Multiple Maniacs

By:
In-House Review - Apr 16 2009

The film Waters claimed "flushed religion out of my system" is so irredeemable that even describing it offends public standards of morality. But we'll try. A traveling carnival called "Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversions" lands in Baltimore and disrupts the lives of the creeps living there. We're treated to a junkie shooting up on a church altar, bearded transvestites, the semi-classic scene of Divine being by a 15-foot lobster, Stole's rosary beads, cannibalism, Kate Smith's rendition of "God Bless America" and, perhaps most disturbing of all, shots of downtown Baltimore.

By: Amos Lassen

In 1970, John Waters released "Multiple Maniacs" which now has been remastered and rereleased as part of the Criterion Collection. It stars Divine as the main attraction in a freak show called the Cavalcade of Perversion. The barker tells us that the Cavalcade also includes a " eater" and "two actual queers kissing each other like lovers on the lips," the barker exclaims. Some of the film's funniest moments occur when customers, fresh from Middle America, gawk at the sights and show their disapproval.

Divine's character, Lady Divine, is determined to kill her boyfriend (David Lochary); Mink Stole turns up in a memorably raunchy scene; and the giant lobster Lady Divine, completing her tumble over the edge of sanity. Waters has said the film was his reaction to the peace-and-love ethos, and it's certainly as ugly and dark as can be. The restoration is quite good, considering that the film was stored in a closet and then an attic for years. Once again we see John Waters' determination to push the boundaries of perceived decency and still today "Multiple Maniacs" is shocking. When it was first released it played at grimy midnight movie houses and they were the perfect places for a movie with its guerrilla style and transgressive content. Long considered lost, it was restored last year.
"'Multiple Maniacs" is a barnstorming swirl of rough and ready provocation" that is totally confrontational". The central narrative of Lady Divine plotting to kill her philandering man Mr. David is fairly incidental and in reality just gives a bare-boned skeleton for Waters to film a series of increasingly surreal sequences built around social taboos and religious preoccupations and rebels against a wide range of the social mores of the period. The film opens with a carnival like freak show.

Violence and mayhem tear down what were presiding notions of peace and love. We immediately sense Waters' fervor through clunky line delivery and awkward pacing hardly. More than forty-five years after it introduces Baltimore's underground scene and it sure to shock many. Treachery, perversion and murder in the criminal underworld come together and there are actually some comic moments of genius.
Divine plays the manager of Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversions, a traveling show that lures in punters with the promise that they will get to see all those disgusting things they love to be shocked by up real close and in the flesh. As the audience shows their loathing for the performers, they make their own hideousness a spectacle for the viewer.
Most of the film follows a revenge narrative as our fearsome anti-heroine as Divine discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her and vows to murder him. Stopping off along the way for a sexual encounter in a church with Mink Stole (a scene which both satirizes and outclasses the pornography of the time) and she becomes angrier at every turn, as it is revealed that she has a long history of committing gratuitous acts of violence. This is the first aggressive character Divine played and there's a rawness to it that hints at years of frustration finally unleashed.
There is a good deal of sexual violence, including an encounter with a lobster. Although the story is trashy and the characters never intended to be realistic, both Divine and Stole turn in committed performances that feel utterly sincere. The script, though crude, is often laugh out loud funny and illustrates Waters' keen observational ability. Some of the supporting performances really are terrible and the pacing is all over the place, but nonetheless it's still surprisingly watchable.
The politics of personal sexual preference underscore nearly every scene. While events grow increasingly outlandish and unhinged, the film understands that the "freak show" has moved from the circus tent to the suburbs, with curious suburbanites hoping to gawk not at the genetic mutations on display but at the behaviors of a post-sexual liberation that are not socially acceptable.

The film does not stick to a narrative and fuses art film and grindhouse with misfits, thieves, murderers, schemers, and rapists. They're presented in no uncertain terms as antisocial, irreverent people, yet there's no pretense of the documentary realism here.
And yet, it would be untrue to claim that the film has no sense of either moral compass or its characters' relationship with elements from the real world. Waters implies that art cannot make rigid sense of these issues, for doing so, especially in a socially directive manner. It is quite an experience.