Divine spends more than half her screentime in John Waters’ Polyester (1981) sniffing the air like a bloodhound in the middle of a hunt. This is an exaggeration, but accuracy can feel like an understatement when trying to describe something the drag queen is doing — a constancy whether we’re talking about her in Polyester or the other films with which she had at that point amassed her up-for-anything reputation.
This was Divine’s fourth feature-length collaboration with Waters, the thin-mustached iconoclast who, starting in the late 1960s, used her overheated acting talents in a series of giddily shocking no-budget movies that might require her character to do things like scarf down freshly-squeezed-out dog poop or chew through an umbilical cord.
There is nothing so shocking in Polyester, a movie where Divine deliciously plays an unhappy, God-fearing housewife that visually and temperamentally recalls a caricatured Elizabeth Taylor. (She’s impossible to upstage unless she’s in the same room as Edith Massey, a Baltimore local Waters had befriended years earlier who plays Divine’s nouveau riche friend and delivers every line reading with riotously — and unintentionally — funny deadpan.) The closest thing the movie has to provocative gimmickry is all the sniffing, a symptom of Waters’ William Castle-like marketing decision to have the movie shown in what he called Odorama during its original run. (I.e., ticket buyers were handed scratch-and-sniff cards and coaxed into action when certain numbers flashing on screen corresponded to the ones on the small sheet in their hand.)
Tab Hunter and Divine in Polyester.
The tactic feels like the last gasps of what, with hindsight, could be considered “the old John Waters” transitioning into the kind of more “mature,” bigger-budgeted filmmaking still attached to the weird and the campy but more willing to indulge commercial viability. Polyester is a very funny satire of the kinds of in-heat melodramas in which Douglas Sirk specialized in the 1950s. It’s also notable for being arguably the first movie Waters made likely to also be considered very funny by people who wouldn’t be so receptive to his antic sensibilities of the decade prior. Waters’ edges would continue getting sanded down by his next, maybe most widely beloved project, 1988’s Hairspray, a candy-colored musical comedy whose sense of fun is even more broadly accessible than its predecessor’s.
This is not to say pleased-with-itself irreverence is absent from Polyester, or that there would come a point where Waters would “sell out.” He’d admirably never snuff out his sensibilities completely; they proved to work surprisingly well with a mainstream-friendly look and feel. Waters’ signature penchant for the grotesque is most memorably found in the loud abrasiveness of the Divine character’s husband (he’s the avaricious impresario of a local porn theater) and in their freakshow son, a paint-huffing foot fetishist who has become a newspaper fixture for going around town stomping on women’s toes so forcefully that they usually have to be ambulanced from the scene of the crime.
It’s a pleasure, too, to see teen heartthrob Tab Hunter readily have his image sullied as a maybe-untrustworthy love interest who appears out of nowhere to woo Divine’s going-through-it heroine. Hunter, who spent nearly all of his life and career in the closet — a time that includes Polyester’s release window — seems to be having a good time in a movie so gleeful about bastardizing notions of a typical Hunter character. There’s a certain thrill in going against the grain while also winking at it.
Peterson Reviews 