Temptation enters Ralph the extra’s life in the guise of an older woman. Mrs. Smithers is “filthy” rich with all the best movie connections. Embellishing this filthiness is how she takes her pleasure — she loves getting slapped around by gigolos. McCoy uses the novel’s filmic context by having Mrs. Smithers seduce Ralph with pornographic home movies. Ralph succumbs, not quickly, not completely, and not, finally, successfully — he doesn’t get a part but he also doesn’t ever give up. And throughout the novel, Mona, as chorus or superego, warns him against Mrs. Smithers and himself; the two extras’ dialogues construct a kind of argument about how far and how much are okay in the pursuit of success.
Relatively plotless, though replete with the genre’s dark mayhem — suicide, court scenes, jail for Ralph — the story is primarily a journey, Ralph’s making his way, or not making it, in the world. In this Pilgrim’s Progress, the hero’s struggle is not with God and the devil but with the secular world. McCoy uses Hollywood as the paradigm, the apotheosis, of capitalist society at a time when the myth of Horatio Alger was becoming a maudlin and corroded irony.
Ralph’s battle with his own corruption and loss of principle is key to McCoy’s work generally. His protagonists fight the good fight. In I Should Have Stayed Home, Mona refuses to be interviewed by fan magazines and rails against them for creating false and insatiable longings. A friend of Mona’s, Johnny Hill, who does publicity for a studio, quits his job because a German consul was able to have censored a part of a movie in which “German youngsters [are] drilled as soldiers.”
Then, in the reflexive mode, Johnny announces to Mona and Ralph that he’s going to write a novel about Hollywood’s extras—“the true story of this town concerns people like you — a girl like you and a boy like him. Maybe I’ll put you two in a book. Understand I don’t think I’ve got any special talent for novel writing.” Ralph-in-Hollywood is McCoy’s meditation on desire and failure. Through failure may now be the unspeakable of our society, in the midst of the Depression it was an existential fact of life. McCoy’s Hollywood is the nightmare machine that produces phonies, monsters and wasted youth, sadness and sadism. He sees failure embedded within the system; there will always be people who don’t make it.
McCoy’s version of cultural politics is, like the country he’s from, contradictory. There’s some “conventional” racism, homophobia and misogyny side by side with sympathy for the underdog and hope for a nationwide new deal. Contemporary “conventional” attitudes are as questionable but more difficult to isolate from the narratives — ideologies — that we live. It seems easier to spot offensive or questionable ideas in work from earlier periods, in part because language and style change. Concepts such as “underdog” and “phony” may seem dated in today’s parlance and in our nation, as presidents wrap themselves in symbols and commit highly unsymbolic HUD and S&L frauds. And get away with it. It’s banal now even to say that corruption is endemic when many are positioned as permanent underdogs, the underclass.
Reading the out-of-print McCoy returns one to the not-so-distant past and to another consciousness. McCoy’s sometimes uncomfortable speeches, prejudices and “old-fashioned” language bespeak the U.S.’s disturbed history, its citizens’ noble and ignoble values. His writing style itself speaks a very American language, presaging the Beats; long flowing sentences and a moody lyricism alternate with terse, plain speech. Like other American writers from the Transcendentalists on, McCoy eulogizes a disappearing America, its hometowns and daily life transformed by powerful economic and social forces. Hard-boiled despair is personal, political and unpopular. But given our economy, McCoy’s lessons on living with failure might come in handy.
Guide for the Misbegotten
In his novella Tonio Kröger, Thomas Mann writes, “Only a beginner believes those who create feel.” Kroger is a young middle-class German who considers himself manqué both as a bourgeois and as an artist. John Waters might be the anti-Kröger — a well-off, middle-class man whose life and art mock high, low, middle and all their fuzzy gradations. He’s an aesthete and an anti-aesthete; he’s classy and classless. Filmmaker, artist, writer, actor, Waters revels in spectacle and spectatorship; and the joys of making, being and observing fill the pages of Role Models, his 2010 collection of essays. In Mann’s terms, Waters might be that rare creature: An artist who feels.
Early in his career, Waters became known for films depicting bizarre characters in outrageous, super-melodramatic situations, as in Desperate Living (1977), a gay/lesbian/cross-dressing murder fantasy set in Mortville, a circuslike shantytown. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque nicely fits these films. A contemporary Lewis Carroll, Waters luxuriates in the topsy-turviness of life, and his somewhat more conventional recent films depend, like most narratives, on the reversal of fortune. In Pecker (1998), the eponymous protagonist flees instant New York art-world stardom when his photographs of Baltimore buddies and family subject them to unwanted and unsympathetic attention. What dances on the surface in this and other Waters films is explicit in Role Models: a concern for art, fun, justice and people.
The essays recount actual and imaginary encounters with ordinary but extraordinary people, as well as with celebrities such as Little Richard and 1950s crooner Johnny Mathis. Their stories, intermingled with Waters’ own, comprise a kind of bildungsroman, or even a portrait of the artist as a collage of his influences. Take the chapter on Mathis, which kicks off the book. “I wish I were Johnny Mathis,” Waters confesses. “So mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect.” None of these qualities characterizes Waters’ own oeuvre; but as he himself asks, “Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites.?” Waters once chanced to see the elusive Mathis but didn’t have the nerve to talk to him, and then felt compelled to interview his undoppelgänger. “[Mathis’s] appeal is broad and wide, something I could never achieve and he can never escape.”
Thinking about the singer, Waters travels down memory lane and unearths other boyhood heroes, like Clarabell, the clown on TV’s Howdy Doody Show, played by Bob Keeshan, later Captain Kangaroo. “Imagine his life, his schizophrenia,” Waters writes of Keeshan. “Am I Clarabell? Or Captain Kangaroo?” It was Clarabell whose clownish makeup would inspire Divine — Waters’s apotheosis and star, the drag-queen actor featured in many of his films, first celebrated in Pink Flamingos (1972) for eating actual dog shit on a Baltimore street. Au revoir, good taste, Waters sings, and good riddance.
Role Models pays homage to Baltimore, Waters’s muse and hometown, whose culture spawned many magnificent oddballs, as well as the bars and barkeeps who nursed his imagination. In the chapter “Baltimore Heroes,” Waters writes, “The good [bars] have no irony about them. They’re not ‘faux’ anything. They’re real and alarming.” He gravitates toward characters like Esther, a fierce, bad mother with a filthy mouth who slings whiskey and fears nothing, and Lady Zorro, “an angry stripper with a history of physical and sexual abuse with a great body and the face of a man.” Waters reflects: “To this day Zorro is my inspiration. Brave. Without makeup. Like Tilda Swinton at the Oscars.”