Polyester: The Perils of Francine

Waters takes impish pleasure in such juxtapositions, reversals, and textural frictions. No contrast is more triumphant than that between Divine’s pyretic femme and Hunter’s seductive butch. The director was prescient in his choice of Hunter for the role of Todd Tomorrow, reviving the actor’s weathered hunkiness from his barely faded glory as Hollywood’s wet-dream-boat, for men and women alike. Waters zeroed in on the perverse irony of playing Francine and Todd’s romantic relationship “straight” years before Hunter finally came out as gay, in his 2005 autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential (a documentary based on it was released in 2015). Hardly an Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which takes a decidedly more earnest approach to the social tolls of “impossible” love across boundaries, Polyester nevertheless revels in the romantic improbability of Francine and Todd, as the courtship follows a preposterous plot. Wooed while gawking at a bloody car crash as paramedics pick up severed heads, Francine falls head over cha-cha heels for the beguiling stranger, whose first invitation is a lure to smell his shiny, priapic Corvette. Besotted by “new-car scent” and Todd’s classy pedigree—he runs a posh art cinema that serves caviar and champagne, a far cry from Elmer’s betraying sleaze—Francine succumbs to her living-Hallmark-card fantasy. Yet capitalism, patriarchy, and romance are, as ever, a conspiratorial brew. The “deodorant commercial” that is Francine’s affair with Todd—slow-motion romps in autumnal fields included—comes to a harshly screeching denouement, another tragedy foretold: Todd, too, is a faker and a gold digger, in cahoots with Francine’s odious mother.

The film’s box-office success testified to the capacity of Waters’ underground sensibility to reach wider audiences. Polyester’s“accessibility” set the stage for the filmmaker’s ascension to the position of America’s degenerate sweetheart with Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990), and Serial Mom (1994), films that also plumbed the aberrant enchantments and hidden impulses of a normie Americana but embraced a populist humor that worked less blue. Some fans may have thought Polyester a sellout of a sort; Waters waggishly retorted in an interview, “I’ve been trying to sell out for years. It’s just that no one would buy me before.”

A tribute to the lost art of exploitation showmanship, this film also wryly and reflexively narrates Waters’ own place in the film industry, at once huckster, shrink, and soothsayer. Francine’s two men, both film exhibitors, resonate with the director’s position in that moment, shuttling between smut and art. And like Francine, who negotiates between a failed marriage to the incorrigible porn peddler and a whirlwind affair with the refined art-house tastemaker, Waters clearly revered the bawdiness and gravitas of both. If anything, he recognized that both modes of filmmaking were also on their way out in 1981, being eclipsed by more severe zoning laws, community decency crusades, VHS’s lure, and the waning of independent exhibition, as cookie-cutter blockbusters made for megaplexes proliferated. With the onset of the Reagan era, a different kind of cinema may have been required. Waters’ appreciation for the powers of porn and art cinemas also emphasizes the falsity of their opposition, as they clearly share publics obsessed with the cultivation of acute tastes that test the body’s limits—whether for burning bushes or oyster platters, XXX skin flicks or triple bills of Marguerite Duras.

Polyester’s metanarrative about film exhibition revisits the fifties moment in which American film producers seriously experimented with incorporating scent into the cinematic experience. Such forms of hullabaloo had been pursued by raconteurs and dreamers like Waters’ idol William Castle, director and gimmickry maestro of Macabre, Homicidal, and other carny delights. In his The Tingler (1959), a scientist discovers a parasite that attaches to the spine and thrives on human fear, and can be expelled only by screaming. Castle had select theater seats wired with a vibrating contraption he called Percepto, which would go off in correspondence with the screen action. Writing in the essay collection Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1983), Waters devotionally recounted this transformative ass-buzzing gimmick: “As I sat there experiencing the miracle of Percepto, I realized that there could be such a thing as Art in the cinema.”

Coextensive with Castle’s shaping of the cinemagoing event, the scent gimmicks Smell-O-Vision, used for producer Mike Todd Jr.’s Scent of Mystery, and AromaRama, which accompanied a travelogue film about China, Behind the Great Wall, represented both a horizon of aspiration and a last-gasp effort that hoped to entice audiences back to movies from television and other leisure activities. These sensory experiments promised a way to rediscover cinema’s specificity as a medium. Smell-O-Vision employed a mechanism, originally invented by Hans Laube in 1939, that would deliver scents to the seats of spectators in specially rigged theaters. Piped-in scents would signal moments of narrative punctuation or provide clues to the unfolding mystery plot. But they would also linger, leaving a stale miasma of belated odoriferous muck.

Waters converted this grand, if failed, sensory project into something more modular, memorable, and oddly durable in the popular imagination. Polyester’s exhibitors provided audiences with scratch-and-sniff cards bearing ten numbered scents. The cards corroborated Francine’s malodorous universe: as a number flashed on-screen, audiences scratched the cards for an olfactory punch line, or rather, a comical punch in the nose. Aware that such a device broke the spell of absorption rather than securing it, Waters laid on the gross-out gambit, relying on a largely noxious library of smells, from Elmer’s nocturnal gas (number 2!) to dirty tennis shoes, from the party-pooper skunk to pizza. Scratch and sniff could be a form of sensory alliance with Francine’s desultory plight, with melodrama’s empathic aims justifying the necessity of a panoply of stinks, rather than mollifying aromas.

The domain of scent could deliver on a promise and a threat that Waters’ utterly visceral films, from the short Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964) onward, always disclosed: a pledge to a scatological and sexually anarchic vision of provoking involuntary responses and shattering corporeal taboos. Waters’ audacity insists that smell (like shit) is material for cinematic art to think and feel with.

As Polyester concludes in a fortuitous double auto homicide of Todd and La Rue after they have attempted to kill Francine, our heroine grasps to hug her sniveling children, both recently reformed from their delinquency through the power of capital-A Art—painting and macramé. She sprays the air prophylactically with a can of Glade. This gesture can be read only as critical farce, a feeble smoothing over of the ravages that Francine’s body and psyche have endured at the hands of narrative fate’s fickle machinations. It is a “happy ending” in camp quotes, delivered in a wittily draped aerosol bouquet.