American Culture Is Trash Culture

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No kid needs to watch a movie about a Manhattan prostitute who kills one of her johns. But I did, once, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Not because I was on the Death Star or Krypton, but because I’d been plunked down in a drama whose opening sounds are rattling chains and the chattering of Black women’s voices. “La di da di,” somebody intones. OK, I thought, something’s off. The camera inches downward to survey an array of latte, caramel, coffee and chestnut skin, leaning, lying on the floor, in sundresses and hot pants, languishing. Somewhere, a liquid trickles. A toilet just flushed, and the colors here would match the ring around the bowl. The shot keeps going until it hits a logical barrier: jailhouse bars.

Then a guard calls out a bunch of names, and bodies rise, form a line to head up a set of stairs toward a light. Gutierrez, Luna. Washington, Tyra. Jones, Arabella. The top of somebody’s head makes an expectant pivot toward the guard: Call mine. When he gets to Kirk, Claudia, the movie matches the name with a face: Barbra Streisand’s. Our murderer and prostitute. The drabness of it all emits a … a sheen, as if the grime had a halo — her. I vaguely sensed that Streisand’s casting triggered the movie’s offness. I’d never seen such an innately glamorous person give herself over to the sordid, seedy, salacious approach of a movie like this — a movie with the nerve to call itself “Nuts” — and do it with this much lewdness and vaudeville. Why flirt with Richard Dreyfuss, her brand-new, court-appointed lawyer, when she can just flash him? The wrongness of that felt ludicrously right.

I was 11 when “Nuts” came out, and it helped lead me into a committed relationship with a certain category of movie. The people in them seemed loonier, lustier, louder than we’re supposed to be. Their eyes were wild; their makeup ran. They had hair we were meant to know was a wig, because it was impossible hair. The paint chips for these movies might read: “wanton,” “lust,” “paramedic,” “weak bladder,” “mattress,” “steamy,” “do not cross,” “pilot light,” “them drawls,” “brazen,” “lit cig,” “urinal cake,” “Crisco,” “bust.” In being honest about this volatile, unkempt, uncouth, indecorous, obnoxious, senseless, malicious, unhinged and therefore utterly uninhibited side of ourselves, a certain kind of movie can make an X-ray of what else it is besides a story about some characters. It can identify the mess.

I didn’t have a name for any of this until Pauline Kael gave me one. Perverse pleasure is the experience she was circling when she wrote “Trash, Art, and the Movies” for Harper’s in 1969. The essay clocks in at just under 15,000 words and doesn’t get to the word “trash” until past the halfway point. But her antennae had picked up on some primal, intangible signal of moviegoing ecstasy that felt ancillary to (if not the opposite of) art and separate from the basics of storytelling. She surmised that the joy of going to the movies arose from “meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.” And when you meet them, “you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies” — movies that behave badly.

The piece is a jeremiad against good taste and Hollywood conservatism. Kael is basically saying, Why bother with something classy or dignified when you can have a movie as “crudely made as ‘Wild in the Streets’” — a satire from 1968 about a young, white rock star who’s elected president and the wave of fascist chaos he surfs — that’s “slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism”? Its anarchic informality, its cut-rate hilarity made it “an unartistic movie,” and three cheers for that.

Kael leaves no doubt about what she likes and is steamed when she doesn’t get it, when she’s served foie gras when what she came for is Spam. Her verdict was that the satisfaction trash offers is what Americans really want from the movies. What I sensed as a kid and what I’ve learned as an adult is that it’s not just that trash is what we want; it’s that it’s who we are.

Kael worried that Hollywood was going to forget this truth. Half a century later, her worry has come true. The thrill-seeking, sensation-oriented approach to all kinds of art (movies, literature, music, painting, sculpture, cartoons) culminated in two decades of what got called the culture wars: conservative and Christian outfits angling to ban what offended them, concerned parents worried Prince would start a masturbation craze. To paraphrase the thinking: There are children here, on Earth; how can we let them coexist with all of this filth? We clashed over taste, almost nightly, in the press, at town halls, on every talk show we had. And that just made the filth stink better. But a trash-induced combat fatigue must have set in, because it vanished.

In the past 20 years, our pop art has lost some crucial pleasure node. It has popped less often, less brightly. The trash urge is now the superhero urge, and the crusades don’t necessarily entail a cape. They’re moral. A meaningful swath of American movies has turned itself over to justice, commenting on real-world debates not as entertainment but as discourse: cancellation, abuse of power, civil rights-era tragedy in new movies like “Tár,” “She Said” and “Till,” movies with women at their core and — in the case of the latter two, anyway — dignity for a spine. I get it. How long have the movies exploited, ignored, mocked all kinds of groups? Now we’re in the grip of a corrective spirit. The gutters are getting a power wash.

The trash urge gave American movies its musk, its fun, its hickies, its exercise — in action and horror and thrillers, in the disaster movie, in just about anything that had the brass to cast Shelley Winters or Faye Dunaway, and the brains, if you think about it, to hire Jodie Foster. It stressed the id in idea. By the end of the 1960s when Kael named it, trash was on the verge of ubiquity, a genre of its own, in stuff like “Slaves,” from 1969, which has Dionne Warwick cavorting with her white enslaver (Stephen Boyd) and the strapping field hand (Ossie Davis) he just paid top dollar for. It’s fully evident during the 1970s, in the hunger and violence of the so-called blaxploitation era, and in “The French Connection” and “Carrie”; in “Mahogany,” a melodrama with Diana Ross as a runway model preyed upon by a fashion photographer (Anthony Perkins, turning his “Psycho” serial killer part into a paying job); and “Eyes of Laura Mars,” a slasher film with Dunaway as a fashion photographer who, somehow, can envision what a serial killer sees.

A good work of trash knows we came for crackups and meltdowns, for drunken stupor and orgasmic ecstasy, for psychosis and putrification, for lunatic blasphemy, like, say, the moment in “The Exorcist” when little Regan MacNeil, possessed by the demon Pazuzu, jams a crucifix into her vagina like she’s trying to open a wine cask. (A good work of trash also knows we’ve come to see a demon named Pazuzu.)

In the ’80s and ’90s, trash’s lurid energies found homes in the erotic thriller and the macho massacring of Eastwood, Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Seagal and, later, some of the underworld scuzz that one hack after another used in an attempt to be crowned the next Quentin Tarantino. Trash was winning Academy Awards. It was good box-office. Sometimes, trash was even deemed prestige moviemaking. I mean, in 1992, when best picture went to “The Silence of the Lambs” over Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” we were witnessing tabloid trash lose to trash with a Michelin star.

Trash tends to operate in defense of itself. Someone’s usually being investigated; something is usually being adjudicated, purged, censored, cast out. And no one filmmaker has flourished more in its defense than John Waters. His dozen or so comedies declare war on middle-class philistines. His extremes goad us to pursue our own.

Officially, Waters is from Baltimore, but he might as well have sprung from Kael’s vexed rhapsody in Harper’s. His second feature opened a month after it was published. He called it “Mondo Trasho.” His last, from 2004, opens with a shot of the Mid-Atlantic’s tastiest pork-waste delicacy: scrapple. That one he titled “A Dirty Shame.” In 25 years, Waters managed to show the unshowable and the speak the verboten, through the invention of absurd fetishes (not licking feet but stomping them), as satire, as farce, as education. His third feature, “Multiple Maniacs,” has a kind of carnival barker outside a tent crying, “Real, actual filth!” Inside, a woman makes out with a bike seat, and two men treat a lady’s underarms like an ice cream cone.

Waters arrived during the heyday of adult movie theaters and the birth of the movie rating system. The difference between an XXX-rated movie and one of Waters’s is a matter of ideology. His movies don’t promise to turn you on; they’re an argument for the infinite ways a person could be turned on. He restages the culture wars within his vibrantly polarized Baltimore. Exhibitionism vs. repression. Bent vs. straight. Libertine vs. conservative. Who else would think to use indecorousness to condemn racially segregated TV dance shows the way he does in “Hairspray” (1988)? Who else would make racism the fetish — and do that while ensuring that even the white dancing is good?

For more than 20 years, Waters worked with his friend Harris Glenn Milstead, who performed in drag as Divine. Her career had an arc, starting in anarchic vulgarity — “Get this table soaking wet!” she commands in “Pink Flamingoes,” from 1972 — and cresting with domestic melancholy. It didn’t matter whether Milstead was playing a post-Manson-family cult leader (“Flamingoes”) or a housewife (“Polyester”; “Hairspray”), Divine’s gender functioned as a matter of fact and seeded a delicious irony. Her bothness — her Divinity — always eluded the censors’ sensors. The big scandal in “Polyester” is that Divine’s philandering husband operates a chain of porn palaces, not that he’s married to (let alone cheating on) Divine. I saw her in “Hairspray” the year after I first watched “Nuts.” There was a quavering kink at play that even a kid could detect. Divine wasn’t hiding. She was a big girl. You couldn’t miss her. The idea that she was safe in Waters’s world — that she was normal — blew me away. I felt let in on a joke, privy to a star’s open secret, sensitive to some poignantly ordinary wrongness.

Like its winky twin, camp, trash tends to be a queer, female, colored zone — even when its practitioners include William Friedkin, David Lynch, Oliver Stone and, in his way, Martin Scorsese. All the homophobia and racism and misogyny that undergirds the wider world exists in trash too. But their toxicities are inverted and exaggerated, mocked and tested, turned upside-down. Oppressed? Condemned? Be free in trash! Curious? Come, get your answers here! These movies are a paradise of the unbidden, the maligned, the maniacal, the hopelessly, outrageously, unfortunately true — everything Waters commanded. He’s the Moses of the mode: Let my people grope.

The most crucial thing about trash, the source of its pleasure and its power, isn’t just how lurid-looking and hormonal it can be; it’s not just about measuring the lengths it’ll go to. What all great trash needs is what Barbra Streisand exudes in “Nuts.” What it needs is shamelessness. Trash means never having to say you’re sorry. It knows that fig leaves are for figs. But that un-self-consciousness, that sense of nonapology, that trash pride — it started to seep from our popular culture right around the time that Bill Clinton promised that he and Monica Lewinsky didn’t have “sexual relations” — “sexual relations” being the trash equivalent of the lights coming up at the old singles bar. “Sexual relations” crashed the country into John Waters territory. Here we were, debating discharge, laughing at the suggestion that Lewinsky wasn’t hot enough to bring the nation to its knees.

The trash of it all did seem to provide bizarre pleasure. We delighted in our disgust. Even the people who were talking about how disgusting it all was wouldn’t shut up about it. We got to be part of a sex drama that upstaged the erotic fictional trash the movies used to give us almost every week. From what I can recall of that era, two of the last works of full-throated trash were “Wild Things,” an overripe crime thriller in which two chicks turn the tables on two dudes, and the book of Ken Starr’s report on Clinton’s affair. Some kind of moral transference had taken place. It was a bigger hit than “Wild Things.” The report begged us to sniff the liaison’s particulars, then whacked our noses. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. So the shame set in.

Not long after we sank into the quagmire of the contested 2000 presidential elections, the Sept. 11 attacks happened, and the nation seemed to wonder aloud whether we’d ever feel anything good again. Irony — the dominant tonal mode of a whole generation — had lost its currency. Earnestness replaced it. The country went to war, and the wars never ended. Amid all that conflict, a Black family moved into the White House, leaving the country to figure out how to manage the paranoia and complacency their tenancy dredged up.

It makes sense that the Hollywood superhero era began in 2000. With the country in too many messes, a series of allegories arrived about the vicissitudes of power, leadership and venality. These are movies that, increasingly, were less concerned with individual identity and autonomy, more concerned with collective action, and tasked with homeland security, patrolling the border separating wrong from right. The hero virus spread. Just look at the “Fast & Furious” series: It started as a tale of car thieves; now the crooks are saving the world.

These movies are predicated upon a certain amount of visual chaos and are comfortable with trauma as long as it goes unplumbed. But for all of the bureaucratic, interstellar darkness, there’s scant human desire, despite the signals being sent by the tight, rubbery costumes — no lust, no petty transgression. If you see a gutter in one of these movies, it probably leads to a state-of-the-art crime-fighting cave. The job here is to remove stains, to take out the trash. But what would happen if Spider-Man tweaked Dr. Strange’s nipples?

Our culture has always been at its most pure when it’s in the gutter, when it’s conflating divine and ugly, beauty and base. Blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz: Somebody was always on hand to cry debasement (not unjustly in minstrelsy’s case). But the crude truth of trash is that we like it — to cry over, to cringe and laugh at — even when we say we don’t. The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise.

So really what I mean when I say trash vanished is that it vanished from movies. But trash is a persistent, consumptive force that’ll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics.

Donald Trump is trash’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, this life-size, seemingly contained thing that a freak accident of slime and ghosts turns into a menacing 10-story engorgement. All that’s pleasurable about trash when it’s tucked away in a movie seems catastrophically vulgar spilled out on the lawns of Pennsylvania Avenue. I won’t enumerate how. We’d be here all day with talk of spray tans and improbable hair, of “pee tapes” and “covfefe,” of “birtherism,” bleach and Billy Bush. But I have to mention two scenes that anybody good at trash could’ve written.

One took place that summer evening in 2020, when Trump wanted to go for an evening jaunt from the White House to St. John’s Church and have his picture taken. He timed his walk to the height of international protests in support of Black life after a seismic spate of Black deaths. Trump and his attorney general were reported to have ordered law enforcement and the Secret Service to clear a path for the president, and the pathway included peaceful protests (although a review by the Inspector General’s Office determined that the U.S. Park Police cleared the area so that a contractor could install “antiscale fencing”). Violence and tear gas ensued nonetheless, although the White House disputed the use of either and claimed that the protesters threw frozen water bottles at police officers. Anyway, on their own, those incidents are not what constitute trash; on their own, they’re just the outrages of civil disobedience. It’s the backdrop the violence provides once Trump arrives at St. John’s for his picture. For one thing, the church was fire-damaged during the protests and is boarded up. So the site has a touch of blight.

Then there’s the Bible he brought with him. When it’s time to brandish it for the camera, he appears to fumble with it, then weigh it, as if either its heft or lightness has caught him by surprise. After seeming to determine that he does indeed possess the strength to handle it, he raises his right arm. And after all the gas and spray and roughing-up, after the graffitied demands for justice that he passes on his way, he doesn’t put any triumph into the image or his few accompanying words. (Actually: Is he pouting?) He ignores a question about what just went down with the protesters, then summons some of his staff and cabinet to stand alongside him. And boy, do they seem confused. Then he shushes the press. I supposed, in this administration, that it all could have passed for a run-of-the-mill fiasco. But there was still a problem — with the Bible. Something viscerally off, something deeply “Wild in the Streets” and trash-true about the way he held it aloft in front of an ailing church, as if his hand had been placed upon it. He looked under oath, and the Bible was testifying against him.

The other scene took place in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, 2017, and it was also immortalized in a photo. Trump had been in office about a month, and his staff had invited the leaders of the country’s historically Black colleges to gather at the White House for a listening session — on the last day of Black History Month. There was, alas, a problem. The education secretary, Betsy DeVos, released a lengthy statement lauding the H.B.C.U. system. It read in part that Black colleges “are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality.” This is like the power company congratulating water for finding its way through a dam. The statement dropped the same day as the visit; and the press office’s “listening session” turned into — surprise! — a photo opportunity with the president. But that’s not what anybody remembers about that meeting. What everybody remembers is the white lady kneeling on the sofa.

The configuration of the image — which Brendan Smialowski captured and which was published by AFP-Getty — is simple. More than 30 men and women (but mostly men) stand around the president’s desk. The president is smiling, with his fingers pressed together in front of him. No one looks more pleased to be there than he does. The photo’s not a marvel of composition, not obviously anyway. But right down the center of the frame runs a path straight to Trump, cleared, it would seem, by the presidential seal woven into the carpet. No one’s standing on it. It and the president are the only objects unobscured by other people.

Normally, that uncluttered pathway might be what you noticed. But there’s a white lady, in a crimson dress, on the sofa that parallels the pathway, kneeling. The woman is Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s counselors at the time, and not only are her knees on the sofa, they’re visible, as are her lower thighs, spread slightly. She’s seemingly unaware of anybody else in the room. She certainly isn’t looking at them, because she’s contentedly swiping at her phone. That’s the whole picture. But really, it’s just the start.

Conway’s also the only other fully visible white person. Nobody’s in her way. This might feel like a story of America. And that would make it something out of trash, out of some — or possibly, any — blaxploitation movie. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” “Shaft,” “Super Fly,” “Hammer,” “Dolemite.” Here on that sofa is the white woman in those movies, waiting for, strung out on, Black male attention. She’s the brunette in bed next to Priest the first time we see him in “Super Fly.” She’s that white lady hanging all over Richard Roundtree in “Shaft.” Hers is a position of power, sure. But it’s also a position of effrontery. These important Black people have been assembled by an important white person — for what, if you’re the white person, is an important optics opportunity. Those movies couldn’t have known that 40 years after they went out of style, there would still be Kellyanne Conway, knees planted into a couch, ignoring or pretending not to notice the Black assembly behind her, evoking four centuries of terrible history and troublesome entertainment without ever having to own or being asked to understand what she’d evoked — without even having to hear a director cry, “Action!”

In life, trash obscures what, in art, trash releases. In politics, it’s a sideshow, the antithesis of the people’s business. It seduces, distracts, disarms us. One reason the movies have taken up so much injustice is to alert us to the trash in our lives, to inveigh against it, to indict it: Have we no shame? American movies do now. Waters hasn’t made one in 18 years. Fig leaves are clogging the gutter.

It’s tempting to argue that trash migrated to the reality-television universe, whose Big Bang happened when “Survivor” landed in 2000. My feelings remain mixed: Sorta yes, mostly no. It was clear almost immediately that reality’s stars — chefs, bounty hunters, drag queens, bachelorettes, housewives, stage moms, Big Brothers, Kardashians, Chrisleys — knew how to be trash. But if trash is a national processing mechanism, a fabricated realm of underlying truth, then reality television, at this point, is too processed. Nothing it conveys is ever an accident. Real trash can’t help itself. It refuses to. I suppose that’s why, after pro wrestling and “The Apprentice,” Trump had to escape from trash TV. It wasn’t real enough.

It’s not as if I can’t detect any screen trash these days, but its signal isn’t nearly as strong as it was 30 years ago. Still, somebody out there knows that our art needs to wrest it back, to take the trash in.

Trash is right there coating the streaming CBS show “Evil” and at the heart — or spleen, really — of the one season we got of HBO’s dyspeptic race fantasia “Lovecraft Country.” We have trash to thank for the scene in “The Woman King” in which Viola Davis ragefully empties a basket of human heads at the feet of her nemesis. It’s there in almost anything Ryan Murphy or Shonda Rhimes puts on TV. It’s in the moment, for instance, when Davis sits before a vanity, on “How to Get Away with Murder” (which hailed from Rhimes’s emotional grindhouse) and removes not only her jewelry, eyelashes and makeup but also her wig: It felt like trash as a religious offering. Murphy has created a new series about Jeffrey Dahmer, the men he murdered (most of whom were gay or Black or both) and a Black woman’s experience of the sound and odor of his predations from her apartment next door. It’s high urinal cake — unasked for, yet distressingly aware of the way those murders are essentially as American gothic as trash comes.

Lee Daniels might know trash better than anybody making movies right now, and that’s why his work means so much to me. “Precious,” “The Paperboy,” “The Butler,” Fox’s “Empire” — this is stuff that understands the gutter of us. Even when I don’t think the work works, the smoked cigarette of it feels right anyway. Take “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” from last year.

Does a movie about Billie need her to have sex with a G-man who was disguised as a G.I.? Especially if we don’t know that she ever did any such thing? Need — probably not. But look, the people responsible for this movie disagree. They went and made the F.B.I. agent sexy. Like, marcelled-hair-biceps-abs-and-two-facial-expressions sexy. The stakes didn’t warrant raising: The movie is about Holiday’s commitment to performing the anti-lynching chestnut “Strange Fruit” over the government’s objections. But somebody did think the steaks could use some sizzle. So the movie has Billie kick it with this guy, who keeps trying to get her locked up for drug possession, then pays her flirty visits (“even in prison, you’re beautiful”).

It’s the sort of movie that opens with one of this country’s most storied singers sitting down for a radio interview with a tangy white gossip whose name is Reginald Lord Devine and whose shirt has at least one mustard splotch. It’s the kind of movie in which an effeminate, occasionally toupéed, sometimes balding, sometimes bald confidant handles her costumes and personally assists her, while a big, one-eyed pal provides hair care and sound advice. It’s she who, after one of Holiday’s pooches gets a grand, cathedral funeral, admonishes Holiday, through sobs: “Billie, I told you, you can’t let Chiquita eat off your plate. That’s why she cho-oh-oh-oh-ked.” It’s a movie in which, for most of the running time, the camera seems to bob like buoy or a toy boat, and the lighting seems emitted from a bottle of Wesson.

Yes, this is the sort of movie that won’t give you the Billie Holiday story straight when it can give it to you gay, crooked and inside-out, when it can savor the shots of the spoons that cook her heroin and juxtapose her singing “Solitude” with a shot of her sitting, negligéed, on a toilet. When Lord Devine asks another nosy question (“Someone tells me” — [Insinuating Pause No. 1]. “You are very tight” [Insinuating Pause No. 2]. “With Tallulah Bankhead.”), the toupéed-balding-bald assistant leans in and says, “Lil’ bitch, you got one more time to ask more one more smartass question. … ” It’s the sort of movie in which Holiday’s future husband runs into her in the park and she is, indeed, out with Bankhead, and he’s with a blonde, and he tells her, “How bout we ditch these snow bunnies and go get into some Black [expletive].”

“The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is the sort of movie biography that respects its subject, just not in any conventional Hollywood way. It prefers stains to stained glass, saltiness to saintliness. Its irreverence is a form of reverence. It’s a movie that doesn’t care about the achievement of cinematic greatness — or, frankly, even very-goodness. It’s after an alternative honesty.

Holiday’s drug use is a pretext for both the F.B.I. and Daniels. Her crime isn’t heroin. It’s singing “Strange Fruit,” a song written by a white Jew that tells on America, that tells a truth about America. Its central metaphor is appalling: Lynched bodies, burned, hanging from trees, look perversely like nature. They belong to Black men, hunted on suspicion of, say, lust for a white woman, for looking at her. For less. So a mob catches them, chops them up, sets them aflame, hangs them from a tree and takes pictures. The F.B.I. didn’t want Holiday singing a song about that, because that song is too much for American ears. That song is a work of trash.