Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Desperate Living
1977 · John Waters · Desperate Living on Sightlines
Edith Massey sits on a throne in a town made of garbage, wearing something that is trying very hard to be regalia, and cackles. The light on her is the same light that's on everything else in the shot: hard, even, unhelpful, the flat exposure of cheap 16mm with nowhere to hide. Nothing is softened. You can see the seams in the costume. You can see that the crown is junk. Waters photographs his queen the way a police photographer photographs a room — get it all in, light it flat, don't editorialize.
Storybook content, evidence-photo technique. That gap is the film, and it is why a French philosopher who never heard of John Waters turns out to be good company here. Desperate Living does not look like a movie that needs theory. It looks like a movie that would find theory hilarious. But there is a shape under the filth, and shock alone doesn't explain it.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze cuts a category loose between two others. There's the affection-image, where a feeling registers on a face and goes nowhere. There's the action-image, where a person sizes up a situation and does something that changes it. Between them he puts the impulse-image: cinema of pure drive. Appetite, compulsion, degradation. Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey. What defines it is two worlds stacked on each other. On top, the derived milieu — a recognizable social setting with furniture and manners and someone to do the cleaning. Underneath, showing through, the originary world, which isn't really a place. It's a condition: a swamp, a desert, a heap of refuse, where nobody is a person and everything is a drive fastened to a part-object.
Deleuze's naturalists have to make you glimpse that world through the cracks in the first one. Waters skips the glimpsing. He builds it out of scavenged trash on a piece of Maryland and moves the cast in. Mortville is the originary world, literally a heap of refuse, and the plot is the shortest possible version of Deleuze's structure: after a killing in a bourgeois house, a matron and her maid flee out of the derived milieu and into the savage one. Nothing gets revealed. They just drive there, and the movie goes with them.
Mink Stole's Peggy Gravel is what Deleuze means by a symptom. Naturalism doesn't give characters choices; it gives them tells. Peggy shrieks, recoils, phobically catalogues her disgusts, and kills — and none of it reads as decision. Stole pitches the performance well past naturalism on purpose, in the camp-overstatement register the Dreamland company had been building since Female Trouble, and the overstatement is the analysis. Peggy has no interior. She has a class, converted into a nervous system. Around her the appetites get more literal: disease, mutilation, hunger that goes as far as eating people. Part-objects, charged and consumed.
Which brings us to the thing Waters actually invented. Deleuze's rule for the impulse-image is the line of slope: entropy, and it only runs one way. The drive eats its world and dies in it. Greed ends in the desert. Los Olvidados ends on a garbage heap. Waters runs his slope all the way to the floor, and then turns it. Degradation doesn't exhaust Mortville — it arms it. The film ends on the oppressed rising against the monstrous ruler and winning, which is not the nihilism Pink Flamingos went out on five years earlier. He took the most fatalistic structure in the movement-image and gave it an insurrection. That's a change to a form, not a change of mood.
And he had to build a people to do the rising, because there wasn't one. Late Deleuze, writing on political cinema: the people are missing. A minor cinema can't presuppose a unified people to speak for, so it has to invent one, through fabulation — subjects caught in the act of legending themselves. Waters got the method from the Factory. The Chelsea Girls had shown how to build a film out of non-professional "superstars" playing amplified versions of themselves in front of a static frontal camera, and Morrissey's Trash had shown how to frame abject bodies deadpan and let a milieu of outcasts hold the screen. Waters casts friends and local eccentrics and writes toward who they already are: Massey's untrained glee, Susan Lowe's near-earnest conviction as Mole, Liz Renay's real underworld notoriety folded into Muffy. The performers legend themselves; the film assembles a people out of the legending; the people revolt. By the end the citizenry acts as one body, a dividual — a crowd that functions as a single unit of feeling.
The staging serves this. Frontal, theatrical, closer to a lewd pageant than to blocking, with Charles Roggero's cutting holding each gross-out long enough for its full effrontery to land. That's the attraction-image: Eisenstein's montage of attractions, the staged provocation aimed straight at the audience instead of at the story, shocks kept and the dialectics thrown out. And the costumes are gests — Carlotta's regalia, Mole's leather butch iconography — postures that wear a social relation on the outside, so class and desire are readable before anyone opens their mouth.
The theory that isn't Deleuze matters here too. Bazin argued that the honest image preserves the ambiguity of the real, that the camera's job is to bear witness. Waters keeps every part of that contract — flat light, frontal camera, long enough holds, the grain of 16mm — and aims it at material that is manifestly fake. He inherited each piece by name: the wild-recorded, post-dubbed sound over static takes from Multiple Maniacs, the anti-glamour flat lighting that renders the grotesque as deadpan document from Pink Flamingos, the glitter-and-rags junk design from Flaming Creatures. Documentary technique, documenting something that was never there.
New Line pushed it into the midnight circuit with an X on it, and what went forward was not the gags. It was the proof that you can make political cinema from people the culture has discarded, for no money, with a camera that doesn't flatter anyone, and that camp is an argument rather than a joke. Watch it again for one thing: the exact point where the slope stops going down. Everything Waters did after depends on that turn.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — The film runs on appetite and compulsion rather than decision: murder, disease, mutilation and cannibalism escalate by cartoon logic, with the emotional pitch held at hysteria throughout.
- originary-world — Mortville is a fetid shantytown built by hand from scavenged garbage, a literal heap of refuse where the citizenry exists as drives in costume rather than as persons.
- derived-milieu — The bourgeois household of Peggy Gravel and her maid Grizelda — manners, class, servants — which the pair flee after a killing, crossing directly into Mortville.
- symptom — Mink Stole plays Peggy Gravel as a spectacle of bourgeois hysteria — shrieking, phobic, homicidally fragile — in a register deliberately pitched past naturalism, so her acts read as class-tells rather than choices.
- fetish — The editing holds on the escalating gross-out setpieces long enough to register their full effrontery — bodily part-objects (mutilation, disease, cannibalism) charged and consumed for themselves.
- entropy / degradation — The naturalist descent into squalor and death runs its full course, but Waters turns it: the film builds toward collective uprising and closes on insurgent triumph rather than the nihilism of Pink Flamingos.
- attraction-image — Staging is theatrical and frontal, 'closer to a lewd pageant than to naturalist blocking,' with Roggero's cutting letting each transgression play out fully — provocation addressed to the audience rather than acted into the plot.
- the-gest — Queen Carlotta's absurd regalia and Mole McHenry's leather butch iconography, shot in harsh even light that exposes every seam — costume as posture that exposes a class and gender relation.
- story-telling / legending — The Dreamland repertory method inherited from The Chelsea Girls: non-professionals performing amplified versions of themselves before a static frontal camera — Edith Massey's untrained strangeness, Liz Renay's real underworld notoriety folded into Muffy.
- people-are-missing — Mortville is a penal colony of criminals and queer outlaws with no pre-existing collective; the film assembles an explicitly queer, class-conscious populace out of local eccentrics and then films it rising against Carlotta.
- dividual — The oppressed citizenry of Mortville, staged as grotesque tableaux in medium and full shots, converges into a single insurgent body for the revolution against the Queen.