Dirty Talk

John Waters is slated to come to Kansas City for a ceramics convention. Yes, we mean the film director whose characters have done everything from eating shit to getting naked and licking people’s toes. And no, he’s not a ceramist.

“I have my own craft, which is filth,” Waters says from his Baltimore office. “That’s what I sculpt.” He’s coming to the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Conference to talk about creativity in general, which he is more than qualified to do.

Waters is less certain of his role in a panel discussion called “Eroticism as Liberation in Ceramics.” “What’s sexy to me is not always sexy to others,” he admits.

Connoisseurs of Waters’ filmography might be relieved to know that he does not necessarily think his films are sexy. “Well,” he says, “they’re funny, and funny is sexy to me. I think going to one of my movies can be romantic, but I don’t know about sexy.” He’s heard of people seeing his movies on first dates and ending up married, but mostly reactions to his films tend to be extreme: “It either gets you laid or never kissed,” he says.

But of all possible reactions to his work, Waters prefers to see people “laugh and look bewildered.” Sometimes the laughter stems from discomfort. After all, it’s impossible not to feel slightly ill at ease watching the actor Divine, dressed in men’s clothing, perform oral sex on the actor Divine in a dress (the drag version yelling, “Eat it! Eat it!”). But that’s the idea. Waters believes that “once you make people laugh, they’ll listen to you.”

In recent films such as Cecil B. Demented, Pecker and even Serial Mom, Waters manages to amuse viewers without showing them more human anatomy than they care to see. “I continue to think up weird, neurotic stuff,” he says, explaining that his career has changed fairly dramatically since he started working in an office and stopped smoking pot. “A twenty-year-old angry kid can be sexy,” he notes, “but a fifty-year-old angry man is a joke.”

Similarly, Waters’ early, underground films don’t make people’s jaws drop for the same reasons they used to. He recalls that when Pink Flamingos came out in 1972, people reacted more vocally to Mink Stole’s and David Lochary’s characters’ selling babies to lesbians than to the pair’s locking unsuspecting hitchhikers in the basement and impregnating them against their will. That’s fine with Waters, who recognizes that his understanding of what’s shocking is far from typical. “When I go to a movie, and I think, ‘Oh, this is horrible; it’s so stupid,’ that shocks me,” he says.

Waters is eager to find out whether ceramists live up to their stereotype — but first he must find out what the stereotype is. “I’ve done library conventions,” he points out, “and librarians are the total opposite of the cliché. They’re wild, all of them!”