Divine Intervention

Is a movie musical warning us not to go hi-def, dumb and blind?

A Media Shmedia colum

by Scott Patrick Wagner

The recent movie-musical version of Hairspray just came out on DVD, and it inspired me to screen both versions back to back. There is something interesting about Hairspray. Even though the story is set in 1962 or '63, with all of the cultural upheaval of the era, each film actually seems to give more of a pulse of the time in which it was made.

I have a great fondness for the original John Waters Hairspray. Or maybe it's just hard to forget Divine, the three-hundred-pound drag queen, filling the screen in a housecoat. Or the fact that the Waters sensibility — sans dog poo or Egg Lady, but still bent — was selling out the multiplex. And, though the new Hairspray has wonderfully exuberant dance numbers and a plot faithful to the original's social commentary on prejudice, I can't help but feel like a radical element from the 1988 version is dampened — has been Waters-ed down, you might say.

1988 was the lumbering end of the Reagan administration, and the social exhaustion left in its wake. This was the president who thought that ketchup counted as a vegetable in school lunches. He also ended the air traffic controllers' strike by ordering them all replaced with new employees. And his homophobia was such that he refused to make — and forbade his Surgeon General from making — any public mention of AIDS for five years. I would suggest that he's the least citizen-friendly president we've had, but then I remember that guy taking up space in the Oval Office right now. Oops.

The first Hairspray wasn't politically controversial because it addressed race relations. The true pie-in-the-face to Reagantipathy was that it was successful at all, and all over the country. There was Divine, in all his huge, trashy, transvestite glory, portraying an American Housewife. And it was seen by audiences far from West Hollywood and Greenwich Village, and apparently far from the separatist mindset of the President-formerly-known-as-actor. The 1988 Hairspray was unabashed and unapologetic in its celebration of the overweight and the underdog. It was an imperfectly acted hodgepodge in the time of Nancy Reagan's airbrushed couture, a sloppy hulk of a gay guy parading around in a dress when homosexuals had to be on their best behavior.

The new Hairspray doesn't impact in any of the same ways that Divine & Co. did. In fact, John Travolta is an utter train wreck of a transvestite. Wih the exception of a funny bit in the big dance number, where Travolta does a Tina Turner shimmy that is completely out of character but provides the sole moment of joy in the performance, this is the antithesis of the Watersian spirit. Travolta hides behind a cryptic, unplaceable accent (Texas? stroke victim?) and enough latex to prevent all further HIV transmission. It is as if the character that Divine presented so unflinchingly is now being reinterpreted behind a layer of Saran Wrap, homo-squeamishness, and some form of hallucinogen.

But the 2007 Hairspray does reveal something about its own time. There is an interesting nuance to this new film: while all the dance numbers are peppy and buoyant, there is a particular crackle that happens in the sequences where the interplay is between the characters in the TV studio and those watching (or dancing) along at home. It is hard to define exactly why these numbers ratchet up the electricity, except to suggest that director-choreographer Adam Shankman — whether intentionally or otherwise — has tapped into the state of our current media frenzy.

Personal interplay with the TV, Internet, and iPod/iPhone/YouTube seems to be ramping up exponentially. Our relationships with the personalities in the media are losing their flat-screen fourth wall. Sure, there's always been water-cooler discussion about some event-TV moment from the night before, and viewers have been phoning in their decisions about American Idol for six years. But it's morphing into something different, something somehow bionic.

I watched an Oprah show the other day about big-weight-loss stories. One woman said that the turning point came for her over the Internet. She had spent her entire adult life, at 600 pounds plus, secluded in her apartment and unwilling to face the disparagement of people on the street. But someone gave her a computer, and she developed chat relationships with people who had no idea of her physical description, forming bonds with them. The strength of these connections — and their impact on her own sense of self — was the motivation she needed to turn her life around. It's hard to know how to interpret that, except to say that it's probably the bright side of a symbiosis that no doubt also has a very dark aspect. I hear parents complaining that their teens have more predominant relationships on MySpace than in real life.

Look, I'm the last broadband junkie to say, "Media bad!" But I do notice a glassy-eyed complacency that comes over a certain segment these days. And since we're still dealing with a citizen-unfriendly tool in the White House, I think it's a good idea to get up from the screen periodically and get some fresh air. Just like your mother always said. Even if she was a three-hundred-pound transvestite.