Liarmouth follows the same traditions of most John Waters productions: It’s gross, unerotically sexual, shocking, offensive, and rowdy. The novel follows Marsha Sprinkle, a dog-hating, sex-negative, pathological liar who steals wallets and identities and hope. Her entire life is about deception — and she does it with gusto. She snaps at little kids. She sneers at men and their disgusting penises that want so desperately to slither inside of her because she is still beautiful and svelte. Really, she hates just about everyone, from people in the military (“post-traumatic stress time bombs”) to families with children (“nutcase Catholics”) to airline customers with disabilities (“fakers”).
Pooping is also too obscene for her to participate in; Marsha eats nothing but crackers to ensure that her bowel movements are delicate little pellets. She has a daughter, having been impregnated by a man while still a virgin via a series of butthole-related mishaps that I won’t ruin for you here. “She did have a reason to be traumatized,” Waters said. “She was with child from a cum rag rimmer!” (Marsha indeed gets pregnant not through intercourse but through a rimming mishap with her ex-husband, and you’ll really just have to read the book to get the full picture.)
The sex in Waters’ projects works because it’s depraved, and it speaks to that monkey element in our brains that wants to throw shit and piss and see where it lands. Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s also hilarious, the most important hallmark of any Waters project. It’s why he’s been able to get away with the shock of, say, a woman having sex with a chicken in Pink Flamingos. And the humor works because Waters never punches down. For most of his career, he was the one on the bottom, aiming upward at conservatives, anti-gay creeps, racist losers, and anyone who can’t take a fucking joke.
Punching up is how he’s gotten away with so much. “Empathy is important,” he said. “Especially if you’re the child of a cum rag rimmer. There’s not a lot of support groups if that’s your complaint.”
Some of Marsha’s characteristics are inspired by an old friend of Waters’ who also loved to ritualistically lie. “Lying made her happy. It’s why she got up every day,” he said. “She told people the wrong directions.” Before the pandemic, she would tell people there was a terrible pandemic going around. “People believe anything! She would tell people in line at the airport terrible things, [like] The flight’s been canceled,” he said. “She said she even felt prettier after she lied.”
The novel is another example of Waters turning an utterly distasteful woman into a kind of folk hero. He has always been able to take repellent, rude, crude, slimy women and make them iconic. Marsha is probably the worst person I’ve ever read in modern literature and yet I still rooted for her. I wanted her lies to work. She sits within a canon of Waters’ deplorable women, like Divine in Pink Flamingos or even Hatchet-Face in Cry-Baby, both off-kilter, emotionally ugly, and a little mean, but mostly just misunderstood.
“Villainous women are good parts, that’s all. I can write them well,” he told me, though he doesn’t necessarily agree with this categorization. “I didn’t think Divine was the villain in Pink Flamingos. Divine was just living her life in nature, doing her memoirs when she was attacked by a jealous pervert!”
There is a kind of order in Waters’ world, even if it seems fucked up. “The rules in my movies are the people that are judgmental and don’t know the whole story are villains, and the people that are proud of their morals — even if they’re completely wrong and insane — are the heroes as long as they don’t try to hurt anybody else first,” he said. “They use what society says against them as a style. They use it as a personality — not a disorder.”
The point of Waters’ career, ultimately, has been to make fun of whatever social norms constrain us. In the 1970s, for example, hippie culture was all the rage, so he made Multiple Maniacs, a film that was pro-violence. 1988’s Hairspray mocked the tedium of racists afraid of losing their place in the world. 1990’s Cry-Baby was about class warfare and white trash teens telling squares to get lost. If you watch a John Waters movie and intrinsically get it, it means you’re a part of a community of like-minded weirdos. People who belong nowhere can find themselves among their people in a John Waters movie.