbia; nostalgia and musical utopias; cult authorship and operations of taste. It concludes pondering Waters’ status in today’s American popular culture.
History
File Version
- Published version
Pages
293.0Department affiliated with
- Media and Film Theses
Qualification level
- doctoral
Qualification name
- phd
Language
- eng
Institution
University of SussexFull text available
- Yes