Subsequent murders ensue involving scissors, air conditioners, and butcher’s knives, meanwhile the town and the Sutphin family realize the truth behind the grizzly crimes. When Misty is stood up by her boyfriend, her mother murders him with a fire poker in a public restroom.
When a math teacher questions the mental stability of Chip – a result of his obsession with slasher films – Beverly runs him over with her car. With a rigid moral code, Beverly anonymously dispenses justice for seemingly minor faux pas (wearing white after Labour Day, snatching parking spaces at the grocery store, improper recycling habits), but as the perceived indignities are aimed at her family, the violence escalates and Beverly turns Lizzie Borden in defense of her family. When her neighbourhood is scandalized by a rash of dirty prank calls, Beverly pretends to be shocked only to reveal to the audience (but not yet her family), that she is the telephone bandit. Her dentist husband (Law & Order’s Sam Waterston) is doting, and her children, Misty (played by Ricki Lake of Waters’s 1984 Hairspray) and Chip (Matthew Lillard in his first credited screen role), represent the average American teenager. And if Serial Mom, starring Hollywood A-lister Kathleen Turner, was a more PG family-friendly entry for Waters (comparatively, remember that his first bonafide hit, 1972’s Pink Flamingoes notoriously concluded with its star Divine ingesting dog feces), it nevertheless exudes its director’s patented trashiness.Īs was commonplace with all Waters’s films, Serial Mom is set just outside Baltimore, in the middle-class suburb of Towson, where family matriarch Beverly Sutphin (Turner) cares for her family with domestic prowess. He positions the entire film, with its disingenuous opening text, as a true crime tale, despite clearly being a work of fiction. Coronated with various loving monikers, such as “The Duke of Dirt,” “The Pope of Trash,” “The Prince of Puke,” and the “Ayatollah of Assholes,” Waters’s unique brand of distaste applied throughout his life and filmography to an obsession with serial killers.
He also satirized the obsession with true crime that is currently at its zenith. When shooting Serial Mom in Baltimore’s suburbs early in 1994, director John Waters – the celebrated, if not worshiped King of Filth – acted as a soothsayer of sorts, predicting the media frenzy that would envelope North Americans later that year.
Serial Mom: How John Waters Predicted True Crime’s Morbid Appeal By
0 kommentar(er)
