The one thing Werner Herzog misunderstood about John Waters
Whether it’s movies, painting, sculpture, literature or music, art serves as a strange bond between the creator and its audience. Few people have benefitted from that bond quite like John Waters.
To call the Baltimore-born writer, artist and director a cult figure does him a disservice. He arguably invented the idea of the cult filmmaker. Waters is more than just a director of strange movies; he’s the ideal outsider artist. Someone who can’t help but put his often thrilling, always unique and occasionally, genuinely disgusting vision on screen in full knowledge of two things.
He knows that the people who get it will get it, and the people who won’t, won’t. In a perverse way, both of those facts are just as important as each other.
This is a feature, not a bug, of making art to Waters. After all, this is a man who was something of an outsider all his life. A man who has spent his life living openly and freely for better and (sometimes) for worse. He knows as well as anyone that shrinking yourself to fit the mainstream will only ever lead to surface-level bonds with people, so you might as well be yourself, warts and all. After all, why would you want to form a bond with people who would be put off by your eccentricities?
Thus, pretty much everything you can read into John Waters’ movies are things you can seemingly read into the man himself. His fascination with pop culture kitsch? Check. His surreal sense of humour? Check. His love of fashion and aesthetics? Double check. His social conscience and support for the oppressed? The man made Hairspray, I’ll give you three guesses. His sexuality? I mean… yeah, the man has never, ever made a secret of his homosexuality, so check. Or, so it would seem.
Trust a man who’d been his friend for 35 years to let that little fact slip.
Who didn’t know that John Waters is gay?
Oh, Werner. For a man who has made films analysing the human condition with a rare empathy and intellect, he really did let this one sail straight over his head. In fairness to himself, Werner Herzog did have the courage and the sense of humour to come clean about this little act of missing the plainly obvious himself. On stage no less, while being interviewed by Karen Beckman for the 2007 documentary On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying.
In this interview, Herzog is in an uncharacteristically open mood and talks about how he can’t help but take things as they are. “A chair is a chair,” he begins with. It doesn’t sound like he’s coldly or arrogantly reducing things to simply how he sees them, and more that he knows that people can have such strong internal lives that he wouldn’t want to make any assumptions about someone before having them made clear to him. Y’know, the way John Waters does.
Yet, that wasn’t enough for Herzog. Who said that at a gala they both attended, he and his wife spoke to Waters briefly, then, after Waters left, “I turned to my wife and I said ‘I think this man might be gay!’” I mean… Werner, you’re not wrong. There is something quite heartwarming about the fact that Herzog does seem to be more focused on the man as a close friend and a brilliant film-maker, but sometimes you can trust your gut about these things.