Multiple Maniacs (John Waters, 1970)

 

A classic Dreamland production that somehow had managed to pass me by, Multiple Maniacs may just be Waters’ true masterpiece. Unlike Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble, where Divine’s characters are driven by perhaps overly-cartoonish grandiose ambitions of infamy and depravity, Maniacs‘ incarnation of Lady Divine has her pettiness and hyperbole balance one another out to the point that her motivations seem typically, dare I say, reasonable?

Early enough in Waters’ career for his influences still to shine through, the spectator is able – encouraged, even, to pick up on references to Jack Smith, Buñuel, Pasolini; the cinematography’s roaming imperfections, in relation to sporadic yet vital use of post-production overhead narration allows the aesthetic to range from genuine vérité to a semi-neorealist Flaming Creatures. Consequently perhaps, although Multiple Maniacs clearly intends to shock, disturb and disgust, its portrayal of sexuality borders at times on the legitimately erotic.

Coming closest therefore to addressing the Dreamlanders’ actual desires, it is unsurprising that Maniacs effectively represents their actual principles, too, before they become refracted into different characters in later films. At the heart of Multiple Maniacs‘ philosophy is the celebration of family, however alternative it may be, and, accordingly, that the greatest sin of all is betrayal. Pink Flamingos addresses the same issues of protection of an alternative family structure, but the threatening forces are external tribalist animosity. Polyester recognises the internal threat of betrayal, but within a bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family. Multiple Maniacs‘ power stems in many ways from its reflection on the need for unity within queer social relations, to such an extent that its prolonged jump-cut sequence between Divine and Mink’s “rosary job” and Jesus, first feeding the “5000,” and then being given the kiss of death by Judas, and his inevitable crucifixion, cannot be interpreted purely as simple sacrilege. Instead, this is Waters himself engaging with the parabolic.

Considering the motley crew of reprobates involved in this and practically all productions of Waters’, Multiple Maniacs is the perfect love letter to what was to come.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

I don’t really like Darren Aronofsky. Requiem For a Dream is a bad and manipulative film that doesn’t represent any aspect of the phenomenology of addiction well in the slightest, Black Swan is just… awful. The Wrestler is good, but that’s almost entirely based on its performances. So I was surprised to walk out of mother! thinking to myself “that was…pretty good!”

I went into the screening as cold as possible and I want to afford that same ability to readers who have not yet seen mother! so I’ll keep things vague as possible and avoid a synopsis and just dive right in.

Perhaps the most chronologically theological aspect of mother!is not the litany of (one might suggest rather too) legible parallels to some of the Bible’s greatest hits. Rather, it is the fact that, when we begin, we are continuously offended by His words and actions, but soon enough find ourselves increasingly offended, as the film progresses, by His passivity, His silence, and His absence. Indeed, when The Shit Starts Going Down, despite the fact it’s supposedly all for Him, He is largely nowhere to be found. This is not an accident, but a decidedly conscious, and surprisingly balanced, perspective on God’s place within religious violence: it is not His doing, and he cannot necessarily help how people respond to His works, but its continuation is His inaction and for that He can be blamed.

Is mother! a subtle film? No. Aronofsky is not a subtle man. Is mother! a clever film? Also no; he’s not much of a clever man, either. mother!‘s philosophy is ultimately entirely stunted by the fact it appeals to the affective horror of anthropocentrism via the means of anthropomorphism and, consequently, can only display its disgust at humanity by rendering Mother Earth human. Intellectually speaking, this is a fairly unforgivable gaffe that cannot help but hollow the foundation of the film’s premise, to an extent that many critics have ended up taking a surprisingly literal interpretation of the film. In which case, one may consider mother! to be a welcome take on heterosexual age-gap relationships which would never normally raise an eyebrow in any other Hollywood film. Trouble for certain other, more negative, reviews is: Lawrence and Aronofsky have a real-life relationship of exactly the same difference as she and Bardem. Trouble for me is: Javier Bardem is ridiculously hot and, even if I had a problem with age-gaps (which I don’t), I would put pretty much every principle on hold were he a legitimate candidate for my affections. Honestly, though, I think it’s pretty rich for right-on discourse lovers who preach constantly about “self-crit” to then turn around and sneer at what one might well consider to be self-crit in action.
The framing, composition, camera work, acting and editing manage to achieve effects that would typically be considered mutually exclusive: mother! comes across as finely tuned yet campy, nasty yet affecting, jagged yet smooth. Certainly there are nods to Aronofsky’s precious efforts: the giallo-deferent glamorous archetypal villainy of Black Swan, the pseudo-documentarian camera style of The Wrestler, obviously the Genesis meditation of Noah, but perhaps most strikingly the swift subjective-universal (there’s those oxymorons again) degeneration of Requiem For a Dream. And yet, it still feels new. Well, it feels new for Aronofsky; not for cinema. The swift degeneration makes me want to compare it favourably to High-Rise though, yet again, I am reminded of We are the Flesh and its absolute brilliance. The most affective personal and successful theological aspects make me want to watch it as the middle film in a triple film, following Queen of Earth and preceding Hard to Be a God, though I feel like that might only reveal mother!‘s flaws all the more starkly. Nevertheless, it’s pleasant to come out of a film by such a crushingly basic-ass underarm-serving chin-stroker as Aronofsky and think that he may have actually made something interesting for once in his damn life.

 

⭐⭐⭐1/2