Raging Waters

When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can drive you in in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today's market-driven context. In fact, for the first half hour or so of Cecil, it's hard not to reflexively evaluate it in terms of the guidelines both critics and audiences have been trained to follow: "This isn't going to make much money, because it's not likely to appeal to anyone other than John Waters fans, but it cost so little that Artisan isn't taking much of a risk in backing it."

But then came the scene in which it's revealed that the members of the terrorist group, whose kidnapping of a middle-range movie star sparks the action, have had the names of their favorite film directors tattooed on their arms. It's a joke, of course, but a serious one. For tattooing the names of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini -- artists whose lives and works Waters reveres -- on your body, is no simple fashion statement: Films such as In a Year of 13 Moons, Salo, and, by extension, Cecil B. Demented, are antithetical to everything currently called "the movies." And to support them is a kind of terrorist act.

Shot on location in Waters' beloved Baltimore, Cecil B. Demented is a return to the sort of movie he hasn't really made since Desperate Living. Melanie Griffith may be the star, but the writer-director treats her no differently than the 300-pound transvestite named Divine with whom he started. In other words, Griffith gets more serious respect from Waters than she has been afforded in her career to date. Cast as Honey Whitlock, an actress whose once-blossoming career is beginning to edge toward the skids (why else would she be doing publicity in Baltimore?), Griffith is redolent with temperament -- something that Waters, like no director since Visconti, fully appreciates. Bored, anxious, and jumpy as hell, she demands that her much-abused personal assistant (Waters-discovery-turned-talk-show-phenom Ricki Lake) find out whether Pat Nixon "got fucked" in the presidential suite of the hotel where she's staying. No, it's not a serious question. She just wants to see people jump through hoops for her.

Yet on another level it's perfectly serious; she's ripe and ready for trouble. Consequently, when members of the "Sprocket Holes Gang" -- a terrorist outfit led by a young man (Stephen Dorff) calling himself Cecil B. Demented (the name a Waters critic slapped on him way back when) -- kidnap Honey and force her to be in their movie (a seemingly endless project in which the relationship between off-screen and on- has been permanently erased), her secret dreams come true. Her inner anarchist is unleashed, and this in turn opens onto another region of Waters legend -- his friendship with Patricia Hearst.

In 1974, Hearst, the granddaughter of legendary newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a self-styled radical terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was then subjected to brainwashing techniques -- which included her being forced to spend more than 50 days in a closet and then to rob a bank with her S.L.A. "comrades" -- that left her as malleable as putty. Not helping matters was the FBI's placing Hearst, who had no political affiliations or activities prior to the kidnapping, on its Most Wanted list. So she went into hiding. When finally found, she went on trial for grand theft and was convicted; she served almost two years of a seven-year term and was released with help from President Jimmy Carter. However, this was merely a commutation of her sentence, and to this day Patricia Hearst Shaw (she married her postordeal bodyguard, Bernard Shaw) has been seeking a full pardon.

John Waters entered the picture in 1988 when he met Hearst at the Cannes Film Festival, where director Paul Schrader's film of her account of the ordeal, Patty Hearst, premiered. Striking up a friendship with Waters, Hearst went on to appear in his Cry Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, and now Cecil B. Demented -- where she plays the worried mother of one of the Sprocket Holes Gang.

You might say Cecil B. Demented is Waters' way of answering the undoubtedly perpetual query "What's Patty Hearst really like?" and its inevitable follow-up, "Do you think she was brainwashed or was she in on the whole thing from the beginning?" And to judge from this film, Waters is resolutely noncommittal on both questions. Hearst is certainly more normal than Griffith's Honey Whitlock. Yet in telling Honey's story, Waters can't help but project all America's secret fantasy: that Hearst had indeed turned in revolt against her class. Moreover, the Sprocket Holes Gang has a lot more going for it than the S.L.A. ever did. Striking a revolutionary blow for movies makes a lot of sense in a culture where theatrical release is little more than a springboard to video sales and rental -- the ultimate destination of all audiovisual experience today. So anyone trying to buck this tide becomes a sort of terrorist.