Jay Rohr
Cecil B. Demented proposes power to the people who punish bad cinema. ‘Death to all who are cinematically incorrect’ may seem delightful, but such militancy puts a lot of movie-makers in danger. Fortunately, this dark comedy, courtesy of notorious auteur John Waters, satirically skewers enough targets to be called Dresden-lite. It could be considered a takedown of toxic fandom, a lambaste of Hollywood pretensions, or a critique of artistic snobbery. And that’s just glancing at the surface. Overall, it’s a comically off-kilter ride into demented territory that oddly foreshadowed the contemporary cinema quagmire.
Honey Whitlock is a fading star. Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) really throws herself into the role of a contemptible A-list celebrity. Entitled by fame, Whitlock is a demanding phony who knows when to flash a friendly smile but expects the world to fawn over her while fulfilling her every whim. She’s kidnapped at a charity event by outlaw filmmaker Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff) and his crew, the Sprocket Holes. Removed to their hideout in the ruins of classic movie theater, these celluloid extremists inform Honey she’s the star in their movie.
What then transpires is almost an ode to a kind of filmmaking that would largely vanish over the next twenty-five years: those movies made on a frayed shoestring budget, taking advantage of anything and everything to get the film finished. Cecil and his crew hostilely take over real spaces, turning them into sets while shooting their guerrilla cinema. Much like those movies, the film they’re making is more about its point than its quality. Yet, there’s an inescapable honesty in every imperfection. In other words, there’s a truth mainstream Hollywood won’t financially produce.
When John Waters made Pink Flamingos (1972), the transgressive black comedy that propelled him into infamy, its budget came in around twelve grand. Cecil came in at $10 million, “a modest sum that has been nevertheless made unthinkable by the combined forces of the financial crash, the collapse of home video, the rise of the internet, and the explosion of digital video… moviemaking has remained largely the terrain of the privileged.”
Even if crowdsourcing opens the purse there’s still another issue.
As Sharon Waxman observed, “There is no longer a robust distribution system either of studios or streamers and their downstream partners like home entertainment that are hungry for the kind of offbeat, seat-of-the-pants, high stakes storytelling that drives the creative energy of the entire entertainment business.”
So even if financed, getting a film in front of an audience is problematic. Although Apple iPhones promised to put cinema quality cameras in the hands of consumers, there’s almost no point to whatever they make since no one will see it. Of course, does that mean it’ll be art?
Cecil B. Demented lampoons the idea of who gets to decide the quality of things quite nicely. The aspiring auteur and his quirky crew all bear tattoos of their preferred directors: Herschell Gordon Lewis, David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, Spike Lee, Andy Warhol, William Castle, Samuel Fuller, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Kenneth Anger. And while their tastes cover a range of wonderfully unruly independent icons, those movies aren’t for everyone. In that respect, Cecil B. Demented is more about pushing back against the mainstream.
Carving out such a niche, even a small one, calls to mind Harry Dodge, who plays Cecil’s producer Dinah, but also wrote, “without the random there can be no new thing.” The unusual invariably attracts the mediocre, especially audience eyes bored by such sea-sized banality, and only in that way can creativity evolve. Within that space, then, is also room for community.
When Waters released Female Trouble (1974), film critic Rex Reed wrote, “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn’t there a law or something?” The trashy, campy romps Waters is known for have always embraced outsiders, and Cecil B. Demented is no different. His crew is composed of gender fluid, African American, queer, and Satanist individuals, all of whom are judged solely by their artistic integrity.
There’s no denying his career has favored social outcasts. More importantly, the wonderful misfits who’ve populated his pictures over the years aren’t just a cavalcade of freaks. They inspire a meaningful look at the values of society. That can easily be seen in the underdog aspects of Hairspray (1988, 2007), as well as the Romeo and Juliet element in Cry-Baby (1990). Waters weird world is composed of greasers, killers, rich squares, zaftig pop music enthusiasts, outlaw filmmakers, and all-around delinquents, but they’re always people dedicated to making the world a better, or at least more interesting place in their own way. Sometimes that involves eating poodle shit.
The fact that Pink Flamingos celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with a re-release the same year as the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition feels like a jab from the subversive shadows. Although more coincidental than intentional, there’s a touch of kismet. After all, the opening of Cecil B. Demented includes a multitude of multiplexes featuring films that are only sequels of familiar titles. Given the current landscape of cinema, where everything is a remake, reboot, sequel, or soon-to-fail Star Wars spinoff, John Waters had a prescient outlook in 2000.
It’s kind of nice imagining a world where the only thing dividing people is taste in pop culture. Yet, at the same time, perhaps more so now than at the time of release, there’s a subtle indictment of fandoms. The intensity of Cecil and his followers may be comically absurd, but it speaks to a dark truth.
The idea that toxic fandom is new reeks of blessed naivety. When Michael Keaton was cast as Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, comic book shops organized a petition campaign to “stop the Batman movie.” At one point, Warner Bros. received roughly 50,000 letters protesting the casting decision. Now, fans of the film are begging for another Keaton appearance as the caped crusader and embracing comic book continuations of the Burtonverse. While it goes to show that fans aren’t always the best casting directors, it’s also interesting to ponder what might have been if the internet existed back then.
Fan campaigns, motivated by everything from racism to misogyny, have dog-piled on performers before films even come out. Without ever seeing the movie, entitled online trolls complain about African Americans in roles they see as exclusively white. Case in point, John Boyega in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015); which then results in articles not only decrying this behavior, but also feeling the need to explain how a fictional universe could have racial diversity. The point being that fans have a possessive parasocial entitlement to fantasy realms, and this extends by degrees into the very act of creative expression. After all, people tend to treat art as an extension of their personal identity.
It makes one wonder how fandoms would duke it out over classic Hollywood feuds such as Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford or Frank Sinatra being a rude pig to Elvira. The thing is, fans never see themselves as villains, which is the case with Cecil and the Sprocket Holes. That’s not to justify the ways they lash out (although many a director wouldn’t mind being able to taze a problematic performer into doing as they’re told), but a recognition that opens the window on why folks get extreme. It isn’t solely the anonymity of the internet; it’s the idea of being a knight in shining armor.
One of the running gags throughout the film is a Hollywood production of Forrest Gump 2: Gump Again. Those who dislike Forrest Gump (1994) for being shmaltzy nostalgia triggers tricking people into thinking they’ve seen a good movie can enjoy the Sprocket Holes’ naked contempt for it. Folks simply disgusted by Hollywood’s desire to cynically cash in on a meaningless sequel will also feel satisfied. Both points of view are valid since, like all good art, Cecil B. Demented isn’t about one thing.
While there’s room to criticize the sledgehammer subtlety of such points, keep in mind these outlaw cinema terrorists aren’t exactly restrained when expressing their ideas. The obviousness of observations throughout Cecil B. Demented fits with the outlandish behavior of its characters. Anything more muted, unemotional, or indirect would also subtract from the comical absurdity of situations.
Cecil B. Demented isn’t a debate about the state of cinema. It’s a bar fight between people so certain of their positions, they’ll knock each senseless over a raised eyebrow then spend the rest of the night in the same bar, glaring at one another while bleeding and drinking angrily. Subtlety doesn’t factor into such a darkly comic portrait of pretentiously absurd extremism.
Such a vein runs through a lot of films by John Waters. It’s a central theme of Pecker (1998), wherein Edward Furlong plays a humble photographer launched into stardom thanks to his grainy, unglamorous photos. But like so many works by Waters, it skewers the idea of what counts as art as well as why people are famous. That’s because as campy and comical as his movies are, Waters is adept at holding up a mirror for society to reflect in darkly.
In that respect, he and David Lynch have very similar careers. Both are godfathers of the midnight movie, and they achieved that honor by exposing, in their own ways, the hypocrisy of suburban culture, specifically in the United States. Growing up in roughly the same era, they share a fascination with the aesthetics of the 1950s as well as prevailing attitudes of the time, censorship in films, music, etc. Waters essentially related all this and more in the documentary Lynch/Oz (2022), where he discussed their similarities. Consider that the noir-ish revelations of Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) aren’t that distant from Serial Mom (1994), wherein Waters presents a quasi-slasher satire about a suburban mom killing anyone who threatens her idyllic Rockwellian portrait.
John Waters excels at composing fictional realities which resonate with our own a little too closely. In them, people are willing to do anything for fame because power through pop culture acclaim allows folks to do whatever they want. Hairspray showed how that can lead to social reform when Tracy Turnblad uses it to press for desegregation. Cry-Baby similarly pressed for socioeconomic equality. Notoriety, even as a result of nefarious deeds, results in a platform, one where outcasts can’t be ignored.
Unfortunately, critics and audiences didn’t care for the film. With all due respect to Roger Ebert’s negative review, Peter Matthews put it best, “Attacking a Waters movie on aesthetic grounds seems as redundant an activity as lamenting the culinary deficiencies of tinned spaghetti. His films are so blissfully aware of their own tackiness that they’re just about impossible to resist.”
People seem to have been looking at what it said about the present back then as well as hoping for more extreme, transformative transgression. However, Waters appears to have been looking towards tomorrow. Cecil B. Demented celebrates an era of filmmaking that may not happen again, when independent movies could still jab at blockbuster bullies, while doing so with a sentimentality largely absent in the irony-soaked years since its release.
Cecil B. Demented is about people who love films so much they’ll do anything to keep them interesting. Indeed, good art requires a certain extremism. At the very least, one needs a vision beyond dollar signs.
