John Waters' Serial Mom is a Killer Dark Comedy
John Waters’ existence makes the world a better, weirder place. And that’s just the man. I’m not even talking about his movies.
It could be argued that Waters’ truest gift is being John Waters. He has perfected the art of being himself. The world is grateful. Waters’ cultural footprint is so huge and he is so widely, fiercely beloved that his persona is bigger than movies.
Everybody knows John Waters. Fewer people have seen Female Trouble or Pink Flamingos, but his films reflect a personality and sensibility that the world has fallen in love with, and for good reason: he’s the best. I love that dude. It will be a sad day, hopefully in the very distant future, when he is no longer with us.
I recently had the pleasure of re-watching Cecil B. Demented for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on American movies about filmmaking. I liked the film for the most part the first time I saw it, but I LOVED it this time around.
The same is true of 1988’s Hairspray and 1990’s Cry Baby. So I was excited about the prospect of re-watching 1994’s Serial Mom because I have an enormous fondness for this period in Waters’ career when he was making studio movies for mainstream audiences without sacrificing everything that makes him special and unique.
Waters’ exceedingly dark comedy explores our culture’s sick fascination with serial killers, murder, and true crime. But since this is a John Waters movie the attitude towards this romanticization and exploitation of the murderously unwell is one of gleeful enthusiasm rather than sour judgment.
The pop icon may take a strong stance against wearing white after Labor Day, not recycling, or wearing a seat belt. Waters would, however, never be churlish enough to come down harshly against people for something as minor and understandable as being fascinated by depraved monsters who derive sick joy from torturing and murdering people.
Serial Mom is Waters’ tongue-in-cheek tribute to mass murderers and moms, and moms who are also mass murderers. How appropriate that I am writing this the day after Mother’s Day.
A perfectly cast, wonderfully game Kathleen Turner, perhaps the biggest star Waters has ever worked with, is hilarious as Beverly Sutphin. Beverly is a very different kind of femme fatale than the ones that Turner played in Body Heat and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, although, to be fair, Jessica Rabbit was not actually bad, she was just drawn that way.
For starters, Beverly has a much more impressive body count than any other character she’s played. Instead of oozing old-school movie star sensuality, Beverly personifies suburban propriety and conformity with one notable exception.
When Beverly gets annoyed, she overreacts ever so slightly by brutally murdering whoever is cheesing her off. For this doyenne of domesticity, there is a price to be paid for faux pas and acts of insensitivity. That price is murder.
From the outside, Beverly leads a seemingly idyllic existence as the station-wagon-driving, stay-at-home wife of dentist Eugene (Sam Waterson) and mother of horror movie-loving video store employee Chip (Matthew Lillard, playing a slasher sicko two years before Scream) and boy-crazy Misty (Ricki Lake).
Beverly’s neighbors do not realize that she leads a secret life as a serial killer-obsessed wacko eager to make the big leap from reading about mass murderers and writing letters to incarcerated killers, and befriending serial sickos, to being a serial killer herself.
She starts out small, with filthy prank calls to Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole). That isn’t enough, however, so when she’s unimpressed by a teacher who doesn’t like horror movies, she commits vehicular homicide by running him over with her car.
This gets Beverly’s bloodlust going. Once she starts, she can’t stop. A pet peeve-fueled murder spree ensues, with Turner’s petty avenger playing judge, jury, and executioner for transgressions like wearing white after Labor Day, cheating on her daughter, having poor taste in music, and all-around thoughtlessness.
Beverly’s obsession with serial killers and eagerness to join their ranks worries her family, who wish she would pursue a hobby other than murdering members of the community for comically insignificant, unjustified reasons.
The exceedingly obvious, public nature of her crimes leads to her arrest and then a trial that takes up much of the film’s third act.
The prosecutor would seem to have an open and shut case. After all, Beverly hadn’t exactly been subtle or discreet in the manner in which she coldly ended the lives of others.
Beverly’s lawyer is understandably overwhelmed by the sheer preponderance of evidence against his client, but he soon loses his unenviable position when Beverly decides to defy conventional wisdom by representing herself.
Beverly is insane. But she’s also an attractive, put-together white suburban housewife, so she can get away with anything, including murder.
The film’s iconic hero/anti-hero/villain’s legal strategy involves turning the tables on the state’s witnesses. Serial Mom asks what’s really worse: the person scrawling graffiti on a bathroom wall, smoking pot, or wearing white after Labor Day, or the person who brutally murders people for those non-transgressions?
Serial Mom realizes that Beverly may be going just a little bit overboard, but it perversely seems to be on her side all the same. What would you expect from the proud owner of one of John Wayne Gacy’s paintings?
Getting Sam Waterson as the hubby is nearly as much a coup as snagging Turner. But where Turner is all icy calculation and then white-hot, murderous rage, Waterson gives the most cartoonishly broad performance imaginable.
On television, Waterson epitomizes gravitas and dignity. So there’s something wonderfully subversive about casting him in a role and a film with no use for dignity or gravitas. I wouldn’t say that he gives a bad performance, necessarily, but he delivers a very silly, wonderfully out-of-character turn as a man who is understandably concerned that, not unlike Mike Myers a year earlier, he had married a murderer.
Serial Mom is another gleefully anarchic gob of spit in the face of propriety and conformity perversely centered around a woman who at least looks like she’d be at a PTA meeting worrying about the children, the precious children, rather than indulge her inner Night Stalker.
The studio apparently objected to the violence and dark comedy in Serial Mom, which is peculiar considering that it’s pretty much all violence and dark comedy. They wanted Waters to change the ending and soften the movie as a whole, but he heroically resisted.
Serial Mom was not a hit at the box office but went on to become a major cult movie. I sincerely enjoyed it because I sincerely enjoy John Waters as a filmmaker and a uniquely wonderful human being.
It’s too bad he’s gone decades without making a new movie but, god willing, that is going to change soon.
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