Ten years ago, we featured John Waters’ handmade Christmas cards, which he’s been making since he was a high-school student in 1964, long before William S. Burroughs deemed him the “Pope of Trash” (also the title of a retrospective exhibition at the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles this past fall). It was Waters’ films that qualified him for that honor, of course, but his regular season’s greetings are no less a medium for his career-long artistic reclamation of bad taste. Christmas cards also have the advantage of being even more “underground” than his early features, directed as they are to only a select group of recipients, large though Waters’ mailing list has grown in recent decades: he mentioned to the New York Times that he sends out over 2,000 cards, and that was back in 2013.
“Christmas cards are your first duty and you must send one (with a personal, handwritten message) to every single person you ever met, no matter how briefly,” Waters wrote in a 1980s essay: “Give Me Another Present! Why I Love Christmas”. “Of course, you must make your own cards by hand. ‘I don’t have time,’ you may whine, but since the whole purpose of life is Christmas, you’d better make time, buster.”
As you can see at this gallery and this recent Twitter thread, Waters has made the time: the time to get his mugshot taken by the Baltimore Police Department, to stuff dead cockroaches into tree ornaments, to commission a painting of himself as a pipe-smoking patriarch (with a Divine-looking wife) presiding over an askew nineteen-fifties Christmas morning, and, last year, to produce blow-up dolls in his own likeness.
In the decade since we last looked at them, Waters’ Christmas cards have also depicted him putting an eye out with a candy cane, feasting on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and decked out in Christmas-thug regalia, complete with tattoos promising “chimney invasions” and “season’s beatings.” This Christmas, Waters opted for a more technical complexity, appearing as a distressed toddler in the lap of a department-store Santa (a fairly common fifties tableau, I gather) who, as a separate component attached by some kind of spring, flails wildly when flicked. Fans who haven’t received one of their own can at least console themselves with the prospect of Waters’ next film, which will be his first in twenty years — and bring to the screen Waters’ own novel Liarmouth, which more than a few of them probably found in their stockings last Christmas. See a gallery of his Christmas cards here.
Related Content:
John Waters Makes Handmade Christmas Cards, Says the “Whole Purpose of Life is Christmas”
When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960)
Watch Terry Gilliam’s Animated Short, The Christmas Card (1968)
Growing Up John Waters: The Oddball Filmmaker Catalogues His Many Formative Rebellions (1993)
John Waters Designs a Witty Poster for the New York Film Festival
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
0 Commentaires