PECKER ***1/2
John Waters1998
IDEA: After an amateur teen photographer becomes a sensation in the art world for his vérité pictures of his neighborhood, his real life and his community fall apart.
BLURB: A blasé outsider artist from suburban Baltimore has his work co-opted by the art-world establishment and assimilated into the elite culture of the urban intelligentsia. It’s hard not to read Pecker as John Waters’s self-reflexive, ironic commentary on his own complicated relationship with the commercial mainstream. Like a more intentional version of the titular Pecker, he was transformed by tastemakers from an unapologetically transgressive enfant terrible to a branded auteur sanctioned by Hollywood and the critical canon. In ways sincere and hilariously irreverent, Pecker uses the art/commerce opposition to satirize the way the capitalist image economy commodifies and fetishizes people's lives, makes a spectacle of consumption, and creates an artificial binary between “high” and “low” culture. The film’s giddy magic comes from how Waters collapses that division completely, with Pecker’s amateurish, impromptu photographs — often depicting scenes of social indecency — being hailed by the establishment as masterpieces of working-class authenticity. What’s trash and what’s art? Who gets to decide, and at what cost? The film, and Waters through it, argues that art can be found anywhere and in any thing, from laundromats and Virgin Mary shrines to go-go bars and thrift shops. And while the stuff that’s dirty, transgressive, and abject is often neutralized or expunged to be packaged for the mass market, sometimes, as the case happens to be in both the narrative and form of Pecker, they poke through with just enough queerness and uncontainable excess to resist capture.
