Female Trouble: Painful To Watch


        When I first laid my eyes on the promotional poster for Female Trouble, I thought the characters looked outrageous. Surely the characters in the movie can’t look that garish, then the movie began. The movie starts off with a fairly box standard outcast/brat situation with a hard fat shaming slant. Once Dawn runs away from home, things start to fall into the deep end. I could barely watch the rape and pregnancy scene, just…. No. Once we skipped to early adulthood, I figured that the movie would focus on the trio robbing random people slowly escalating to a weird heist setup but that never happened. Instead we continue on this crazy train of Dawn chasing an unattainable “beauty” culminating in her nightclub act, which acts as a summary of the transformation of Dawn. Starting off with simple tricks then descending to depravity mixed with self indulgence and ending with pure madness. Almost every character on screen is comically over the top and perverse in nature. The only person that seemed normal was Dawn’s doctor after she got splashed with acid. Which I found surprising considering they had a joke about mental health professionals earlier in the movie. John Waters credits the movie to Charles Watson, who was one of the main figures of the Manson murders. This was likely done to help drive home the absurd and terrible nature of the movie but I also have a deeper theory behind the crediting. The Manson murders were in part inspired by their hatred of the vanity on display on 10050 Cielo Drive. Since Female Trouble is very much a comedy and a teardown of the excesses of vanity, I feel like the crediting Manson murders was his way of summarizing what you are about to watch. After the movie had ended, I immediately started to make comparisons to Natural Born Killers since that was the last risqué we had watched. I found myself preferring NBK over Female Trouble and for a while I couldn’t figure out why, both show terrible immoral acts, what’s the difference? The difference is in its presentation, if you feel uncomfortable watching a certain scene in NBK, you can lose yourself in the odd visual presentation to distract from the foreground. In NBK you cannot do that, the simple camera work and lack of extra visuals forces the viewer to watch the foreground and witness the horrors that unfold.


(If I watch this movie again in my lifetime, it'll be too soon.)


Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 29, 2020 at 5:37 PM

    Hey Alex!

    I had a hard time watching the rape scene too, even though it was Divine playing both parts. I also preferred Natural Born Killers to Female Trouble, but I had to watch Natural Born Killers in 3 different sittings lol. I really had a hard time figuring out the focus of the movie, I thought it was gonna start as a high school movie, then the rape scene happened and I was like oh.. and the she was a thief and then she did the project with the Dashers and I was like oh.....

    - Chloe Kowalyk

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  2. Jacquelyn HeinenNovember 1, 2020 at 8:38 AM

    Hey Alex, I agree with you I found this very difficult to watch, but I like how you compared in to Natural Born Killers. These two films were both very gruesome works and hard to watch unless you are really into films of this genre. I did not think to compare the two at first, but I agree with you that Natural Born Killers was easier to watch for me.

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