Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Desperate Living
1977 · John Waters · Desperate Living on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the lighting stay flat and harsh in every scene. (light)
Waters lights Mortville and its citizens with the same even, unflattering 16mm light throughout, exposing every seam of costume and set instead of hiding them.
Payoff: The flat light treats the grotesque like ordinary documentary fact, never dressing it up.
Watch characters pose frontally like a staged pageant. (staging)
Waters keeps arranging his cast frontally and theatrically, closer to a lewd stage show aimed right at you than to naturalistic blocking between people.
Payoff: The staging keeps announcing that you are the target of the joke, not a bystander to it.
Notice how much of Mortville is built from garbage. (setting)
The shantytown's houses, thrones, and costumes are visibly assembled from junk and scavenged material, never disguised as anything sturdier than what it actually is.
Payoff: The world looks exactly as cheap and improvised as the people who were forced to build it.
Watch Peggy Gravel react without ever seeming to decide anything. (performance)
Mink Stole plays her shrieking, phobic, and homicidal, pitched well past ordinary acting, so every outburst reads as reflex rather than a choice she is weighing.
Payoff: She plays a class of person converted into a set of tics, not a woman making decisions. In the reading: symptom. Deleuze calls a character whose behavior is all tell and no decision a symptom, which is exactly how Stole plays her.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the lighting and the junk. The film never dresses anything up.