{"id":257,"date":"2016-10-04T16:48:01","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T20:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/?post_type=tribe_events&p=257"},"modified":"2016-10-04T17:05:48","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T21:05:48","slug":"polyester-a-film-by-john-waters","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/event\/polyester-a-film-by-john-waters\/","title":{"rendered":"Polyester a film by John Waters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"polyester_odorama_card_t614\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Polyester<\/i>\u00a0is a satire on race, gender, sexuality, and class by acclaimed filmmaker John Waters<\/a>. It is being screened in coordination with Professor Sophia Harvey’s courses: FILM 392 and MEDS 160<\/p>\n

Reservations required here<\/a><\/p>\n

Criterion Collection Write-Up by Carrie Rickey<\/p>\n

Remember those inane but innovative gimmicks that duped a movie audience into having the time of its life even when the movie stunk?<\/p>\n

There was Percepto in William Castle\u2019s The Tingler <\/i>(1959), a device consisting of a buzzer rigged into selected theater seats which jolted viewers into believing that the critter of the film\u2019s title (a dormant organism aroused by its host\u2019s fright) was alive in their spinal columns. Less effective but more fun was Illusion-O, Castle\u2019s gimmick for 13 Ghosts <\/i>(1960) similar to 3-D glasses except that you could see the spools if you looked through the red lens but couldn\u2019t if you looked through the green.<\/p>\n

John Waters fondly remembered these gimcrack gimmicks and resuscitated them for his 1981 film Polyester<\/i>, shot in fabulous Odorama. This, in the first above-ground picture made by the director of such subterranean dementia as Mondo Trasho<\/i> (1969) and Pink Flamingos<\/i>(1972), was a cinematic breakthrough more profound than Dolby sound or Cinerama. For an audience that previously had been olfactory-deprived, able only to SEE but not SMELL a movie, Waters provided special scratch-and-sniff cards enabling you to fill your nostrils with whatever scent or stench that the film\u2019s heroine, Francine Fishpaw, was inhaling. These aromas, which ranged from the pungent perfume of pizza to the foul fragrance of flatulence, reinforced the film\u2019s all-important moral: Some things in life just plain stink.<\/p>\n

Francine Fishpaw (played by Waters\u2019 longtime diva, the divine female impersonator Divine, aka Glenn Milstead) is a suburban housewife who wins the Woman\u2019s Movie Trifecta, enduring alcoholism, juvenile-delinquent children, and divorce. Fortunately, V, as the title intimates, is a 100% unnatural comedy, a satire of middle-class America tickling the conventions of the mainstream domestic melodrama. It was the first of Waters\u2019 Bourgeois Trash Trilogy that would later include the 1987 Hairspray<\/i> and the 1990 Cry Baby,<\/i> all films lampooning middle-class values.<\/p>\n

Poor Francine Fishpaw. She lives on a secluded cul-de-sac in suburban Baltimore, a dead-end in more ways than one. Sure, Francine seems to have everything: the house, the husband, the Empire furniture upholstered in Jordan Almonds colors (white, lavender, pale pink). But she is having a Bad Air Day. For this woman with a nose keener than an anteater\u2019s sniffs something rotten in her plush paradise.<\/p>\n

Is it the moldy tomatoes thrown by the picketers outside her house, protesting her husband\u2019s porn theater, currently playing the XXX-rated movie, My Burning Bush<\/i>? Is it the cheap perfume worn by her slutty daughter, the one in the spandex disco pants and the Farrah Fawcett \u2018do? Or is it the angel dust smoked by her punk (as in rocker AND delinquent) son, a foot-fetishist sought by the police for his serial crime of stomping the sandaled feet of pretty women?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no one Francine can turn to for help or advice. Her mother is interested only in money. Her husband is busy diddling his secretary. Thus the vodka bottle becomes solace for Francine, a picture of full-figured pathos who looks as though she\u2019s simultaneously channeling Liz Taylor, Anna Magnani, and Smirnoff.<\/p>\n

Waters knows\u2014and he knows that you know\u2014that the convention of women\u2019s movie melodramas dictates that she who has everything must be punished for being better off than those in the audience. Yet Francine suffers more than most. Her daughter comes home pregnant, with a straight-F report card. Her son is expelled for truancy, arrested for his foot-stomping, and sent off to what used to be called \u201cthe laughing house.\u201d Then there\u2019s her empty-bed blues. Could it get any worse? Imagine what it\u2019s like for Francine to reach for a snort and find that her mother has handed her a jigger of gasoline!<\/p>\n

For she who suffers, the woman\u2019s movie melodrama also provides deliverance. Will Francine be saved by that hunk in the white Corvette, Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter)? He is the opposite of her philandering husband: attentive, tender, PLUS he runs a drive-in theater showing a triple-feature of films by Marguerite Duras, the highbrow novelist-feminist whose movies are as tedious and opaque as Waters\u2019 are peppy and transparent.<\/p>\n

With Todd, Francine enjoys a \u201cHappy Interlude,\u201d that montage sequence in the woman\u2019s movie where everything goes right for the heroine. The couple horseplays feeding ponies, they chase butterflies, they take a roll in the hayloft. But Waters knows\u2014and he knows that you know\u2014that the \u201cHappy Interlude\u201d is just the upbeat prelude to the downbeat melodrama that inevitably follows.<\/p>\n

Happily, Polyester<\/i> has an unexpectedly cheerful resolution. Francine is reunited with her children who have learned that instead of committing crimes, they can make art about them. In the stale genre of woman\u2019s movies, Polyester<\/i> may not be a breath of fresh air, but it is definitely a waft of air freshener.<\/p>\n

Reservations required here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Polyester\u00a0is a satire on race, gender, sexuality, and class by acclaimed filmmaker John Waters. It is being screened in coordination with Professor Sophia Harvey’s courses: FILM 392 and MEDS 160 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3680,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[],"class_list":["post-257","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3680"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/257\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/creativearts-calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}