Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
In an age where true crime gawking infests every other tile of every streaming service, it may seem like America’s cheap and tawdry murder-lust is a bit of a modern phenomenon, or at least one most obvious now that all life (and death) must become Content. But real murder, scandal and ruination has long captivated audiences, especially in the country where O.J. Simpson’s trial became a defining media sensation and a racial reckoning. But even before the glove and Bronco show made this point so obviously, John Waters made it in his 1994 satire Serial Mom. Released a few months before the killings and the car chase, Waters’ black camp comedy is pessimistic towards its nation of rubberneckers. Led by a hilariously committed Kathleen Turner as a sitcom socio in charge of her nuclear family, Waters’ film flips conservative fear-mongering on its head in flippant, fun fashion. Serial Mom is now streaming on Netflix.
Serial Mom fits into Waters’ mid-career period of making subversive studio pictures that retained his midnight movie sensibility despite their production sheen. Following Hairspray and Cry-Baby (though erring toward the latter’s commercial failure and cult appeal), Serial Mom takes a single joke and runs wild with it: What if June Cleaver had a meat cleaver? Turner is perfectly composed here, pursuing her prey with a laser focus and plasticky politeness. She also delights in her crimes, which only makes the movie’s punchline (that everyone is eventually on her side) all the darker.
It’s a premise simple enough to hold all the snarky criticism Waters infuses into his film, whether it’s directed at bloodthirsty advocates of the death penalty or those fretting over the dire influence of horror films. In one of Serial Mom’s funniest juxtapositions, it’s not Herschell Gordon Lewis’ seminal splatter flick Blood Feast that accompanies an actual murder, but John Huston’s goody two-shoes adaptation of Annie. And it was all saved from a studio re-cut by a blabbermouth gossip columnist who ended up putting the executives on blast before they could touch Waters’ vision.
But even this behind-the-scenes drama reveals the theme of the film: Danger lies in squareness, in safety, in the pillars of community. Turner’s killer housewife turns the implements of domesticity (kitchen knives, tailoring scissors, even a particularly bludgeon-like piece of dinner) against those who’ve slighted her or her family in some minor way. You step out of line? Instant death! It’s an ultra-silly, slasherfied, maternal take on right-wing fantasies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish.
And that resonated with us “because everybody’s mother, in a way, is a Serial Mom!” Waters told Paste. “Everybody has pet peeves—you had friends that they didn’t like. Now, your mother didn’t go set them on fire, but you kind of, maybe, wish your mother did go back to school and murder a teacher that was unfair to you.”
Those are the impulses some of us allow to curdle into hate, some of us learn to overcome and some of us, like Serial Mom’s son Chip, release in harmless ways, like through his love of horror movies. Chip is played by Matthew Lillard in a prescient piece of casting—it was only his second film role, before Hackers and Scream would solidify him as a beautiful little freak of the screen—and he’s a hoot as a video store gorehound who quickly takes to the idea that his mom is a murderer media sensation. Alongside his sister (Hairspray’s Ricki Lane), he monetizes the situation, selling t-shirts and hoodies outside the trial like he was exploiting those looking to Make America Great Again.
This observation of sideshow capitalism quickly consuming matters of life-and-death comes during the film’s weakest moments, but it’s also the film’s most trenchant take. Just think about how many murder podcasts, true-crime documentaries and lurid tabloid TV shows are printing cash using bloody ink. They weren’t quite doing all that in the mid-’90s, but there were still fangirls marrying murderers and yellow journalism galore. In fact, some of the funniest bits of Serial Mom are those that ape the established form of its era’s fictionalized accounts of reality, with fake opening and closing credits noting how true the story is. “This is a true story. The screenplay is based on court testimony, sworn declarations, and hundreds of interviews conducted by the film-makers,” read the first words on screen. I love that Waters hyphenates “film-makers” to make it extra pretentious. It’s a silly little film, but Serial Mom seriously takes the piss out of the very real phenomena around it.
As Patty Hearst, a real victim of a media circus, cameos as the film’s final victim, Turner’s Terminator-like steel and stiffly prim smiles fall away to an unavoidable truth: We like watching people die, and we like hearing about those who’ve killed them. It’s makes us feel more alive, in a perverted way. But, as Waters loves to point out, if we’re not thoughtful about our perversions, those looking to cater to our basest instincts will only magnify our worst qualities.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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