A Ph.D. candidate from UCLA exposed a grotesque and enlightening side of independent filmmaking to students yesterday.
Loran Marsan, a student from the University of California, Los Angeles, who is working on her dissertation in Women's Studies, presented to a group of about 10 students and faculty members in the Women’s Center yesterday about the representation of drag in John Waters' earlier films. Waters is most famous for his films Pink Flamingos and the original Hairspray.
The idea of taking on different identities originated when people of mixed races passed as white people, Marsan said. This trend eventually led to men passing as women in drag.
Most of Waters' independent films from the 1970s featured a character in drag named Divine. This recurring character shocked audiences by partaking in scenes that were both offensive and grotesque, she said.
Some of these scenes included characters participating in incest, recreating the assassination of John F. Kennedy or eating dog poop.
These obscene scenes served a purpose to draw attention away from the fact that there was a man dressed as a woman on the screen, Marsan said.
“Since his films have so much abjection and disgust, the small fact that there's a man dressed as a woman doesn't seem to matter as much,” she said.
She added that Divine's drag in the films passes as acceptable to viewers because of Waters' method of filmmaking.
“Drag passes as one of the tamer aspects of the film,” Marsan said.
This idea of grotesque characters exists in popular culture today. Marsan said she found a strong correlation between Waters' techniques and horror films that are produced today. There are also aspects of these obscene themes in reality television, she said.
“In the show The Bad Girls Club, we see these strong and grotesque caricatures, but they still go back into the fold (of being socially acceptable),” she said.
aw317609@ohiou.edu
