Screen Queen: The Johns: John Waters’s ‘Polyester,’ ‘Rocketman’ and queer school-comedy ‘Booksmart’

Polyester
John Waters staged a live chicken decapitation for his 1969 debut feature Mondo Trasho. In the following year’s Multiple Maniacs, he made anal sex with rosary beads a thing. And in Pink Flamingos, Divine, his drag muse, committed fully to her art by eating real dog crap for a scene. So by the time 1981 rolled around, the King of Filth was over it, ready to move away from the filth and find some fresh inspiration via the 1950s. He looked to bygone moms, specifically the classic trope of the overburdened middle-class housewife. With a beefed-up budget of $300,000, he rounded up his motley crew of John Waters regulars, including Divine as Christian mother-of-two Francine Fishpaw, for Polyester, released in 1981.
A hysterically melodramatic spoofing of the American suburbs, the film holds up as one of Waters’ finest comedies – due in large part to the game cast, including Edith Massey as Francine’s debutante friend Cuddles, who regularly dispenses basic-mom-type inspirational bromides to soothe Francine. And with Tab Hunter playing opposite Divine as, naturally, the hunk who swoops in to save her...