Pecker 1998

Pecker is the story a modest boy who works at a sandwich join in the suburbs of Baltimore whose passion is photography. In an amateur manner, he begins to take his own photographs of everything around him and exhibits them in his fast food restaurant.

One day, an art expert from New York discovers his snapshots and is amazed by the freshness of his point of view, so she decides to take the young man to the Big Apple to start a new career as an artist and fulfill his dream. However, sometimes fame does not bring happiness and Pecker must decide between his life or his work. Success totally alters the life of the young man, whose family will be the focus of an unhealthy interest on the part of the pretentious intellectuals of New York. As fame begins to suffocate, his work will gradually lose the initial freshness.

At first glance, Pecker might look like a domesticated John Waters. This film starring an Edward Furlong who goes from being an amateur photographer of his friends and family in Baltimore to triumph in the most snobs artistic circles of New York is one of the best films of the last stage of the director of “Pink Flamingos”. He doesn't have the forced camp hooliganism of “Cecil D. Demented'” or the homemade black humor of “Serial Mom”. However, the director knows how to apply to his characters the same look with which the main photographer observes his loved ones: from the love of those who do not see the freak as someone different. So 'Pecker' works like an endearing comedy that claims that wonderful thing (of “art”) that is in the most unusual everyday people without any kind of caricaturist eagerness. Waters also season the film with some of his touches.

Pecker is an acid comedy about how the twisted circles dictated by artistic fashions can orchestrate the fame and subsequent decline of an artist. The irreverent director John Waters, responsible for other cynical and ironic visions of American society, this time had two young stars Edward Furlong ("Terminator 2" , “American History X”) and Christina Ricci (the macabre Wednesday of "The Addams Family" and “Buffalo 66”). The film is surrounded by the typical eccentric characters, but full of humanity, a redeeming quality in most of his films.

John Waters, the father of creatures as transgressive as the ones in Pink Flamingos or Polyester, however this particular film is one of his friendliest films in the late 1990s. Pecker, another rarity within his filmography full of bizarre examples, the film was received as the author's most mainstream work, a biased judgment because we are actually facing the most sincere and autobiographical of Waters’ movies. Lightened of the exaggerations 'brand of the house', but faithful to the bizarre spirit of its beginnings, Hairspray's father uses high doses of imagination and positive energy to tell us about the personal and artistic future of Pecker, a young photographer who captures his impromptu prints the crazy world around him. The protagonist, symbolic alter ego of Waters, knows success and failure as an artist almost at the same time, a premise that serves Waters to criticize the trends of cultural elites and public opinion, while defending the purity of 'neighborhood' life, devoid of the superficiality and cold sophistication attributed to the great New York. Pecker perhaps sins of a certain sense of being 'goody goody' and a narrative disorder, and at all times the feeling of being attending a private joke of very restrained repercussions weighs on it, but it is also a film with an almost contagious energy. To the usual interpreters of the Waters cinema, we must add a successful Edward Furlong and a grumpy Christina Ricci, at that time they were very popular faces and references of the American indie thanks to works such as American History X or Buffalo '66 respectively. Pecker is a sympathetic and counterculture film, so unique in its kind that it does not resemble any other. It is a harmless story in appearance, but with a lot of bad drool inside, a moral fable that surprises with its grim comedy but rejoicing with a positive spirit about existence.

Script and Direction: John waters

Music: Stewart Copeland

Photography: Robert Stevens

Cast: Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, Mary Kay Place, Martha Plimpton, Lili Taylor, Bess Armstrong, Brendan Sexton III, Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst