Hairspray: A Clean Teen in a Filthy World

And then, of course, there’s Divine, long the cross-dressing muse of Waters’ most fetid and febrile imaginings, here pulling double duty as Tracy’s put-upon mother, Edna, and the loathsome WZZT station manager Arvin Hodgepile. Edna is the film’s best comic creation, her political awakening (“Tracy, honey . . . we joined the NAACP!”) is its most satisfying arc, and the cross-gender casting single-handedly gives an otherwise straightforwardly heterosexual narrative its vibrant queerness. And beyond the intersectional-feminist oddness of having a man playing a housewife who is (initially, at least) oppressed by the crushing patriarchal conventions of domesticity, it’s the cadences of Divine’s inimitable speech patterns that give Hairspray its most quotable dialogue, often in tandem with Jerry Stiller—no slouch in the distinctive-line-reading department himself—playing Wilbur, Tracy’s fondly indulgent dad. Just listen to the singsong rhythms as Edna declares indignantly “My Tracy’s a clean teen!” while Wilbur chimes in with “There’s no bugs on our babyyy!” And who among Hairspray’s legions of fans has not occasionally felt their blood sugar plummet, or glanced at an empty coffee cup, or licked the last amphetamine granule from a depleted wrap of speed and felt Divinely inspired to warn anyone within their blast radius, “My diet pill is wearing off . . .”?

Hairspray was not the first time Divine had played a woman chafing against the shackles of a man’s world. Nor, strictly speaking, was it the first time Waters had shaken a tail feather in the direction of the commercial mainstream—or at least the outer edge of it. Polyester (1981) starred Waters’ regular crew of so-called Dreamlanders, including Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and Mary Vivian Pearce (incidentally, Waters’ partner the two times he himself went on Buddy Deane as a teen), alongside resurrected fifties matinee idol Tab Hunter. But it is primarily a love letter to classical Hollywood melodrama and to Divine’s colossal charisma, swaddled in glossier production values than Waters had ever attempted before. The critical establishment garlanded the movie with the best notices of both their careers to that point, as though its relative polish and narrative coherence were evidence of a long-overdue learning curve. But while the budget-challenged, willful shonkiness of Waters’ earlier films was partly necessity, it was also partly choice. As author Gary Indiana put it in a 2004 essay—perhaps the best piece ever written about John Waters not written by John Waters—“the Sirkian patina of Polyester and a film like Serial Mom amply prove[s] that Waters knows how to do a lot of things he doesn’t bother doing in a lot of his films.”

Still, Polyester’s gentle shift away from the excrement-eating grossness that characterized those early films feels in hindsight like an acknowledgment by Waters, the Alexander of the Abject, that having established unimpeachable midnight-madness credentials on multiple maniacal occasions, there were now new worlds to conquer. And what, in the end, is the best way to subvert? To get to very few people a lot or to very many people just a little, perhaps so subtly that they don’t even notice the tender massaging of their prior preconceptions? Why not, over the course of a long career, do both? Short of going door-to-door through the suburbs and strip malls of the flyover states, Hairspray is how John Waters, refusing to sell out to the mainstream, instead slyly hoodwinked the mainstream into buying into John Waters.

As part of that stealth campaign, alongside Polyester, Waters unleashed his first memoir, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste. And perhaps the most fascinating piece of Waters ephemera from this era, especially for students of pop-cultural manipulation, is his first appearance, with Divine, on the then-brand-new Late Night with David Letterman, in 1982, promoting both book and film. Divine is out of breath, post–singing performance, wearing a hairdo that implies some deranged wigmaker went berserk inside a cotton-candy machine; Waters is eager but composed. And it’s remarkable to witness the young and kinda greenhorn Letterman warming to his guests—Waters would go on to become a regular—in real time. Initially nonplussed by the director and a little flustered by Divine (which you can tell because he admits, “Well, I’m a little flustered”), Letterman prefigures the reaction of mainstream America to Hairspray by visibly relaxing into Waters’ pointed but genial repartee. The host concludes the segment by not even attempting to keep the note of sincere amazement from his voice when he gives his benediction, saying, “You both seem like very nice individuals.”

More than maybe any other incident, it is Divine’s tragic early death, just days after Hairspray opened, that can now be seen as the pivot point between the first and second halves of Waters’ filmography. He went on to work with stars like Johnny Depp (Cry-Baby, 1990), Kathleen Turner (Serial Mom, 1994), and Melanie Griffith (Cecil B. Demented, 2000). But as good as they often are, with them, you cannot help but see the wheels of long-game career ambition in motion. Working with Waters came to be a handy career reset, effective in redefining the boundaries of a calcifying star image and letting the public know you could take a joke. The debutantes and Divine-led Dreamlanders of Waters’ output up to and including Hairspray, by contrast, leave it all up there on the screen every time, as though another opportunity may not present itself. You never get a second chance to make a last impression.

And so, if you imagine Waters’ overarching strategy as a kind of Napoleonic pincer-movement attack on the United States of complacency, hammering in from the extreme fringes with his earlier, filthier films, but also sneaking right up to the hearthside with Hairspray, suddenly the PG-rated anomaly starts not to seem so anomalous. What it shares with all of the Waters catalog is an innate affection for the “outsiders who lose in real life but win in my movies,” and the same simple dividing line between the good and the bad, which has nothing to do with how you look or even how you (mis)behave. It’s all about disposition: Waters heroes like themselves, no matter how the outside world sees them, and their found families and friendships are marked by ferocious camaraderie and loyalty. His villains are jealous, petty, miserable, and correspondingly lonely, each one an Amber sitting on her stolen throne, screeching and alone.

Tracy’s inherent good nature does not set her against Waters’ previously established cavalcade of happily perverted scumbags—quite the contrary. More than its right-on racial politics, more than its offbeat queerness, and certainly more than its as-yet-unsuccessful agenda to literally broaden the permissible physical dimensions of the prototypical Hollywood heroine (in the age of Ozempic, any body-positive #OscarsSoThin movement seems further away than ever), Hairspray spreads the dangerous disease of Waters’ skewed, absurdist worldview by putting Tracy on the same side of the fence as even his most grotesque and twisted prior protagonists. Viewed through a Watersworld lens, innocence and idealism are just as troubling to the powers that be as degeneracy and lasciviousness, because they stand united in splendid opposition to the compromised cynicism and stifling conformity of “normal” society. Exulting in their own true natures, in their zaftig bodies and zany debaucheries, these ladies all, in their way, just wanna dance.

So to look again at Hairspray is to appreciate the cunning smuggled into the cornball, like a time-delayed bomb hidden in a hairpiece. It’s to notice the way it gently warped “the best minds of my generation,” to quote Pia Zadora’s beatnik quoting Allen Ginsberg, at exactly the moment of our maximal impressionability, nudging eighties and nineties tweens away from the reactionary politics of our parents, toward a sunny kind of social radicalism—or at least demonstrating that the option of righteous rebellion was open to us. Indeed, Hairspray has so comprehensively Trojan-horsed us all (should have known to beware of freaks bearing gifts) that perhaps, if we try very hard, we can even gin up a little outrage at how wantonly we’ve all been duped by its apparent decency, violated by its vivacity, and swindled by its sweetness. And perhaps then we can spearhead a movement to retroactively strip Waters of his unwanted respectability and restore him to his rightful perch atop the pantheon of disgrace and transgression. Given the debt of fervent gratitude that the movie world owes John Waters for the many, many years of liberating, subversive joy he has given us, it’s the least we can do.