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.
Once you have seen it
Track every choice Dawn makes against how much worse her life gets. (structure)
She gets pregnant, marries, models, steals, kills, and not one of these acts improves her position; each one drops her a floor.
Payoff: The film runs entirely downhill, and every scene is another step of the same descent. In the reading: entropy / degradation. Deleuze calls this the line of slope, a descent that never reverses no matter what the character does.
Watch the cha-cha heels Dawn wanted for Christmas cause everything after. (setting)
One refused pair of shoes sends her out the door and the entire causal chain of the film hangs off that single object.
Payoff: A pair of shoes carries the weight an entire plot usually needs many scenes to build. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls this a fetish, an object torn out of the world and charged past all proportion.
Watch the Dashers argue that crime and beauty are the same act. (structure)
Once that idea enters the film, Dawn stops merely falling and starts inventing the standard by which her own fall counts as art.
Payoff: Nobody in the film ever supplies a position from which to correct her, so her invented standard stands. In the reading: le faussaire. Deleuze calls a character like this the forger, someone who invents a new criterion of truth rather than lying within an old one.
Watch the years jump forward with no dissolve or warning between them. (structure)
Roggero cuts across elliptical gaps of years, and each new scene presents Dawn already transformed, further along her own decline.
Payoff: The speed of the cuts makes her whole criminal career feel like a wire-service summary of a life.
Carry this in: Watch what Dawn wants, not what she does with it. The wanting is the engine of everything after.