John Waters and the Divine Comedy of Cult Cinema

Abstract

“John Waters and the Divine Comedy of Cult Cinema” thinks through how humour informs concepts of cult via the case study of John Waters and his archival materials, early films, exhibition environments, and extratextual influences. John Waters’s early films (1964-1981) are often cited as canonical cult films, as much for their low-budget yet imaginative aesthetics and transgressive subject matter as for the subcultural community of fans that coalesces around them. Cult film scholarship has appropriated religious terminology to explain the subcultures that form around these texts, as well as fans’ obsessive attachment to them. But John Waters is a particularly apt case study in the cultivation of cult beyond reception, as his work is invested in alternative forms of community, a subversive approach to Catholicism, and a fascination with cults. This dissertation shifts the emphasis from cult reception to the development of concepts of cult prior to film exhibition and takes seriously the term “cult” in its different yet related meanings of devoted worship to the divine, a group with unorthodox beliefs, and an unconventional unified community. It examines these concepts of cult in relation to modes of comedy, foregrounding humour and laughter as integral to a particular subset of cult films, examining comedic forms in the texts as well as what a humorous approach to concepts of cult might elucidate about cultlike engagements with texts. Thinking through the relationship between the sacred and laughter, it interrogates where comedy and cult meet, in a mutually illuminating endeavour that traces their convergence in John Waters’s scrapbooks, in his film’s formal composition, in his harnessing of particular reception contexts, and in his investment in tabloid sensationalism.