Following
Pink Flamingos, his movies
Female Trouble (1975),
Desperate Living (1977), and
Polyester (1981) have been described as "vulgar and cheerful nihilism," "blasphemous," "sophomoric," and "whimsical." Foul language and scatological visual and verbal references made these works unappealing to middle America. Critics and audiences either hated his films or loved them, hailing him as an iconoclastic artist. His themes often presage cultural trends by decades. For example, in
Female Trouble, the crazed heroine believes death in the electric chair for a life of crime is the equivalent of an Academy Award. Water's loopy characterization antedated by nearly 20 years Oliver Stone's controversial treatment of warped lovers who go on a killing rampage to achieve media notoriety in
Natural Born Killers (1994).
In the 1990s, Waters graduated from cult and midnight-movie houses to suburban multiplexes with such films as Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), and Pecker (1998). Waters' second period continues his biting satire of American culture but without reference to such perversions as incest, coprophagy, castration, necrophilia, and the gross visual images of the earlier films. A unifying theme of both periods is his focus on characters who are "insane but believe they are sane," Waters told National Public Radio interviewer Terry Gross in 1998.
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