A Dirty Shame, which I finally viewed on DVD this past Saturday morning, is perhaps John Waters’s masterwork and the greatest socio-political sex comedy of our time.
You can read a plot summary elsewhere, but I’ll just give the short version here: Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) is a “neuter” (i.e., sexually repressed) Baltimore housewife who lives in a bland house on a bland street and runs a bland convenience store with her husband and her mother (Chris Isaak and Suzanne Shepherd respectively). Her chief annoyance: The growing numbers of “perverts” on her street, including her grown daughter Caprice (Selma Blair with impossible fake breasts).
But a bop on the head during a traffic accident, combined with the “sexual healing” prowess of garage mechanic Ray Ray (Johnny Knoxville of MTV’s Jackass), turns her into another of the “sex addicts” of all persuasions and kinks, who vow to take over the street, the city, and eventually the world. Mother and hubby start a reactionary protest group out to enforce “normal” behavior, and the battle is set for the hearts and crotches of Baltimore.
The sex is all farcical and nudity-free, as befits a GOP-controlled America in which even mentioning glandular drives (other than fear and greed) is an ultimate act of subterfuge.
A whole essay or four could be written about its queer-eyed-for-the-straight-guy utopia of sexual anarchy, and how the forces of “neuter” control naturally see it as a threat (to work, to productivity, to a whole social/aesthetic order of suburban obedience), and the “happy ending” in which Ullman discovers the new kink of head-butting to orgasm.
In our schizoid real world, of course, “pleasure,” even sexual pleasure, is sometimes decried as a sinful departure from the staight-n’-narrow ways. But it’s also exploited in advertising, in the magazines, and on “hip” TV channels as the promised result of buying and owning consumer products; which, for most of us, requires working for The Corporation or its affiliated entities.
Waters’s fucking-in-the-streets utopia, in which everybody’s constantly horny and everything safe and consensual is acceptable, would negate that motivation. People would still work, to some extent. They’d still build and/or acquire homes, perhaps with fully equipped dungeons in the basements. They’d still strive to look good, by their changed standards of looking good (i.e., the adult daughter’s impossible breast implants). And because of the lust/luxury continuum (the words have the same Latin root), other sensual-pleasure based consumerism would still occur (swimming pools, hot tubs, limos with big back seats, foods with aphrodesiac or at least mood-setting properties, role-play costumes, corsets, whips, restraints, and, of course, contraceptives, condoms, and STD treatments).
Also note that Waters avoids potential plot complications that might negate his premise. Minor children are not seen, and are barely mentioned, in the film. The repressed mother mentions syphilis once, but AIDS apparently doesn’t exist in the film’s fictional universe. But the whole notion of the film’s sexual utopia is completely informed by gay culture, whose solidarity and assertiveness have been forged by a quarter century of fighting AIDS.
Ultimately, Waters’s erotic ideal posits straight women and men behaving, well, more like gay men, specifically post-Pride Movement gay men. A Dirty Shame‘s proudly self-proclaimed “sex addicts” define their entire beings by their libidos and their fetishes, and forthrightly demand to tell the whole world about ’em. It’s a world where gays and lesbians are just subsets of desire.
John Waters has given us a glimpse of an all-encompassing, fully-functioning Queer Nation.
