But then came the scene in which it's revealed that the members of the terrorist group, whose kidnapping of a middle-range movie star sparks the action, have had the names of their favorite film directors tattooed on their arms. It's a joke of course, but a serious one. For tattooing the names of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini (artists whose lives and works Waters reveres) on your body is no simple fashion statement: Films such as In a Year of 13 Moons, Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, and by extension Cecil B. Demented are antithetical to everything currently called “the movies.” And to support them is a kind of terrorist act.
Shot on location in his beloved Baltimore, Cecil B. Demented is a return to the sort of movie Waters hasn't really made since Desperate Living (1977). Melanie Griffith may be the star, but the writer-director treats her no differently than the 300-pound transvestite named Divine with whom he started. In other words Griffith gets more serious respect from Waters than she has ever been afforded in her career to date. Cast as Honey Whitlock, an actress whose once blossoming career is beginning to edge toward the skids (why else would she be doing publicity in Baltimore?), Griffith is redolent with temperament -- something that Waters, like no director since Luchino Visconti, fully appreciates. Bored, anxious, and jumpy as hell, she demands that her much abused personal assistant (Waters-discovery-turned-talk-show-phenom Ricki Lake) find out if Pat Nixon “got fucked” in the presidential suite of the hotel where she's staying. No, it's not a serious question. She just wants to see people jump through hoops for her.
Yet on another level it's perfectly serious; she's ripe and ready for trouble. Consequently when the “Sprocket Holes Gang”-- a terrorist outfit led by a young man (Stephen Dorff) calling himself Cecil B. Demented (the name a Waters critic slapped on him way back when) -- kidnaps Honey and forces her to be in the gang's movie (a seemingly endless project in which the relationship between off-screen and on has been permanently erased), her secret dreams come true. Her inner anarchist is unleashed. And this in turn enters another region of Waters legend: his friendship with Patricia Hearst.
In 1974 Hearst, the granddaughter of legendary newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a self-styled radical terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was then subjected to brainwashing techniques -- which included her being forced to spend more than 50 days in a closet and then to rob a bank with her SLA “comrades” -- leaving her as vulnerable as putty. Not helping matters, the FBI placed Hearst, who had no political affiliation or activity prior to the kidnapping, on its most wanted list. And so she went into hiding. When finally found she was put on trial for grand theft and convicted; she served almost two years of a seven-year term and was released with help from President Jimmy Carter. This was merely a commutation of her sentence, however, and to this day Patricia Hearst Shaw (she married her postordeal bodyguard, Bernard Shaw) has been seeking a full pardon.
John Waters entered the picture in 1988 when he met Hearst at the Cannes Film Festival, where director Paul Schrader's film of her account of her ordeal, Patty Hearst, premiered. Striking up a friendship with Waters, Hearst went on to appear in his Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, and now Cecil B. Demented -- where she plays the worried mother of one member of the Sprocket Holes Gang.
You might say Cecil B. Demented is Waters's way of answering the undoubtedly perpetual query “What's Patty Hearst really like?” and its inevitable followup “Do you think she was brainwashed, or was she in on the whole thing from the beginning?” And to judge from this film, Waters is resolutely noncommittal on both questions. Hearst is certainly more normal than Griffith's Honey Whitlock. Yet in telling Honey's story, Waters can't help but project America's secret fantasy: that Hearst had indeed turned in revolt against her class. Moreover, the Sprocket Holes Gang has a lot more going for it than the SLA ever did. Striking a revolutionary blow for movies makes a lot of sense in a culture where theatrical release is little more than a springboard to video sales and rental -- the ultimate destination of all audiovisual experience today. And so anyone trying to buck this tide becomes a sort of terrorist.
In Cecil B. Demented Waters offers a unique world view. Imagine a gang operating out of an abandoned theater. Imagine its members getting support from the few old-time movie houses still in operation, playing porn and action films. Now witness a fight to defend the Sprocket Holes Gang from a band of “Family Viewing” thugs (led by Waters regulars Mink Stole and Mary Vivian Pearce). And that's not to mention the gang's guerrilla takeover of Gump Again -- the sequel to Forrest Gump, a film that Waters clearly despises with a passion. It's all here, charged by Griffith's funky glamour and the gleam of perfectly calibrated insanity in Stephen “Call me if you can't get Johnny Depp” Dorff's eye. The crowning touch? Cecil's real name is Sinclair Beckstein. And if you really know your movies, then you're aware that that's the name of the author of O Brother Where Art Thou? -- the novel Joel McCrea wants to make into a movie in Sullivan's Travels. (The Coen brothers pay similar tribute in their upcoming musical starring George Clooney.)
In short Cecil B. Demented is essential viewing.
