I have a confession to make: despite years and years of obsessing about movies (some of you may not know, this being a primarily video game blog, but my first love was always movies), I had not seen a John Waters film until earlier tonight. We are talking a decade and a half of hearing about Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Female Trouble, and, of course, Serial Mom, but never having taken the plunge myself. The man himself I knew I was a fan of, having watched plenty of interviews with him (and that one standup special he did, This Filthy World), but his brand of exploitation film had always seemed like something I would get to eventually. Originally, I had planned to start with Pink Flamingos, but over the years I have felt that starting with one of his more accessible films would do the man more justice. Somehow, it would allow me to see what his emotional tenor would be without the distraction of his shock, and so Serial Mom seemed as good a place as any to start with.
Serial Mom has, first of all, dated in a rather interesting way. The film's themes split an interesting half, where one part feels more relevant now than it was at the time (with one caveat), while the other seems to have gone the way of the dodo. The latter theme has to do with comments on suburbia. Serial Mom follows a relatively simple plot: Kathleen Turner (having an immense amount of fun in the role) is a wholesome suburban mom named Beverly, a homemaker with strict rules as to how her suburban bliss should be structured and maintained. When something goes awry - literally any little thing - her first instinct is to go straight to murder. This reaction isn't out of nowhere, as Beverly is an obsessive when it comes to literature about serial killers. She holds a secret collection of books and letters from serial killers in her nightstand and under her bed, and shares an interest in the gore movies her son loves so much. Beverly isn't so simply a serial killer in hiding, however. She seems to truly see herself as a doting wife and mother, with her suburban home being of her upmost concern. The killing seems to be more of a side-gig than anything, an extreme solution to a fleeting problem.
Beverly's character could be taken straight out of a family TV show from the 50s (homicidal tendencies aside), and part of that is to send up the suburban status as nucleic America. Suburbia as painted by the film is a place of order and control, but one so often breeding laziness and obnoxious behavior. Beverly's neighbor doesn't recycle, the ingrate, and the old lady who rents movies from the rental shop her son works at refuses to rewind her tapes when she brings them in. Suburbia is rotten somewhere deep within, full of selfish, fattening and aging white people who seem to think the world owes them some sort of convenience. They are often ungrateful and manipulative, and Beverly is no different. She holds a grudge against another neighbor for stealing her parking space, spending her afternoons prank calling her ("You're a pussy! Fuck you!") and sending her hateful letters. But with Beverly's serial killer status, she feels to be the more honest one of the bunch. There is nothing subtle about Beverly, and part of what makes the film so funny is to see Beverly played up with so much campy fun. But the suburban symbolism feels more than a little dated these days, partially because the suburbs no longer feel so central to the American identity, relegated instead to the pocket reality of upper-middle class families. The commentary could still work, but it would need plenty of adjustments.
What does work, however, is the themes revolving around True Crime stories. The film erroneously says that the story is based on true events, meant to invoke the feeling of a true crime story, the same way Fargo would only a few years later. Likewise, towards the end of the film, the murder spree happening around the suburbs is commoditized, with no one too good to make a quick buck off of the events. Likewise, Beverly's obsession with serial killers would be downright quaint these days, being the new Soap Opera for many a housewife these days (and just about everyone else, let's not be sexist or classist here). It's the kind of thing that would have felt perhaps too on the nose around the time Serial was everyone's podcast obsession several years ago, but imagine this: Serial Mom released two months before the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. Oddly, despite this, Serial Mom was a box office bomb that wouldn't gain cult status until much later.
Serial Mom is a hilarious romp for the most part, being held down primarily by some pretty basic and predictable plotting and some pacing issues. The satire feels as though it is striking in two different times, the kind of oddity you could only get when looking back on a film, but even that which does not have an immediate emotional payoff is still easily appreciated. The film is great on its own, but you cannot undersell how great Kathleen Turner is in this film, schlocking it up for the rest of us in such an interesting and subversive way that even Roger Ebert was hoodwinked, giving the film a mixed review at release due to his feeling Turner's performance implied a serious mental issue with the woman worth pitying, not laughing at. I think the film may have just not spelled out its more conceptual nature enough for Ebert at the time, something that is probably a little easier to swallow today when we drown in irony. Serial Mom is the kind of film I may change my mind on as I watch more of Waters' films and grow more accustomed to his style and narrative voice, but even without that bit of background it is a riot.
7.5
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