Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Female Trouble
1976 · John Waters · Female Trouble on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 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
Watch how flatly and directly the camera faces each performer. (camera)
Waters shoots frontal, waist to head, centered and symmetrical, as if every actor were standing on a small stage built just for the lens.
Payoff: The plainness of the camera makes every outrageous thing in front of it look presented, not caught.
Notice Divine's shaved-back hairline and sprayed, architectural hair. (setting)
Van Smith turns the forehead into a canvas and builds the hair like a piece of set design, changing Dawn's look across the film's decades.
Payoff: The makeup itself tells the story of who Dawn is becoming, scene by scene.
Notice how ordinary and lower-middle-class each set actually is. (setting)
Peranio builds the Davenport living room and the beauty salon from a precise reading of everyday décor, then pushes it one degree into hallucination.
Payoff: You could price the furniture in these rooms, and something is still deeply off about all of them.
Listen for source records instead of any traditional film score. (sound)
The film runs entirely on needle drops and a title song performed by Divine, with voices recorded close and pitched louder than any realist film would allow.
Payoff: The star sings her own myth before the story even starts, which is the whole film in thirty seconds.
Watch Divine play a teenager's petulance with complete sincerity. (performance)
Nothing in the performance winks at the audience, and that unbroken sincerity is what lets the comedy come from the arrangement of the scene instead of a joke.
Payoff: The film never lets Dawn know she's funny, and that's exactly why she is.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Dawn wants, not what she does with it. The wanting is the engine of everything after.