GOOD DIRT

GOOD DIRT

On Ottessa Moshfegh, John Waters, and filth

On March 17th, 1972, audiences at the University of Baltimore—gathered together for the premiere of a new film—were shocked at what was on their screen: drag queen Divine, decorated in grotesque makeup and costume, eating fresh dog shit directly off the Baltimore sidewalk, staring directly into the camera, smiling. This shocking scene ended John Waters’ 1972 film, Pink Flamingos, leaving his audience appalled, offended, and intrigued.

Throughout his disgusting career, the Baltimorean director John Waters has built a cult following from his filthy films. Despite international bans and numerous bad reviews, his campy, dirty films have become fixtures of queer cinema, establishing filth as a staple of the genre. But it is no longer the 1970s and Waters is no longer producing films. So, with the decline of the once-dubbed “King of Trash,” there must be a filthy contemporary to rise as the protégé of puke.

Ottessa Moshfegh first rose to notoriety with her debut novel, Eileen, later gaining a younger, online fanbase through her apathetic lit-fic hit, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Her novels are mostly first person, typically following a young, cynical narrator, with Moshfegh describing the appeal of her writing as “seeing Kate Moss take a shit. People love that kind of stuff.” Much like the visual Moshfegh has modeled for us, the characters in her novels are often white and young, often wealthy and beautiful, and almost always full of shit. Moshfegh’s writing focuses on finding solace—and maybe even pleasure—in the darker parts of the human experience. As writer and critic Andrea Long Chu writes in her Vulture review of Moshfegh’s latest novel, Lapvona, Moshfegh’s work suggests that “disgust does not preclude delight—and, in fact, it often enhances it.”

Moshfegh began her Lapvona press tour on June 21st at the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she was interviewed by John Waters. “The press this week called you the Empress of Filth,” Waters gleefully remarks to Moshfegh, his pencil-thin mustache covering a toothy smile. “You aren’t trying to steal my title, are you?” While Waters delivered this line with his signature, sarcastic affect, there is truth to his sentiment. The two artists fulfill similar roles within their respective creative fields: Waters being the 1970s arbiter of filth, and Moshfegh being the contemporary.

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When examining filth in art, filth is often literal filth: dirt and puke and piss and shit. But when examined broadly, filth is an antinormative device, where the grotesque assumes the role of the political. By reaching for the lowest common denominator of dirty imagery, artists are able to use such visuals subversively, challenging their audiences’ perceptions of whom and what we often conceive of as filthy.

Filth, similar to camp—defined by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” as a sensibility prioritizing exaggeration, irony, and playfulness—can be both “deliberate” or “naive,” with the former being more satisfying to the audience. Naive filth is filth without a purpose, filth without care. Vomit for vomit’s sake, shit for shit’s sake. Naive filth is unintentional, and thus unsatisfying. Waters echoes a similar point in his book, Shock Value: “It’s easy to disgust someone; I could make a ninety-minute film of people getting their limbs hacked off, but this would be bad bad taste and not very stylish or original.”

Sontag argues that the defining characteristic of camp is “a seriousness that fails.” Similarly, if camp and filth are two sides of the same ridiculous coin, filth can be viewed as insincerity that succeeds. To clarify, filth is an aesthetic lens of viewing the world that borrows from a visual language of deviancy—drag queen supermarket shoplifting (Pink Flamingos), or shitting on the floor of an art gallery (My Year of Rest and Relaxation). Deliberate filth, filth which knows itself to be filth, is then able to subvert initial hesitation by creating entertainment. Again borrowing from Shock Value, Waters notes a difference between good-bad taste, and bad-bad taste: “To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good-bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor.”

In the closing scene of Pink Flamingos, Waters uses deliberate filth. Deliberate filth is grounded in political motivations, the intentional choices behind the disgusting. Through the stylization and characterization of Divine—exaggerated drag make-up, a sleeveless, gray cocktail dress, and a hairline that starts on the crown of her forehead—Waters is creating an amplification of typical queer visual signaling. Waters simultaneously critiques queer respectability while producing a sensory shock, where we want to look away, but we just can’t. It is a labor of filthy love to make shit-eating watchable. It is the set-up into a dirty, dirty punchline.

In an artistic sense, filth can be thought of as a diagnostic tool. Filth serves as a cultural thermometer, allowing the author to take the temperature of whatever they find sick in the world. But a fever doesn’t stay in one place forever; it spreads from person to person, developing new and complex strains, spreading even faster when the conditions are dirty. While piss and puke are forever, a temperature taken in 1972 will read differently from one taken in 2022.

Time is not the only thing that affects an artist’s filth; filth is a disgusting intersection of an artist’s biases. Waters’ filth is a male filth, a gay filth, a working-class filth, a campy filth. Moshfegh’s filth is contemporary, it is online, it is middle class and sexually normative. Waters, being born in the mid 1940s, takes his temperature anally and focuses his filth mostly on what comes out. With his films, he takes the temperature of both gay men and straight men alike. If filth is an antinormative tool, then the norms that Waters chooses to critique with his films are heteronormativity and homonormativity.

Heteronormativity is the ideal that straight people, and more importantly straight cultural conventions, are the correct way of being. Queerness and queer people, excluded from this categorization, are left othered and outcast. The defiance of this normalcy is what queered queer into existence. What Waters does with his filth is create a grotesquely queer image, one where queer visuals and filthy visuals are so interwoven that they become difficult to separate. Once he has created this dirty amalgamation, he places them into nuclear spaces: the kitchen, the nursery, the living room Christmas morning. Through this queasy combination, Waters disrupts the nuclear setting, visually challenging who is typically seen in these spaces, creating shock, humor, and sometimes even vomit. This deadly combination is what makes the character of Divine: murderous drag queen, femme fatale. Singer. Homemaker. Shit-eater.

The waters are murkier with homonormativity, as this belief system can be hidden amongst seemingly antinormative practices. This (shitty) ideology believes that the goal of gay and trans-rights activism should be assimilation into a heterosexual world, where the cultural characteristics of the normative straight population should be taken on by gay and trans people in exchange for civil protections. This vision is one of acquiescence, where queer culture is sacrificed for respectability amongst those who have the ability and desire to assimilate. But what about those who cannot assimilate into a heterosexual mode of operation? For Waters, filth provides an answer to this question, or rather a rejection to the question entirely.

As a critique of heteronormativity, Waters’ use of filthy queer characters exacerbates stereotype to the point of absurdity, showing the filth and horror in the prejudice of queer individuals, rather than in the individuals themselves. Conversely, the conflation of queerness and filth serves as an antihomonormative practice, where the straight cultural conventions needed for assimilation are dramatically rejected through acts of filth. Filth, serving as the antithesis of respectability, allows for the loudest and dirtiest possible rejection of gay assimilation.

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In conversations of filth, the topic usually falls on excretions: piss, shit, puke. Yuck. But in her work, Moshfegh also makes time for the filth we put in our mouths: food, alcohol, pills, men. Issues of self-image plague Moshfegh’s characters, from laxative-abusing Eileen to the repetitive “I’m skinny” utterances of My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s narrator. Alcohol abuse weighs over her novella, McGlue and her short story, “Bettering Myself.”

A main example of Moshfegh’s filth is clinical psychiatry. While Moshfegh often likes to keep her politics hidden, saying that she “never intends for her work to be political,” Moshfegh believes that the world is shitty and that the answer is not medication. Within her novels, this is clearest in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, where the unnamed narrator abuses sleeping pills. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, is naive, unaware, and always eager to prescribe. As she says to Waters in their interview, “You can walk in [to a clinic] and they’re already writing Prozac.” Moshfegh’s filth manifesting as psychiatry does not present itself in a typical ‘Watersian’ fashion, instead trying to create a sense of disgust through the mundanity of the situation. Moshfegh creates a sense of filth without the dirty, shitty without the shit. But this internal, moralistic filth that Moshfegh is trying to exercise may be even dirtier than Waters’ literal version.

But just because Moshfegh has chosen these topics as the subjects of her filth, that does not mean that these topics are morally soiled. Critiques of Moshfegh are often over what she chooses to make dirty in her work. Through her reliance on depraved narration, she ends up producing a lot of depraved text. It is up to her reader to decide for themselves whether or not their delight outweighs their disgust. Moshfegh herself does not care.

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Lapvona represents a tonal change for Moshfegh. Where some of Moshfegh’s earlier works—My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands—deal with 21st-century filth, Lapvona centers around a fictionalized medieval peasant village, where filth is more literal: village massacres and cannibalism, as compared to pill-popping and body-checking.

Lapvona utilizes naive filth, in contrast to Moshfegh’s earlier work. The filth in Lapvona, while intentional, is not political, or at least does not have a unified focus of critique. Instead of aligning her filth with a specific politic, she has cast a wide, shit-covered net, using any and all filthy visuals and images. What we are left with is just gross: erotic breastfeeding, animal massacre, pube-eating…sorry. This disgustingness, though, is not without an objective. Rather than choosing to critique using deliberate filth, the newest Moshfegh is instead utilizing naive filth to serve her own personal interests.

With Lapvona, rather than trying to make an argument through her filth, Moshfegh is trying to protect her ability to say whatever she wants. Due to the online nature of celebrity, Moshfegh has a much more direct relationship to critique than Waters ever did. Lapvona is Moshfegh’s rejection of political correctness and online respectability, reaching for the zenith of filth to prove that she is the one in control of her voice, not her critics on Twitter.

Moshfegh’s use of naive filth is why Lapvona may feel tonally different than her previous work—and why it probably feels worse. Worse, in this instance, refers both to morality and enjoyability. In a rejection of any attempt at politics, Lapvona embraces gratuitousness. Through sacrificing her desire to be political, Moshfegh

sacrifices a degree of control she has over her story, inserting her disgust at the expense of the readers’ delight. To create good filth, one must understand what makes bad filth so unsatisfying. Moshfegh is still learning this scripture, preaching her filthy sermons while still waiting to be confirmed.

While Moshfegh may write that “Lapvona dirt is good dirt,” in the end, the dirt was not good enough to save Lapvona from its own filth. Much like the absent Lord Villam, watching Lapvona from atop his manor on the hill, Moshfegh has dropped us into the town of Lapvona with no promise of assistance and no ability to escape, no means of pleasure and no justification for its absence. All that we are left with is dirt.

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In all of this conversation surrounding piss and shit, why is it that an audience might want to engage with filthy art? The answer may be quite simple: that it is human nature to be curious about filth. In the words of Moshfegh in conversation with Waters: “People love talking about shit. They are using us talking about shit as an opportunity to talk about it.” So maybe it is not that audiences are necessarily adverse to filth, but rather that they are adverse to their own enjoyment of it.

Waters and Moshfegh are not tricking their readers into enjoying their filth. Instead, they are curating their filth in a way that gives their readers the comfort to act on a desire they have always had. They want to witness humanity’s darkest moments, but through a controlled, morally sound medium—a politically correct way to experience the politically incorrect.

If a line can be drawn between enjoyment and repulsion, filth allows us to take this distinction, queer it, and then shit on it. Filth is not a doctrine but a device to be used deliberately, as things can easily get messy. So if you are interested in walking down the hot, asphalt streets of Baltimore, or perhaps Spring-Breaking in Lapvona, I might put a towel down first.

CHARLIE MEDEIROS B’24 is queasy.