Reflections on ... All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

/ Pictured: Self Portrait 1st Time on Oxy, Berlin, 2014 by Nan Goldin /

In Laura Poitras’ lacerating Oscar-nominated new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), fierce 69-year-old photographer Nan Goldin - think of her as the Marianne Faithfull of modern art (or as Variety puts it, “the post-punk Diane Arbus”) - emerges as a captivatingly blunt tough cookie. The film deftly weaves together her art, activism and history of personal trauma and Poitras wisely mainly lets Goldin narrate it herself in her broken chain-smoker rasp. 

/ Nan Goldin in Boston, 1970 / 

The focus encompasses early family tragedy (the story of her doomed older sister Barbara is wrenching), Goldin’s artistic epiphany photographing her LGBTQ friends and her early years hustling in grungy 1980s New York (she go-go danced in New Jersey “titty bars”, bartended and did sex work at a brothel to buy rolls of film). Goldin eventually achieves international acclaim but also weathers the AIDS crisis, violent relationships and drug addiction. 

/ Trixie on the Cot, New York City 1979 by Nan Goldin /

While Goldin has openly battled substance abuse over the decades (she frequently depicts herself in rehab in her self-portraits), nothing prepared her for the hell of OxyContin, which she was prescribed following an injury. Once Goldin recovered, she was enraged to learn the very galleries that display her work benefited from the support of the Sacklers – the mega-rich family behind Purdue Pharma whose wealth is tainted by the OxyContin-fueled opioid crisis and who position themselves as art world philanthropists as a means of image-laundering. Forming the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2018, Goldin undertook powerful demonstrations to shame the world’s cultural institutions into cutting ties with the Sackler family. (Goldin witnessed Act Up protests in the 80s and clearly took notes). 

/ Portrait of Cookie Mueller by Nan Goldin / 

Bittersweet as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is (and the Sacklers retreat into their wealth rather than face any real consequences), it’s gratifying to see galleries finally start refusing the family’s money. There are vivid glimpses of totemic avant-garde downtown NYC denizens like Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Greer Lankton and Vivienne Dick. And as you would anticipate, the soundtrack is impeccably hip (Klaus Nomi. Bush Tetras. The Velvet Underground. Suicide). 

Reflections on ... Multiple Maniacs (1970)

[I reviewed Criterion's new Blu-ray release of John Waters Multiple Maniacs for gay arts and culture website HISKIND in March 2017. Read it here.  Disappointingly, they edited the hell out of it, deleting all my efforts to put the film into context – so I’m posting it here in its uncut / uncensored original version!]

It’s looking increasingly unlikely cinema’s high potentate of trash John Waters will ever make another movie following 2004’s commercial flop A Dirty Shame. (In recent years, the 70-year old “peoples’ pervert” has successfully diversified, spreading his joyous message of filth via books and spoken word tours instead of films). 

But happily for Waters’ legions of fanatics ravenous for a lurid sensationalism fix, they get to rediscover one of his freshly-exhumed obscure classicks (sic). For decades, Multiple Maniacs (1970) - which Waters himself calls his “celluloid atrocity” - has been virtually impossible to see.  A grainy, scuzzy VHS was issued in the eighties, then it occasionally surfaced as a poor-quality pixelated bootleg (Waters’ legal team promptly deletes it every time it crops up on YouTube) - but until now it’s never officially been available on DVD or Blu-ray. And now Criterion has handled Multiple Maniacs like it’s a prestigious art movie, giving it a loving deluxe digital remaster treatment. Watching this crystalline deep velvety black-and-white revival of Multiple Maniacs is like experiencing a whole new film.

/ Divine as Lady Divine in Multiple Maniacs / 

Forty-seven years later, the restored, reviled and revolting Multiple Maniacs hasn’t lost its capacity to startle. It still feels insanely raw, nasty, punk and queer. And it’s essential to understanding Waters’ subsequent films (Multiple Maniacs suggests a preliminary sketch for his next film, 1972’s more famous Pink Flamingos). In her first starring role, Waters’ 300-pound hog princess drag queen leading lady and muse Divine portrays Lady Divine, the cruel and amoral proprietoress of traveling freak show “The Cavalcade of Perversions” of assorted sluts, fags, dykes and pimps. (The sensational revue incorporates vomit eaters, bicycle seat lickers, a junkie writhing in withdrawal and “two queers actually kissing on the lips like lovers”). When we first encounter Lady Divine, she’s lounging stark naked on a bed and barking orders at her minions – think Liz Taylor as Cleopatra. Upon learning her carnival barker boyfriend and criminal accomplice Mr David is leaving her for another woman, a homicidal Lady Divine embarks on a berserk rampage.  The film concludes with a cannibalistic blood orgy (Multiple Maniacs – made in ’69 – was Waters’ response to the Charles Manson Family murders in same way Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was for Russ Meyer). Oh and – spoiler alert – a giant lobster is involved.

/ David Lochary as Mr David in Multiple Maniacs /  

Sure, in technical terms neophyte Waters’ filmmaking is frankly amateurish (which makes Multiple Maniacs feel like a lunatic home movie) and the actors sometimes stumble over the verbose script. But there is much here to make a Waters devotee swoon in frenzied ecstasy. The cast features Waters’ familiar stable of regular actors at their most heartbreakingly youthful and fresh-faced, like David Lochary and Mink Stole (Raymond and Connie Marble, the villains of Pink Flamingos), Mary Vivian Pearce, Cookie Mueller as Divine’s hard-boiled lisping (frequently topless) juvenile delinquent daughter and – in her film debut - the beloved snaggle-toothed outsider actress and punk granny Edith Massey.  The vicious dialogue is predictably quotable (“I love you so fucking much that I could shit!” “And all at once she inserted her rosary into one of my most private parts …”) while the soundtrack encompasses ominous rumbling surf instrumentals and twangy rockabilly. Thematically, Multiple Maniacs sees Waters lashing out at his Catholic upbringing:  the “rosary job” Divine receives from perverted religious whore Mink Stole and the blasphemous re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross still feel taboo and sacrilegious. 

/ Edith Massey as The Virgin Mary in Multiple Maniacs / 

Best of all, Multiple Maniacs captures iconic freak diva Divine-in-embryo, still a fleshy young starlet or ingénue on the ascent.  Mincing around like Jayne Mansfield in a skin-tight leopard print pencil skirt and brunette wig, snarling her lines and sometimes actually foaming at the mouth in excitement, this represents early Divine at the height of her monstrous beauty.

The promotional tagline for Multiple Maniacs screams, “Better than amyl nitrate! Better than Carbona! Better than heroin!” What other film could live up to those claims? It’s like an intravenous jolt of bad taste. For long-term Waters aficionados, the Blu-ray release of Multiple Maniacs is the equivalent of Christmas day. For newcomers to Waters’ oeuvre, it offers an excellent introduction. Get corrupted!

MULTIPLE MANIACS - available to buy on Blu-ray from 20th March 2017 from the Criterion Collection 

Further reading: Read my epic 2010 interview with John Waters here

Reflections on ... John Waters' Role Models (2010)

(In preparation for swapping my creaky 8-year old PC for a gleaming new laptop, I'm combing through and sorting old files of ancient photos and documents and deleting crap. I came across this review I wrote of John Waters' 2010 book Role Models. It appeared on the alternative art and culture Nude website at the time, but that was yanked down a few years ago now, so I'm posting it here for posterity). 

There’s an illuminating anecdote in Prince of Puke John Waters’ new book. In 1957 aged 11 he shoplifted a Little Richard record.  Sneaking it onto the hi-fi at his grandmother’s house, Waters felt a spasm of pleasure at the horrified reaction when The Bronze Liberace started wailing “Lucille”: “In one magical moment, every fear of my white family had been laid bare: an uninvited, screaming flamboyant black man was in the living room.” His impulse to épater le bourgeois was already seething even in childhood.

Role Models profiles the various personalities who've warped the wworld-view of cinema’s trash virtuoso, encompassing people from fashion, music, pornography, literature – plus a former member of the Manson Family. Most interesting are the freaks from subterranean Baltimore who anticipate the gallery of grotesques from Waters’ films:  a teenage drag queen called Pencil (“rabidly enticing despite his repellent packaging”); Zorro the alcoholic stripper who’d stumble onto the stage already naked snarling, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

Waters shares his thoughts on modern art (“Isn't that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate?”), his ideal death (spontaneous combustion), a social history of his favourite squalid Baltimore dive bars, his philosophy of success (“True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks”),even his beauty tips (his signature moustache is augmented with Maybelline Expert Eyes in Velvet Black eyeliner).

For Waters, reading Tennessee Williams revealed, “There was another world ... a universe filled with special people who didn't want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.” For many of us, Waters himself has served a similar role. Trenchant but generous, Role Models reads like missives from a wise uncle for the maladjusted who counsels, “Make friends with your neuroses.”

All of the above photos are swiped from the current issue of i-D magazine. It's a must-have, featuring a lovingly-done interview and fashion spread / homage (by Alasdair McLellan) to cult cinema king and “the peoples’ pervert” John Waters shot on location in Baltimore. It incorporates portraits of Waters, his great regular character actress Mink Stole, a shot of Divine’s tombstone and a fashion model clad in Miuccia Prada’s spring/summer 15 Miu Miu range (inspired by Waters’ 1974 masterpiece Female Trouble) and styled to evoke bad girl Cookie Mueller (1949-1989). The hair and make-up people nicely capture Mueller’s tousled beehive hair-do and winged Brigitte Bardot-style black liquid eyeliner – but the model is considerably softer-looking than the actual tough-as-nails Cookie, and doesn't have Mueller’s home-made tattoos.

Read my epic 2010 interview with Waters here.