Female Trouble (1974) - John Waters

John Waters' Female Trouble is a vile, grotesque, and hilarious story about the life of Dawn Davenport, a self-centered young woman that transforms from a relatively modest schoolgirl into a mass murder, all of which stems from her intense desire to become famous.  The film begins in her high school days, where Dawn, played by John Waters' regular Divine, the 300-pound transvestite, obsesses over cha-cha heels.  On Christmas Day, Dawn goes ballistic when her parents' refuse to buy her the heels, due primarily to their preconceived notions about "the type of girls who where cha-cha heels", leading Dawn to hit the road and never look back.  From there, Dawn is raped, becomes a single mother, a criminal, a glamorous model, and eventually a mass murder who gets a hot-date with an electric chair, with John Waters' absurdest comedy painting a vivid and vile portrait of self-indulgence.  Being one of John Waters' early efforts, aka pre-Hairspray, Female Trouble is an exuberant yet rickety-made piece of filmmaking, a film that looks and feels amateurish yet lively, relying on Divine's flamboyant energy and visceral rage to create a sustained aura of shock and awe, as the film delivers Water's one-of-a-kind satirical flare.  Female Trouble is a film that was made to shock and offend, a social commentary wrapped in disgust that comments on the pitfalls of self-indulgence, related to not only to morality but also art itself.  John Waters has always been a filmmaker that never succumbed to the elitist, pretentiousness mindset that plagues so many great artists, being a filmmaker who routinely finds truth and intellectualism in what is perceived to be grotesque and repugnant.  On some level, Female Trouble is a commentary on the pretentious, self-indulgences of the art world, with Dawn becoming a character so obsessed with being respected and admired as an artist that she is willing to kill or be killed to do so.  Flamboyant satire is what Divine was made for, and she delivers in spades throughout Female Trouble, carrying the film with her undeniable energy, lamenting at the end, "the death penalty is the best reward I could ever recieve for my work".   Like many of his John Waters' features, Female Trouble is a film full of subversive energy, being a story that loudly skewers societies norms on family, beauty, and sexuality to tell its absurdest story of Dawn, revealing how vanity itself is often a bedside companion with selfishness and hate.  

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