Female Trouble · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl asks for cha-cha heels for Christmas. She doesn't get them. She walks out of the house that morning and never comes back.

Everything Female Trouble is going to do is already in that. Look at what it isn't: a decision. Dawn Davenport weighs nothing. A want arrives, it's refused, a life goes off the edge. Over the next ninety minutes she'll do plenty: get pregnant in a junkyard, marry a hairdresser, model, steal, kill. Not one of those acts improves her position by an inch. Each one drops her a floor.

That shape has a name, and it isn't the one you'd expect for a comedy shot around Baltimore for about twenty-five thousand dollars.

Most movies, in Deleuze's account, run on the action-image: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, the situation changes. Western, thriller, biopic, all of it. Waters never closes that circuit once. What he films instead is the impulse-image — Deleuze's term for cinema driven by appetite rather than choice, the form he traced through Stroheim and Buñuel. Naturalism in the strict sense. Not grit. Raw drive erupting through the social surface, on a line that only slopes down.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because the usual defenses of Waters stop at attitude. Camp, transgression, bad taste rehabilitated as good taste. Sontag's camp is failed seriousness enjoyed for its failure, and that doesn't cover this film, because Divine isn't failing at anything; the dossier is right that this is a performance and not a stunt. Those readings tell you how the film feels. They can't tell you why it has a shape, and this one has a rigorous shape.

Deleuze says a naturalist film gives you two worlds at once. There's the derived milieu, the real dated located place. And there's the originary world showing through it, a place with no manners in it, only drives. Vincent Peranio's sets are exactly that doubling: built from a precise reading of lower-middle-class American décor, then pushed one degree into hallucination. The Davenport living room at Christmas. The Lipstick Beauty Salon. The trailer. You could price the furniture. You can also see that it's a cave.

The heels are what Deleuze calls the fetish — the part-object torn out of the world and charged past all proportion to itself. Not a symbol of anything. Dawn wants them the way an animal wants. The entire causal chain of the film hangs off a pair of shoes, which is funny for about four seconds and then stops being funny.

Deleuze's word for the time of the impulse-image is entropy: the line of slope, the descent that doesn't reverse. Waters found the funniest available form for it, which is the career montage. Charles Roggero, the first credited editor Waters worked with, cuts the film in elliptical jumps of years, and every cut hands you Dawn already further gone. Married. Scarred. Famous. Condemned. A criminal life at the clip of a wire-service summary. The joke is the speed of the fall, and the speed is a formal decision, not an accident of a cheap shoot.

An impulse-image usually ends in mute degradation. This one ends in an argument. That's the Dashers, the salon owners who take Dawn up and hand her a theory: crime is beauty. Once that sentence is in the film, the descent turns into something Deleuze cared about far more, the powers of the false.

The idea is simpler than it sounds. We normally judge an image against something outside it that settles whether it's true. Deleuze argued that cinema's real power runs the other way. The interesting films make truth undecidable and then produce with it, and their characteristic figure is the forger, who doesn't copy a real thing but manufactures a new criterion. Dawn is a forger of exactly that kind. She isn't lying. She invents the standard under which she is a major artist, and Waters never supplies a camera position from which to correct her.

He does the opposite. In the Dashers' photo sessions he shoots Divine the way a magazine would, flat glamour lighting and posed attitudes, so the film's own image-making joins the conspiracy. Deleuze calls this a crystalline description: an image that composes its object and then replaces it. After those photographs there is no Dawn underneath the picture of Dawn. The star biography and the tabloid make the same promise, that this happened, and Waters runs that promise at full volume over a career with nothing behind it.

The clearest statement of the whole conceit is a gag. Divine also plays Earl Peterson, so the star has sex with himself in a junkyard, so Dawn's origin is Dawn.

Which brings in the concept Deleuze reserved for political cinema: fabulation, people caught in the act of legending themselves. He found it in documentary, in filmmakers shooting minorities who had no representation and were inventing their own. Female Trouble may be its purest fiction case. The film opens on Divine singing the title song, the star performing her own myth before the story starts, and ends with her executed by her fans. Dreamland was a company of Baltimore friends playing amplified versions of themselves on 16mm, with nobody coming to represent them. Deleuze's phrase is that the people are missing. You don't wait for that people. You make it up on camera at maximum volume.

The making-up is visible in the bodies. Waters' camera sits frontal, waist to head, planted. Performers face the lens as though on a proscenium. Entrances are made; positions are announced rather than revealed. That's tableau, not blocking, and Deleuze's word for it is the gest — the posture that lays a social relation out flat instead of acting it. Van Smith's design on Divine is the argument in physical form: the hairline shaved back so the forehead becomes canvas, the drawn brows, the architectural hair, and finally the acid-scarred face with its vertical crest. Waters holds shots past comfort so the performances curdle. The duration lands in the body, which is where this film keeps its meaning.

None of it came from nowhere. Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures had already proven that makeup, wigs and drapery could replace production design outright on scavenged 16mm; Van Smith and Peranio turned that into a system around one star. Anger's Scorpio Rising replaced the score with pop 45s as an ironic commentary track, which is why this film has no composer and opens on a song. Morrissey's Trash supplied the shooting economy: planted camera, scene-length takes, a zoom where a funded film would dolly. Russ Meyer wrote the register, hard-boiled dialogue delivered at maximum volume by women framed to look architectural, and Dawn talks in it. H. G. Lewis's Blood Feast is where atrocity gets staged frontally in a static wide so it reads as tableau, amateur line readings left unsmoothed. Baby Jane is the design premise, caked pancake and penciled brows on a fallen showbiz woman, which Van Smith pushes to its terminal point.

Waters' own invention sits in the seam. The underground used the planted camera because improvisation needs room. He aimed it at a fully written screenplay with a three-act shape and hired an editor, and that is why Female Trouble holds as a movie instead of as a document of a scene. What followed depended on it. New Line Cinema, then a small outfit booking campuses and repertory houses, was made viable partly by Pink Flamingos, and this film went into the same circuit. Waters wasn't outside the industry. He ran a parallel one, fluently.

One honest note, since the temptation here is enormous: Dawn's final look precedes the consolidation of punk's visual vocabulary in London by roughly two years. That's parallel discovery from shared sources, not descent, and saying so is more interesting than a false claim of paternity.

The last turn is one the film would enjoy. For decades Female Trouble existed as battered prints and bad tape, and for most of its audience that degradation was the look. Criterion's 2018 restoration, supervised by Waters, resolves the image far past anything the midnight crowd ever saw. So which is the real film, the one that looked like evidence of a crime or the one that looks like art? Dawn Davenport would have an answer, and it would be the wrong one, and the movie has never once told us she's wrong.

Watch it again for the moments where Divine isn't doing the joke — where Dawn is simply, unbearably proud of her work. Then notice that the film declines to disagree.