John Waters: This Filthy World

The stars of this film are John Waters and his fascinating moustache ("I know I look like a child molester – it looks like Central Casting sent me"). We spend an evening with him as he addresses a college audience, offering the youth of today some models for bad behaviour through recollections of his career as a director and general trouble-maker. In discussing the films that influenced him at a young age, we observe how he quickly moved on from the archetype of a sensitive gay boy ("Why would Dorothy want to go home when she could live with magic shoes and gay lions?") and took a shine to the macabre, the perverted, and the weird.

Between happy reminiscences of shoplifting with Divine and his extensive experience as a trial groupie, Waters fills us in on the stories behind his films. On being shown Pink Flamingos, his students - murderers he taught in a prison class - declared that he was "fucked up", but John wants us to know that he, too, has limits, whereupon he outlines a bunch of obscure sex-related trends that induce waves of nausea in the audience. Interwoven with all of these themes, though, is a political sensibility that humourously attacks the right-wing and a refusal to take the ‘just like everybody else’ approach favoured by some gay activists. A welcome insight into one of the most captivating personalities of our time, This Filthy World serves to both educate and entertain.