John Waters' Movie World Satire Cecil B. Demented Is a Gloriously Scuzzy Tribute to Guerrilla Filmmaking
John Waters’ winningly warped 2000 show-business satire Cecil B. Demented doesn’t just represent a return to gonzo, profane, gleefully anarchistic cinema of rebellion after the mainstream moves and crossover success of softer, gentler yet still terrific movies like Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom. Cecil B. Demented, which takes its title from a filmmaker whose career began in the silent era and its raucous spirit from the underground cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s as well as the counterculture of that era, doubles as a blood-soaked, sex-crazed, proudly anti-social valentine to the cinema of transgression Waters embodies in an unusually pure form.
The movie represents a return in other ways as well. The beloved, Baltimore-based writer-director and national treasure didn’t have to look far for inspiration. Waters didn’t even have to go beyond his own troupe of repertory players for the film’s plot although he of course twisted the true-life tale to suit his idiosyncratic needs.
Cecil B. Demented is an enormously ingratiating film-length riff on the legend of Patricia Hearst, the legendary heiress who was kidnapped by the questionable revolutionaries of the Symbionese Liberation Army. With the whole world watching, but particularly the press, Hearst seemed to have gone native and joined the confused militants in their criminal endeavors, like bank robbery, before getting captured.
Cecil B. Demented has a pretty direct link to this classic piece of tabloid Americana in the presence of Patricia Hearst herself, who by the turn of the millennium had long since made an unlikely transformation from aristocratic American media royalty to John Waters repertory player, appearing in Cry Baby, Serial Mom, Cecil B. Demented and A Dirty Shame.
Hearst's contribution to Cecil B. Demented goes far beyond her minor supporting role. Hearst was clearly the inspiration for Cecil B. Demented, which asks what her too-strange-for-fiction brush with criminal infamy might have looked like if, instead of press royalty, the kidnapped cultural heavyweight was a fading queen of the silver screen (played here by Melanie Griffith) and instead of being kidnapped and brainwashed by political revolutionaries, the guilty party were crazed cinematic revolutionaries waging a guerrilla, innately doomed war against the soul-crushing forces of the Hollywood establishment.
Waters tends to cast actors as much for their offscreen lives as their suitability for roles. He certainly did not work repeatedly with Hearst due to her Margo Martingale-like acting chops. That’s true of Griffith as well. Griffith isn’t just a tabloid fixture and Hollywood royalty, she’s also the daughter of a movie star (Tippi Hedren), the mother of another (Dakota Johnson) and the wife of still two more movie stars (first Don Johnson and then Antonio Banderas).
Being a quintessential student of trash and Hollywood, Waters undoubtedly appreciated Griffith’s amazing pedigree: mother tormented by Alfred Hitchcock and birds both mechanical and real, adolescence spent in a home with an actual LION, as dramatized in the movie Roar, playing a porn star for Brian DePalma in Body Double and a different kind of working girl for Mike Nichols in her career-defining role in the film of the same name, and the proverbial much, much more.
Griffith may not a great actress but she is one hell of a movie star and that’s what the movie not only calls for but angrily demands. Cecil B. Demented affords an exceedingly game Griffith a priceless opportunity to spoof her image as Honey Whitlock, a fading diva who is all honey-dripping charm when the cameras are on and a nightmarish monster of id and ego when they’re off. Honey personifies the awfulness, hypocrisy and fake sanctimony of the show-business establishment.
Cecil B. Demented’s ripped-from-very-old-headlines plot finds Honey preparing for the debut of her latest glossy melodrama in the busy hub of cinematic activity that is John Waters’ believed hometown of Baltimore.
In Cecil B. Demented, the Baltimore Film Commission, of all people, stand in for the corrupt, bought-and-sold film establishment. The resistance, meanwhile, is led by the titular movie maverick (Stephen Dorff, back when that meant something), a crazed cult leader (born Sinclair Stevens) whose God is cinema and whose makeshift church is an abandoned movie theater where his gang holes up after abducting the movie star during the blood-filled aborted debut of her new movie.
Cecil B. Demented is the king of the cinematic freaks, a true believer willing to die, and also to kill, for arthouse cinema. He’s assisted by a lovingly crafted gallery of fellow film freaks, including a pre-stardom Michael Shannon as a towering hillbilly type with a weakness for the grim cinema of Rainer Fassbinder, Alicia Witt as a porn star with extensive experience in a much different variety of extreme film than the kind Demented worships, Maggie Gyllenhaal as a lovely young woman whose two great loves in life are movies and also serving her dark lord Satan and Adrien Grenier, who would go on to embody the lazy, mercenary and self-regarding Hollywood the movie is railing against insouciantly as the star of Entourage but who is surprisingly funny here as the rebel collective’s resident doper. Grenier’s role only calls for him to be a stoned idiot but that’s definitely within his very narrow range as an actor.
The kamikaze cinematic collective’s not terribly well-thought out plan is to abduct Honey at her big premiere and then force her at gunpoint to be the unwitting star of their new movie. The ultimate film fanatics are intent on making the ultimate art film/cinema verite provocation, an incendiary outlaw manifesto filmed on location with real bullets, real bloodshed, real dying and extras who don’t realize they’re part of Cecil and the gang’s mad vision to wage all-out war on the enemies of cinema.
Cecil gives his hormonally crazed collaborators the ultimate incentive to finish the movie: they can’t have sex until shooting wraps. Since they all seem to exist in a state of perpetual frenzied horniness, they’re eager to finish things up as quickly as possible for reasons sexual as well as cinematic.
Honey is predictably horrified to find her glamorous, tidy life of convenience violently interrupted by a makeshift underground cinema army. She cries out for the civilizing intervention of the studios or Jack Valenti. But over the course of her misadventures in rebel cinema Honey becomes radicalized to the cause of cinematic revolution and comes to identify with her kidnapper’s righteous crusade. Together they’re a gang of scrappy arthouse Davids taking on the ghoulish Goliath of terrible mainstream studio cinema.
For a movie about kill-crazy lunatics willing to commit cold-blooded murder to stop atrocities like Kevin Nealon starring in the title role of the sixty five-million dollar blockbuster Forrest Gump 2 from happening, Cecil B. Demented is an awfully big-hearted, inclusive movie. What else would you expect from Waters?
Cecil B. Demented is about the liberating power of vulgarity, on both a personal and a cultural basis. It’s a middle finger to propriety and to the establishment (whether in Hollywood or Baltimore) fueled equally by joy and anger.
True, Waters’ loving send-up/homage takes aim at everyone from opportunistic film commissions to people who talk during movies to regulations-obsessed teamsters to sequels to video game adaptations to dubbing foreign films to multiplexes that play nothing but Star Trek and Star Wars movies. Yet for an angry jeremiad against mainstream commercial cinema, Cecil B. Demented oozes love and affection for the underdogs, outsiders and degenerates that have always been Waters’ people, whether they’re kung-fu fanatics, the queer community, sex freaks, dopers or crazed cult cinephiles so obsessed that they have the names of their favorite filmmakers tattooed onto their bodies. Cecil B. Demented takes the concept of “cult filmmaker” literally in the most extreme possible sense, in that Cecil is both making a cult movie and also a cult leader in the Charles Manson/Jim Jones mold, only he’s willing to die for movies, which makes him a hero as well as a villain in Waters’ admiring eyes.
In true John Waters tradition, Cecil B. Demented is both naughty and nice. It’s in exquisitely bad taste yet radiates love for the medium of film and the beautiful freaks who devote their lives to the sacred church of celluloid. Waters is such an innately lovable figure that he’s seemingly incapable of making a movie that isn’t immensely likable even when it’s overflowing with righteous rage.
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