For the next ninety seconds, while this preview of coming attractions is playing, will all filmgoers with any degree of wit, taste and intelligence please keep your critical remarks to yourselves, or we’ll nail your tongues to the floor.
– Introduction to the theatrical preview for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
See, Mr. Meyer, we’ve caught up.
– B. Ruby Rich, ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ (1995:56)
For a guy who got rich by making so-called dirty movies, Russ Meyer has received a remarkable amount of positive critical attention, including comparisons to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini and Jacques Tati, as well as literary figures from Geoffrey Chaucer and Francois Rabelais to Thorton Wilder and John Steinbeck. While many continue to see him as a misogynistic sexual Neanderthal, others have called him a twentieth-century Sade, a Mennipean satirist and a Romantic ironist.6 His fans have included such luminaries as Leslie Fieldler, Camille Paglia and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His 1960s melodramas about insatiable women on the prowl constituted their own front in the sexual revolution, and his 1970s put-ons – beginning with the Fox Studios project, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – harkened a period of both popular and academic respectability. That same year, Yale University sponsored the Russ Meyer Film Festival, and similar events followed at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Champaign, Princeton and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Scholarly pieces began appearing in Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinema, and the Journal of Popular Culture, while the Nation, Newsweek, Forbes and many of the world’s major newspapers featured lengthy profiles. A surprising number hailed his films as witty satires on sexual repression and conspicuous consumption, and acknowledged his auteur status.
Largely absent from this ascension was Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which was shown to little acclaim at Yale and several other of the film festivals, and made the rounds of college campuses in the 1970s, but failed to capture much popular or critical attention alongside Meyer’s overheated skin flicks. Fortunes would change in the 1980s, when Meyer’s sex films had to compete with direct-to-video hardcore and popular R-rated teen sex comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Hardbodies (1984).7 But the transgressive violence and noir aesthetics of his mid-1960s black and white roughies would appeal directly to the evolving punk and postmodern sensibilities of young Gen-Xers. Many would find in Pussycat’s hard-driving, thrill-seeking, bisexual nihilist strippers an alternative to the banal horrors of Ronald Reagan’s America, where Baby Boomers abandoned the last vestiges of 1960s idealism for mutual funds and retirement plans and their children surveyed a cultural inheritance of deficit spending, racial division and AIDS from behind a mask of disaffected irony.
But first this new audience would have to see the film, which was little known and nearly impossible to find in 1981, the year it first appeared on VHS. That year less than five percent of American households with televisions had VCRs. The number would increase nearly ten-fold by 1985, and by the end of the decade they would be as common as telephones, but even as the technology became available, finding Meyer films on tape was no mean feat. Copies had to be ordered directly from Meyer’s company, RM Films International, which in the 1980s was little more than a duplicating machine, a receipt book and a telephone, usually answered by Meyer himself. Unlike studio releases, Meyer’s films were not featured in rental supply catalogues, which meant few video stores stocked them. Anyone who wanted a copy either needed to know someone who had one, or dig up the name and number of Meyer’s company and be willing to spend 80 dollars. Of course, finding that information was its own challenge, since RM Films only advertised in pornographic magazines.
Despite these obstacles, the audience did find them, and Pussycat soon became one of RM Films’ most popular titles, thanks to a confluence of cultural events in the early 1980s. It all began with John Waters, a cult celebrity who had made his name on the midnight movie circuit with Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). In 1981 he released Polyester, the first of his films to cross over into the mainstream, in part because it was simply less explicit than his earlier films (it earned an ‘R’ rating, where all previous were ‘X’ or unrated), and in part because audience sensibilities had evolved following a decade of films like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Caligula (1979). That same year, Waters published his autobiography, Shock Value. Part memoir, part poetics, the book traces the filmmaker’s history, working methods, and key influences and contains interviews with Waters’ favourite filmmakers: shockmeister Hershell Gordon Lewis, and Russ Meyer. Waters had long been a devotee of Meyer, even paying homage to him in several of his films (including Polyester, where a Pussycat poster hangs prominently on the wall of Elmer Fishpaw’s porn theatre office), but in Shock Value he pays his mentor even higher praise: ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.’
Waters is the ideal person to carry off this bit of hyperbole because he is in many ways a bridge between Meyer’s sensibilities and those of his burgeoning cult audience. Deeply invested in 1950s and 1960s exploitation filmmaking, as well as a do-it-yourself aesthetic that made Meyer look the rigid formalist by comparison, Waters was hip in the ways Meyer never could be, more socially and intellectually evolved, and a master of self-conscious camp. He was an obsessive fan, a bona fide outsider, and a practiced ironist whose film world was, like Meyer’s, a joyous simulacrum of perversions played entirely for effect; only where Meyer aimed for the erotic, Waters went for the emetic. ‘To me,’ his autobiography begins, ‘bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.’ On Pussycat he continues:
I first saw the film in 1966 at a local drive-in after being attracted to the radio ad that blared, ‘It will leave a taste of evil in your mouth!’ At the time, I was totally unfamiliar with Russ Meyer’s work, but after seeing Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! he became my lifelong idol. I went back to the drive-in every night of the run, even if I had to go alone, just so I could watch the picture over and over while I had a chance. (I always respected people I saw alone in the drive-in for their unabashed devotion to films). I wrote Russ gushing fan letters, which he politely answered. I got a job as a film reviewer in a local underground paper for the sole purpose of raving about the film. If there is such a thing as a film being a bad influence on youth, here was the perfect example. Russ’ nasty ‘pussycats’ became a role model for all the characters in my productions – especially Divine. The one big difference was that Divine was a man and his big set of knockers was nothing but a pile of old wash rags. (1981:192–3)
Waters’ gushing assessment has all of the earmarks of a cult devotional: the celebratory rites, the identification of a community, the personal commitment, and of course the sense of discovery. It is a story any devotee would love to tell, even if it is not precisely accurate (the ‘taste of evil’ line was actually part of the marketing campaign for Mudhoney, which was released a year before Pussycat). Though it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Waters’ paean to Pussycat set the tone for future critical and cult assessment, those first two lines found their way into just about every piece that followed written on the film – not because anyone agreed with Waters, but because this younger auteur on the up-swing of what would soon be a highly successful career was willing to claim Meyer for his own.
Pussycat also benefited from a growing popular interest in cult films generally. Cult communities had begun to form around magazines like Fangoria, Sleazoid Express, and Michael J. Weldon’s seminal fanzine, Psychotronic, a labour of love packed with reviews of ‘films traditionally ignored or ridiculed by mainstream critics at the time of their release: horror, exploitation, action, science fiction, and movies that used to play in drive-ins or inner city grindhouses’ (Weldon 1989:2), which Weldon launched in response to Michael and Harry Medved’s condescending take on B- and Z-movies, The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).8 In 1983, Weldon published the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, which contained more than 3000 reviews, including a highly-laudatory piece on Pussycat that pronounces the film ‘outrageous, ahead-of-its-time,’ ‘a funny, non-stop barrage of sex and violence’, with ‘the best dialogue you’ve heard in years’ (Weldon 1983:233). This was followed by the Psychotronic Video Encyclopedia of Film in 1996, which features another 3000 reviews.
Weldon’s work is an indispensable resource for the study of cult films, but it also represents a shift in cult film criticism. Where the communal, participatory experience of the grindhouse and midnight movie screening had once been a hallmark of film cult, Weldon recognised (with great sadness) that the days of regular public exhibition of these films had come near to the end, and that the new cult audience would be born in the living room, sitting in front of a video player or watching B-movie television broadcasts in the wee hours. The Psychotronic project,9 much like Tim Lucas’s Video Watchdog magazine launched a few years later, is about acknowledging that shift and helping to create a new sort of community more in tune with what would later be known as the Information Age, a virtual one, connected not by a common space but a shared text. It was here rather than among Meyer’s grindhouse patrons that the cult of Pussycat would really take root. Like John Waters in 1966, cocooned night after night in his Buick at Baltimore’s Carlin Drive-In, the Pussycat devotee would practice the cultic rite alone or among a few like-minded friends, in basement rec rooms and college dormitories.
In many ways, this shift to the living room cult experience helped to solidify cult studies as an academic discipline in the 1980s, engendering the sort of isolation and circumspection (aided by a technology that allowed the home viewer to endlessly stop, start, and review the film as required) typically associated with scholarship. It also essentially guaranteed that the scholarly work of cult film studies would be done first and foremost by the true cult enthusiast. Two such works of scholarship appeared in the early 1980s. In 1981, Danny Peary published the first of a three-volume series entitled Cult Movies. Though cult had been a subject of film scholarship since the 1920s,10 Peary’s texts left aside theory and focused upon the movies themselves, literally hundreds of ‘special films which for one reason or another have been taken to heart by segments of the movie audience, cherished, protected, and most of all, enthusiastically championed’. For, according to Peary, ‘Cultists believe they are among the blessed few who have discovered something in particular that the average moviegoer and critic have missed – the something that makes the pictures extraordinary’ (1981:xiii). In 1983, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum – two highly-respected film critics whose tastes ran to the art house and avant-garde – published Midnight Movies, which charts the history of that particular cult film practice from the late-night B-movie television broadcasts of the 1950s, to the underground cinema of Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs, to theatrical screenings from the 1970s to the early 1980s.
Neither of these texts mentions Pussycat specifically, but Peary would call it the ‘ideal drive-in movie’ in his 1986 Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986:147–8) and in Cult Movies 3 (1988) he compares it to the work of Sam Fuller and Don Seigel (1988:85). Hoberman would shower praise on the film in a 1987 piece for Premiere magazine, where he lists it among his ten favourite genre films available on video, and describes it as having the ‘convoluted quality of a gothic novel’ (1987:99). But if Peary and Hoberman are a bit late to the Pussycat party, their seminal work in cult film studies had already helped to pave the way for the Pussycat Renaissance. In 1983, the film would be screened as part of major Meyer retrospectives at the London National Film Theatre and the Cinematheque Français in Paris, and the Cramps would cover the film’s main theme on its Smell of Female album (the album title itself taken from the film’s opening monologue).11 Among punk rockers, film cultists and cinepiles word spread quickly. By the mid-1980s, demand for the film on the college and festival circuits multiplied, and Meyer was making regular appearances at screenings. In 1986, the Chicago Psychotronic Film Society made it the centerpiece of its annual film festival, and Jim Morton lavished praise on the film and its maker in the pages of Incredibly Strange Films, highlighting in particular its dialogue, which ‘rings in the ear like beat poetry’ (1986:86). Shortly after, Jonathan Ross would devote an episode of his highly-regarded British documentary series, The Incredibly Strange Film Show, to Russ Meyer and single out Pussycat for special consideration (the episode would also feature a lengthy interview with Tura Satana). In 1987, Meyer would direct his one and only music video for a newly formed Los Angeles glam rock band that called itself Faster Pussycat. The video would feature clips from his film.
The ultimate measure of Pussycat’s ascendancy came in 1995 when, following a highly successful theatrical run in Germany and France, the film was re-released in America. Fans and film critics flocked to theatres to see Pussycat as most never had before, on the big screen in pristine new prints. Meyer toured with the film for two months, and at several screenings the Pussycats themselves made appearances, including Lori Williams, who had retreated from the public eye decades before. Fans came to gather autographs, to hear these four highly articulate ambassadors for the film speak, and in general to gawk at the women who, though thirty years had passed, still managed to turn heads. And Meyer, still a few years away from the dementia that would rob him of his quick wit and showman’s instincts, gave countless interviews to promote the film whose appeal he never seemed to entirely understand. But at least this time around it was making money.
Critics came, too. Some registered familiar complaints about the thin plot, the two-dimensional characters and the film’s underlying misogyny. Marjorie Baumgarten’s review for the Austin Chronicle is perhaps most pointed, likening the film to ‘some Sixties Strom Thurman nightmare about emancipated women run amok’ (1995:42). But most found enduring archetypes in the film they and their predecessors had so long managed to ignore. In his New York Times review, Stephen Holden claimed that watching Pussycat offers the clearest evidence that Meyer invented John Waters, Madonna and ‘anything and everything else in popular culture that proudly advertises itself as trash … In its humorous celebration of a buxom dominatrix as the ultimate icon of female desirability, it is also a movie with an erotic vision in tune with contemporary interest in so-called mean sex’ (1995:10). In Bright Lights Film Journal, Gary Morris hailed the film as ‘a masterpiece’, and ‘a cornerstone of both camp and punk cultures’. He describes the Pussycats as ‘early riot grrls’, and likens Meyer’s ‘subtle detailing’ of the characters’ dysfunctional relationships to a William Inge play (1996). Entertainment Weekly’s Troy Patterson gave it an ‘A’ grade, and had this to say: ‘The camera work is as sharp as Gregg Toland’s, the scenario is a Warholian daydream, and the slangy, innuendo-laden dialogue … nearly aphoristic.’ In their 2003 list of the top 50 cult films, EW would rank Pussycat number fifteen (Anon. 2003:31). Even Roger Ebert, who had stopped reviewing Meyer films in the late 1960s due to a conflict of interest, could not help but mark the occasion with exuberant praise and some account of the contemporary appeal of the film:
What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course. (1995)
Perhaps the most surprising remarks came from feminist scholar and sometime Village Voice critic, B. Ruby Rich, who in a column of unrelenting praise for Pussycat admitted that her initial judgment of the film as ‘retrograde male-objectification of women’s bodies and desires further embellished by a portrait of lesbianism as twisted and depraved’ after seeing it for the first time in the mid-1970s – ’the heyday of right-on feminism’ – was short-sighted. ‘From a contemporary perspective,’ she wrote in 1995,
the film inverts positive and negative images of ‘woman’ to show just how interrelated the bad and the good have turned out to be, once sexuality is no longer deemed suspect. Further, Faster Pussycat deals a comparable body blow to the idea that women are victims: just sign up for a few aikido courses, buy a Mazda Miata, and you, too, can traverse the wide-open spaces of America, and woe to the man who crosses your path or the woman who tries to leave your orbit.
She continues:
Faster Pussycat seen through a 1995 filter is a veritable Rosetta stone of contemporary attitude; ironic, irreverent, sexually polymorphous, mixing high and low forms, reversing camera angles as handily as it does power and prurience, bending dialogue to suit its whims and wit … See, Mr. Meyer, we’ve caught up. (1995:56)
In the age of political correctness, when the halls of academe rang with feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, Russ Meyer was being hailed by the same critic who had coined the terms ‘chick flick’ and ‘New Queer Cinema’. This was simply too much to ask for a filmmaker who was fond of making the claim that he never met a good-looking feminist. But Rich’s comments are consistent with a larger trend, for Pussycat’s popularity among women had been increasing exponentially since its initial video release. By the time of the film’s theatrical re-release, women made up the majority of Pussycat’s audience.
This highly-publicised second run effectively bestowed ‘masterpiece’ status on the film. Though it had stood in the shadow of the campy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for more than two decades, fanboys, cultists, and members of the mainstream media alike were now hailing Pussycat’s manic energy, cool style, pulpy dialogue and larger-than-life characters as timeless. It certainly did not hurt that a younger generation of filmmakers had begun to claim Meyer’s film as their own, including directors Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino, who would pay explicit tribute to Pussycat in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Sin City (2005) and their Grindhouse double feature (2007).12 As a measure of this new cache, references to Pussycat would begin showing up in all areas of pop culture, from music (White Zombie’s ‘Thunder Kiss ’65’, the B-52’s ‘Funplex’, Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Faster Kill Pussycat’), to television (The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena, House M.D.), to graphic fiction (Dan Clowes’ Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron), and merchandising (Pussycat lunch boxes, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts).
Though Pussycat was not released on DVD until 2005, it has since found a third life on the Internet among bloggers and fans too young to see the film on its last go-round. Websites like Cinephilia.com offer primers on the life and work of Russ Meyer, always with special consideration for Pussycat. ‘The Definitive Russ Meyer Thread’ began that same year on the DVD Maniacs website, and its pages continue to ring with praise for Pussycat, including a post by contributor, Ian Jane, that claims ‘everyone interested in exploitation films should not only see this film, but commit it to memory’. Episode 5 (December 2007) of the on-line Film Geek Primer is devoted to Russ Meyer, and Pussycat in particular. YouTube hosts several video projects constructed almost entirely of pirated Pussycat clips, including Mikolino Gonz’s ‘Russ Meyer Visuales Simpl3’, music videos for Bootstrap’s ‘Bootstrap Streetlight’ and April March’s ‘Chick Habit’, and daVJdek’s ‘Faster Pussycat Dance Dance’ series. And the Pussycats themselves continue to meet their public at screenings and cult film and comic book conventions, and through their websites and social networking pages. Until her death, Tura Satana was particularly successful cultivating her cult celebrity, inspiring comic book characters, a rock band (called, not surprisingly, Tura Satana), a Varla action figure, several fan sites, and ‘TURA! TURA! TURA!,’ a group art show at the Tattoo Factory Gallery in Chicago in October 2008. A documentary film, Tura!, based on her long-anticipated autobiography, The Kick-Ass Life of Tura Satana, awaits release from Varla Films, and she voices a character named Varla in Rob Zombie’s animated film, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009).
Perhaps the ultimate proof that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has and will continue to find a vital audience is the furor arising when a rumour hit the Internet and the entertainment press in the summer of 2008 that Tarantino planned to cast Britney Spears in the role of Varla in his long-promised, though still unrealised remake of the film. Though Tarantino himself attempted to squash the rumour only days after it first appeared, the outrage persisted for months, thousands of loyal fans registering their distaste on various blogs and Internet forums. Even Tura Satana seemed alarmed by the news, claiming that she called Tarantino immediately after hearing and threatened to castrate him if he cast Spears. Though subsequent gossip that porn star, Tera Patrick, would fill the role met with far less vitriol, Pussycat fans proved that they were no less invested in questions of casting than, say, avid readers of the Harry Potter or Twilight series who worried over the suitability of Daniel Radcliffe or Robert Pattison embodying their beloved fictions. Perhaps moreso. If J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer fans had only their mental picture of Harry Potter and Henry Cullen to compare to the young actors playing them on the screen, for Pussycat devotees, the authentic Varla, Rosie and Billie already existed. Any substitute, be it a pop princess or a porn star, was at best a cheap copy: a novelty of no small interest – like Vince Vaughn trying to fill Anthony Perkins’ shoes in Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho (1998) – but a novelty nonetheless, one that would threaten to undermine the primal power of the original, the very source of the film’s cult.