Sultan of Shock

By RICHARD CORLISS

Really now, America, your fondness for intimate atrocity is getting out of hand. Aren't there fewer cases of serial killers in the U.S. than there are books, movies and TV shows about them? It's sick but true: a statistically minute aristocracy of psychotics has commandeered pop culture.

John Waters understands. For a quarter-century, the 47-year-old filmmaker has been America's pre-eminent satirist of domestic depravity. He is also an elegant comic essayist, who puckishly wrote in 1985 that killing a celebrity is "the only sure-fire route to overnight front-page fame." And he is a connoisseur of the judicially sensational, attending many a grotesque trial. Waters can sagely note the media's glamorizing and merchandising of felony -- "These days you can commit a crime, and two weeks later it's a TV movie" -- and in the next breath give a rave review to the Menendez circus. "A-list, A-list!" he rhapsodizes. "It's the only A-list trial in America for quite some time. Hey, it even launched a cable channel!"

Waters' spiffy new farce, Serial Mom, mocks this frenzy. It's about a suburban matron (Kathleen Turner, nicely balancing agitation with propriety) who has a caring dentist husband (Sam Waterston), two fairly normal teenage kids -- and an urge to kill anyone who affronts her notion of decency. If someone should chastise her children or date a fast girl or refuse to recycle, Mom goes maniacal.

All this is a parodic setup for Mom's delirious trial and exploitation. It's a tatty freak show, and Waters loves it. "I'm a participant in everything I criticize," he insists. "My movies aren't about violence but about how America is so confused about fame." The confusion and fascination, he suggests, come from a public exhausted by their own mundane problems and eager to find release in someone else's. "Here's the reason people can laugh about it," he says. "I've had a long day, you've had a long day, other people have been fired, they've been hurt in a relationship -- but they were not eaten today by Jeffrey Dahmer!"

Gallows humor? No: a robust fascination with the depths of human experience. "John is actually more normal than he wants people to think he is," says Patricia Hearst -- yes, that Patty Hearst, once an heiress on the lam, now a regular in Waters' movies.

"Everybody has great secrets," Waters says cheerfully, "and I want to know them all. I like to find things that can surprise me and confuse me and scare me and make me laugh." His current research involves the kinky pastime known as sploshing -- the erotic act of dumping a plate of food on your loved one. "When I hear about something like this," he says, "at first I'm shocked. And suddenly I feel very healthy." Waters' films have often made viewers feel healthy -- by default. The 1972 underground smash Pink Flamingos was about the "Filthiest People Alive" and climaxed with an act of coprophagy that still shocks; a Flamingos screening in Florida was busted last year. The film was so raw and assaultive in its mondo-trasho fashion -- a prime example of cinema sploshite -- that it made viewers feel it was made by those crude people onscreen. But no: Waters was using crudity as an ironic style. He was a gross-out Oscar Wilde, making clever comedies of bad manners.

As Waters' movies (Hairspray, Cry-Baby) became increasingly agreeable, though without losing their tang, they attracted major studio financing and, this time, a Hollywood star: Turner, who on her first reading of Serial Mom threw down the script in disgust. "If I hadn't met him," she acknowledges, "I probably would have been able to pass on it. But once we met, no way." A dandy of decadence, Waters can charm them all, even the studio moneymen. "I live in Baltimore," he says, "but I know how to play the Hollywood game."

Waters' Italianate villa reflects his interests: an electric chair in the hallway, weird movie posters on the walls and, in the attic, lots of oddity and atrocity memorabilia. "It's exactly the house you'd think I'd live in," he admits. The library bulges with books on true crime, film history, lesbian nuns and other arcana. "My home is my think tank," he says. "It's where I always know I'll find the idea for my next movie."

But can the shock virtuoso still find amusing ways to upset moviegoers in a world that has caught up with and perhaps surpassed his foulest dreams? Mink Stole, the actress who since 1966 has appeared in every Waters work, hints that he may have, well, mellowed. "I wouldn't use that word," she says, "because it's so Donovan. But we have grown up. There's less to be mad about now."

The very thought of that might vex Waters. He cannot even bring himself to use the term mainstream; he calls it "the M word." There are some ideas that even Baltimore's Poet Lurid finds too loathsome to contemplate.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles