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.
Once you have seen it
Notice what Peggy and Grizelda flee from before reaching Mortville. (setting)
The film opens in a tidy bourgeois house and then drives its two women straight out of it into the junk-built shantytown, one world sitting directly on top of the other.
Payoff: Mortville is not a separate place. It is what was always underneath the tidy house. In the reading: originary-world. Deleuze calls the savage world beneath a respectable setting the originary world, and the film drives its heroines directly into it.
Notice how the film ends compared to Waters's earlier endings. (structure)
Instead of closing on pure degradation the way his earlier films had, this one builds toward the citizens of Mortville rising up together and actually winning against their ruler.
Payoff: The same downward slide that usually ends in ruin gets turned into a revolt that succeeds. In the reading: entropy / degradation. Deleuze's line of slope is an entropy that only runs downhill, and Waters is the rare case who turns that slope back upward.
Watch the citizens of Mortville move as one crowd by the end. (staging)
Individual outlaws and misfits who spent the film as separate grotesques start acting in unison once the uprising against Carlotta begins.
Payoff: A scattered cast of outcasts becomes a single political body right when it matters.
Carry this in: Watch for the exact point where the film's slide downward stops going down. Everything after depends on it.