Kathleen Turner in John Waters's SERIAL MOM (1994)

 

Among lines that haven't aged well, "I just love Bill Cosby pictures" is among the most haggard and bone-chilling.

Anyway, Serial Mom is a fabulous, 50 story flaming apple pie of a movie as John Waters brilliantly in a giant cartoon fresco merges ideas and themes from at least two of his previous works, most specifically (and this may be because I've been going through his oeuvre piece by piece the past few weeks) the inverse of both Female Trouble and Polyester, where the tough but damaged heroine of the former gets transmogrified by trash people into a mad killer who ultimately (spoiler) is sent to death at the chair and the downtrodden and gobsmacked housewife with an awful husband and useless couple of units (err children) has to reckon with her life and what's become of it - here we have a woman (Kathleen Turner, who should have in any just world won the Nobel peace prize nevermind the Osvar for this) who is loony tunes all on her own yet in a fine contradiction totally within her faculties, an absolutely equally terrible yet totally delightful force of nature who's husband is a simmering coward (Sam Waterston, who you've never seen like this before and wouldn't again) and who's kids are lovable dolts obsessed with pop culture and being adored (ie Ricky Lake and the various men she oggles- and likewise, in a great running gag). And as the bodies pile up, well... can you really blame her??

This is consistently hilarious work, full of perfectly executed scenes where the actors get to behave I'm the biggest and broadest strokes and dialog that constantly catches you off guard - especially because you should (or really I should) know by now with Waters what he'll put in the script to get the biggest laughs from the lowest blows. And yet what I admire so much when I ponder more on it is that Waters isn't punching down necessarily; this is upper middle class (white AF) suburbia where everyone has it pretty darn good, Beverly included as the housewife of a (I guess successful) dentist, the other wives and various supporting characters are self-absorbed nitwit people or just suck, and it's almost like Beverly cum Serial Mom is strangely enough a breath of fresh air for "Normal" society. If he's mocking anything in particular, and this is certainly a consistent throughline through all his movies, it's how tasteless and pathetic most people are, while it's all emaculately designed by Vincent Peranio for all this gonzo satire to spring from.

And of course the punching up also extends to the legal system and the media circuses that turn killers into All Star People, whether they intend to or not (and usually they do, or did back when that was more a thing). By the time Serial Mom becomes a recognized figure, she (one thing certainly akin to the Dawn character in Female Trouble) has to keep feeding the beast and loves the attention - though through that entire bonkers courtroom series of scenes the thing that's most clear is that as Beverly is finding all the ways to make herself lovable and a great scoundrel, she is still clearly not hinged (white heels after Labor Day? Nope!) In other words, as Waters keeps this rightfully ridiculous comic spectacle gaining in momentum, leading up to that big final day with the church, the Annie set piece (maybe the funniest of the murders which is saying a lot), the Camel Lips concert and then into the court, it's like the only way this could work is it it becomes about how this is ALL spectacle, everyone knows it, and maybe we're all the better for accepting it... or no that's not right word, acknowledging it, there.

I hope I made clear that Turner is phenomenal here, because she is, but extra shout outs to Mink Stole, the other end of the prank phone calls (::chefs kiss:: to all those all around), a young but totally game Matthew Lillard, Patty Hearst and Traci Lords's minor roles, and even the guy as Andy from Child's Play 3 gets a wild set piece involving an epic masturbation session to a Russ Meyer movie. And the other important things to know are this: this is directed just right, to be slick and colorful but never forgetting the (sometimes extreme) comic pacing needed for so many of these scenes, and yet it doesn't become so stylized to the point that it overshadows the performances, which brings me to the other movie this made me think of (also 94), Natural Born Killers.

That as well tackled the milieu of Serial Killers as Celebrities and how toxic the media can get in making it less about lives lost than about who can get the best book or movie deal, but Stone's film has aged a lot more poorly to me when compared to something like Waters film. Both films mean to show an extravagant, uber-even-monolithically satirical examination of what kinds of people are Serial killers and how they're seen as figures for mass Capitalist production, but Stone lathers the cinematic style on it so thick that it takes over from whats there on screen, and the people already in it should be strong enough (the characters as well as the performances) to say it all. 

Waters doesn't have that problem because he keeps things relatively simple visually - not to say he can't move the camera sharply or acutely or even in an amusing fashion or find clever editing - so we can focus on how bugfuck the material is on its own. Your mileage may vary, but decades down the line Setial Mom seems to have more to say on a substantive level about what a Suburban life does to people like Beverly, it doesn't bother explaining why she is this way, and the the silliness and violence is nearly invigorating. As the saying is: go big or go home!

So once again, anyway, Serial Mom is one of the underrated American films of the mid 90s, and up there with Waters most important (and fucking just funniest) films for me as far as the Mel Brooksian Rising Below Vulgarity thing.