Desperate Living arguably gets the least amount of play as a peak John Waters film, perhaps due to the fact that Waters’s closest collaborator and muse, Divine (the scare queen drag persona of Harris Glenn Milstead), wasn’t involved in the production. But for me, Desperate Living has served as a reliable source of laughter, providing an odd sense of comfort in the viewings I’ve had amidst the backdrop of an increasingly disturbing political climate against trans people and drag queens in the United States. I watch Desperate Living not for its political commentary, though, but for its fractured fairy tale about the messiness surrounding a clash of identities and ideologies, played out in environs more befit for mud wrestling. The film essentially picks up where Waters’s Female Trouble (1974) left off in terms of testing the limits of both his performers and audience—but whereas the rise and fall of Dawn Davenport (Divine) ends in an electric chair in Female Trouble, this time around a rag-tag collective of miscreants emerges victorious.
Desperate Living begins with a credit sequence featuring a candlelit dinner where a roasted rat is being cut to be eaten on a plate. The image—a mix of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Salo (Waters considered Pasolini to be his Catholic Saint)—conveys the vulgarity of such an act being played up as opulent, though here Waters’s targets are not so much the bourgeois in Pasolini’s oeuvre, but rather the American nuclear family. Behind the chintzy picket fences and two-car garage homes is a woman under the influence, Peggy Gravel, played with high-strung perfection by Mink Stole.
When the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision became official last summer, placing abortion rights in peril nationwide, an image recirculated online of Peggy screaming, “I hate the Supreme Court!” And while context hardly ever matters with internet memes, especially ones sourced from movies, Gravel’s outrage in the original image was actually less about SCOTUS and more about being a ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBy) suburbanite. Peggy is coming out against the lawlessness and criminality directly outside her own home: a group of kids who broke her bedroom window playing baseball (which she characterized as ‘an assassination attempt’). While her overreaction plays as absurd, it also echoes the ways in which the suburbs can warp people’s sense of entitlement—those who call for ‘law and order’ to right the wrongs that besmirch them over things that, in the grand scheme of things, are miniscule. Peggy not only shows the tendencies of a Karen, but recycles Richard Nixon’s domestic platform as well. And her politics only get worse from there.
Of course, Waters does add texture to Peggy to help explain why she is the way she is. Her more subdued, nebbish husband Bosley (George Stover) is, in fact, a completely sinister and evil partner who threatens to either tranquilize her or send her back to a sanitarium. But Peggy fights back and, with the help of her psychiatric nurse Grizelda (a terrific Jean Hill), murders her husband and goes on the lam together. These two strange bedfellows get tracked down quickly by an unusual police officer, Sheriff Shitface (Turkey Joe), who has an underwear fetish and crossdresses. After assaulting both Peggy and Grizelda, who can’t hide their revulsion, the officer gives them an ultimatum: have their asses hauled to jail or walk over to a town called Mortville. They choose Mortville.
Mortville is a mix of fairies, tramps, nudists, and leather bikers in a shantytown that looks like a defunct and dilapidated children’s amusement park. Peggy and Grizelda come across an unconventional couple, Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe) and Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay, a nightclub performer and pinup model who gained notoriety for her salacious 1971 memoir, My Face for the World to See, in which she alleged various escapades with several men in Hollywood ranging from Frank Sinatra to Jerry Lewis. Even in her unkempt blonde beehive and smeared makeup, she is worshiped by Mole, whose categorization and gender identity is its own complicated topic. What eventually becomes clear in Desperate Living is that Peggy Gravel was merely a conduit into this world; in the end, the real intrigue is Lowe’s Mole, a total gender outlaw.
Mole McHenry has been characterized as a butch, a self-loathing lesbian, and a trans man. Those who describe Mole simply as a lesbian seem to skip over his own personal assessment, “I am a man! I am a man trapped in a woman’s body!”, a common explanation when describing trans identity at the time. But Mole can barely uphold a dignified response to any questions of his gender identity, such as when he reacts violently to Muffy’s teasing about his lack of ‘original plumbing’ by stabbing her in the hand. Mole is a fascinating character, particularly in his butch punk aesthetic, complete with bleached blonde hair and facial scars; he easily could have been a Vivienne Westwood creation. McHenry remains a curiosity, a time capsule of what was in the ether surrounding trans masculine images, and how transness was talked about at the time. Trans representation onscreen was primarily dominated by trans women due to the broader cultural interest even when, behind the scenes, trans healthcare funding, education, and research was being funded by Texas philanthropist and trans man, Reed Erickson. Still, there was a major imbalance of trans masculine images versus trans feminine images.
So where did Mole come from, exactly? Waters was a fan of William Castle, so it could stand to reason that his idea of a trans masculine figure was sourced from Castle, whose Psycho ripoff Homicidal (1961) has its lead actress, Joan Marshall (credited as Jean Arless), commit to dressing in male drag for a good portion of the film. Waters is also on record as being a fan of the 1960 television movie of the Peter Pan musical starring Mary Martin—to that point probably the most iconic instance of female-to-male gender play in American culture.
There’s also the fact that Waters was based in Baltimore, operating in the backyard of a deeply influential global institution, Johns Hopkins University. In the late 1960s, the university opened a Gender Identity Clinic that gave an incredible amount of credibility to trans healthcare, which was finally gaining momentum in the United States. It should also be noted that, in 1979 (two years after Desperate Living’s release), due to conservative internal political pressure, Johns Hopkins University halted these surgeries for trans people and suspended its gender clinic, leading to devastating effects for many trans Americans in subsequent years. As with many incremental instances of progress for trans people, the pendulum swung back and hard. Johns Hopkins University also happens to be the gender clinic that denied Jame Gumb (‘Buffalo Bill’) gender reassignment surgery in The Silence of the Lambs. But Mole is luckier and fares better than Gumb—and many real-life trans people at the time—by winning the lottery. With his winnings, he spends money on getting a phalloplasty from Johns Hopkins. When he gets it and uses it with Muffy for pleasure, Muffy rejects it, even demanding he get rid of it.
He does.
Is this moment problematic? Sure. But is it also deeply absurd? Absolutely. From the quick surgery, the even quicker recovery time of the obviously fake phallic appendage, and the castration from which Mole also manages to also quickly recover, his surgery fiasco is presented as a farce. Still, the moment is not about treating trans masculinity as a joke. No doubt, the scene was conceived to be a moment of shock, yet in a film in which cannibalism is on the table, Mole’s action is rather tame and, interestingly, more attention gets paid to him after this happens—he emerges in the second-half of Desperate Living as the film’s protagonist.
There is also a moment of genuine anguish and pain on Muffy’s face when she realizes what Mole was willing to do for her. Ultimately, Mole’s masculinity doesn’t need any additional fulfillment through surgeries, which also applies to many, though not all, real-life trans masculine people. Lowe plays Mole as perturbed when hearing the radical lesbians calling penises ‘God’s big mistake’, showing how burned out he is by the alienating rhetoric he’s clearly heard so many times before. Mole’s commanding presence is what ultimately makes him the undeniable leader of the growing resistance in Mortville against the city’s monarch, Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey, in a beguiling red dye-job), who runs things with an iron fist from her castle, complete with painted portraits of Hitler, Charles Manson, and Idi Amin.
Mortville under Queen Carlotta’s reign is, on the surface, a hedonistic bacchanal set in a pigpen. It’s also a deeply troubled place, riddled with spitefulness, sadism, and utter contempt. Carlotta has managed to alienate her own daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce), but in losing her daughter she gains a fan in Peggy Gravel. Despite having engaged in same-sex relations with Grizelda, and going from blonde to Vampira since stepping into Mortville, Peggy emerges as a fascist straight out of Salo, exclaiming to Carlotta, “Only the rich should be allowed to live!” It’s fascinating that Waters chooses not to make Peggy Gravel an antihero, or create a narrative in which she wreaks havoc on the individuals and systems that wronged her. Instead, he has her regress further into a heinous and completely unredeemable figure.
After Coo-Coo pleads with Mole and Muffy to kill her mother after Coo-Coo is assaulted on Carlotta’s orders, they, along with other Mortville citizens, successfully overthrow Carlotta and kill Peggy. Released a year after America’s bicentennial, Mole McHenry, in a zoot suit and red fedora, addresses the townsfolk from Carlotta’s castlewith full patriotic fervor: “Mortville is at last a free city!” It becomes a well-earned exclamation point to Desperate Living, only to be outdone by the film’s “Eat the rich!” coda.
All things considered, Mortville doesn’t seem so bad compared to Florida these days, with the Sunshine State defiling itself through various anti-trans and anti-gay bills thanks to its reactionary legislature and near-autocratic Governor. In a perverse way, Mortville’s ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ setting, siloed off from polite society, was always doomed to contain miscreants who found common struggle against Queen Carlotta. Waters, following in the tradition of exploitation films about juvenile delinquents and prisoners, as well as childhood fairytales, gives his film a gleefully nihilistic depravity. Even with its small scale, a liberated Mortville is still a welcomed respite to watch unfold onscreen amid an increasingly hostile and reactionary backlash against trans and queer people in real life.
Desperate Living was never meant to be some prescient allegory of rebellion, or about how marginalized individuals can still be tempted by fascistic power trips, and yet, the film’s anarchy and mean-but-hilarious spirit is welcomed and fulfilling in a way that few contemporary films offer in this current moment.