Hairspray · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Look at the hair first. Waters does. A beehive lacquered into a tower that could take a punch, shot dead-on and centered, the girl underneath squared to the lens like she's posing for a class photo. Van Smith built those hairdos as freestanding sculpture and David Insley lit them flat and bright, television light, nowhere to hide. Before a word of plot arrives, Hairspray has told you its whole social system through hair. Who has the biggest, and who sprayed it, is a complete account of where a person stands in Baltimore in 1963.

That frontality isn't a period gag Waters picked up for his first PG movie. It's the grammar of Pink Flamingos: the Dreamlanders squared to a flat rear plane, head-on, long-ish takes, minimal coverage, hair framed like statuary. He walked into New Line Cinema with the underground's compositions still in his hands and never set them down. What changed was the target.

Here is where Deleuze becomes useful rather than decorative. He takes a word from Brecht — the gest — for a posture that gives away the social arrangement holding it up. Not a symbol you decode. A body doing what the world requires of it, in public, where the requirement becomes visible. The Corny Collins Show dance floor is a machine for producing gests. It is a bounded arena, staged as a proscenium, in which the hierarchy of a city is literally choreographed: who dances in front, who dances behind, whose body is telegenic, and whose body may only dance on "Negro Day." Segregation in this film is not an opinion anyone holds. It's a blocking diagram. Which is why integrating the show requires no argument, only a reblocking — put the excluded bodies on the same floor on the same afternoon and the diagram breaks.

Janice Hampton's cutting is where this stops being a nice idea. She cuts the numbers on the beat of the source records and never fragments the choreography into the shredded montage that later musicals would default to. Dances stay legible as dances. Bodies stay whole inside the frame. In a movie about a fat girl the culture wants cropped out, keeping the body entire in the shot is the politics, and it costs nothing at the script level. A Deleuzian reading earns its keep exactly here: it tells you why a modest decision in an editing room is the film's central claim.

Around Tracy, the teen ensemble massed frontally and cut on the downbeat behaves as one thing, a single affective unit rather than a group of individuals. Deleuze calls that a dividual. Waters inherits the technique wholesale from the AIP beach cycle, where teen bodies existed as decorative mass. The difference is what he does with it: the crowd is the conformity, and Tracy's whole arc is the business of separating out of it while staying inside it.

The numbers themselves are self-contained blocks, performance staged flat to camera and dropped into the comedy, the structural model being The Girl Can't Help It. Deleuze has a name for images that figure a conflict instead of enacting it: the attraction-image, the staged spectacle that carries the argument. Waters wins on staging. The soundtrack is Black R&B, the exact records white teenagers bought while their parents lobbied to keep the performers off the air. Every needle drop plays that contradiction without a single character having to name it.

And we are always watching people watch. The film keeps cutting to families at home in front of the set, and borrows the show's own camera positions, so the TV frame sits inside the movie frame with the seam showing. Deleuze's dicisign is perception squared: the camera perceiving somebody who is perceiving, so you feel the apparatus. In a city where one local channel dictated what every teenager wore and danced and wanted, that inner frame isn't a formal flourish. It's the actual instrument of power the plot attacks. Change what's inside it and you change the street.

Color does the feeling. Turquoise, hot pink, lemon, pushed past documentary plausibility into candy, absorbing scenes rather than describing them — Deleuze's affective color, the hue that takes in the whole situation. Waters cited Imitation of Life as the template, and what transfers from Sirk isn't the irony. It's the refusal to wink while playing a race plot in full Technicolor conviction. Camp usually buys distance. Polyester had already tested whether Divine could play a housewife straight instead of as burlesque. Hairspray completes the experiment: artifice at full volume, sincerity at full volume, no protective irony in between.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because Deleuze's prestige runs the other way. This is a movement-image film, uncut and unembarrassed. Large form: an encompassing situation presses on everyone in it, and a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze reserves his admiration for the modern cinema of people who can no longer act, who can only look. Waters goes the opposite direction, and it's a choice, not a shortfall. By 1988 the sincere action-image was the one instrument the American underground had thrown away. He picked it up, aimed it at segregation, and made the transformative act a dance.

Then there's Divine, playing Edna Turnblad and also Arvin Hodgepile, the racist station owner — the dual-role gag Female Trouble invented, with Van Smith's makeup engineering the split. In 1974 the doubling was a provocation. In 1988 it's a gest of its own: the same body plays the woman the culture has no use for and the man who runs the culture. Divine died on March 7, 1988, weeks after release. The valediction was nobody's plan.

So: can a film be this cheerful about something this ugly? The win comes easy, and the plot hands it over almost before Tracy notices she's asking for it. But Waters had watched a real teen dance show run his city's taste from 1957 to 1964, and his argument is that culture turns when the pictures turn. That's what makes Hairspray count as an event in the art: proof that an outsider's grammar — flat, frontal, sculpted, broad — could carry a wide-release civil-rights comedy without being sanded down first. It's the film that made Cry-Baby and a Universal budget possible.

Watch it again and watch the back of the frame. Waters put the whole argument there, in who's allowed to stand in front.