In 1974, John Waters’ **Female Trouble** was a blistering satire on American celebrity culture. As Dawn Davenport’s fall from a Christmas lunatic to a criminal celebrity, the film used Divine’s gender-bending performance to explore and subvert traditional conceptions of the family and sex roles. It helped to define the “Dreamlanders” style, which combined street realism in Baltimore with melodramatic camp.
For the mainstream audience of 1974, the film was largely treated as an assault on public decency. Though it found a rabid audience in the “midnight movie” culture with other avant-garde classics, established audiences and critics often reacted to it with both visceral disgust and cynical bewilderment. It was often dismissed as “amateurish” or “vile” by the critical establishment, which had trouble understanding Waters’ irony. This however functioned as an ironic achievement for the film, and eventually led to the film’s evolution from a shunned midnight movie to a cult masterpiece of independent cinema.
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