How John Waters and Jeanne Moreau bonded over puke in cinema
The aesthetic that John Waters presents in his movies is one that’s as simple as it is brave. You take the most wholesome, Rockwell-esque aesthetics of small-town Americana and contrast it with some of the most disgusting things you can possibly imagine.
There’s a damn good reason that I am never, ever in a million years going to see Pink Flamingos, no matter how much of a landmark in queer cinema it is. Anyone who isn’t familiar with arguably the most controversial addition to the canon of John Waters (an insane bar to clear if there ever was one) can Google its profoundly disgusting ending if they have a really, really strong stomach. Honestly, that alone could qualify John Waters for the nickname ‘The Prince of Puke’, but in true Waters fashion, he had to go far, far beyond the boundary of good taste.
Everywhere you look in his films, there’s something transgressive. Whether that’s the progressive racial politics of Hairspray or the insane, cannibalistic ending of his 1977 film Desperate Living, yet all of it is delivered with not only a knowing wink but a clear understanding and appreciation for the standard Americana he grew up with… One imagines that David Lynch was watching closely and looking to communicate the same repulsion and attraction to American culture in his own work. Only with a little less coprophagia.
However, it wasn’t just creators from after the time of John Waters that were paying close attention to his films. It would be very easy to say that the genius behind Serial Mom was ahead of his time, and no one his age or older could possibly understand where he was coming from.
However, Waters was putting voice to a feeling that many people of his generation and before were feeling. Fascination with things that repulse you is nothing new, and it was something that Waters himself bonded with one of the most iconic actresses of the previous generation over.
This actress is, of course, Jeane Moreau. One of the greatest gifts the French ever gave to cinema and a performer that no less an authority than Orson Welles called “the greatest actress in the world”. One wonders whether a young Waters, watching her onscreen in pictures like Seven Days… Seven Nights and Viva Maria!, would have ever in a million years imagined that in 40 years he’d find himself in a bathroom in Cannes with Ms Moreau discussing, of all things, puke.
It came up (so to speak) in an interview Waters gave to artnet regarding an exhibition of his visual art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The nickname ‘The Prince of Puke’ comes up, and Waters is only too happy to reference that nickname in the show, referencing a 1998 film that’s showing at the exhibition called, creatively enough, ‘Puke in the Cinema’… It’s exactly what it says on the tin: a compilation of scenes from old movies where people vomit.
He says that he enjoys the campness of it, especially when movie characters vomit in shock, which was, bizarrely enough, what he bonded with Moreau over. Waters recalled, “I’m name-dropping here, but one time I was at Cannes with Jeanne Moreau, and we watched a movie in which this happened. Jean asked, ‘Did you ever puke when you were upset? I never puked.’ She’s right! When something bad happens, we don’t puke. I don’t, at least. But they always do that in movies. So I was celebrating that oddness.”
Which, honestly, is something that could be said for pretty much all of his movies. Something that many people, both before and after his time, have always been keen to do.