Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

 Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

Written & Directed by John Waters

This could be looked at as a clever witty fun violent comedy romp. It certainly scores in that. It is a terrific, very fast paced entertainment but it’s deeper than that. It has youth rebellion, but more. The violence is a lot of fun, but there are consequences and deaths. There is really something else going on here. 
 
  The setup is simple enough. Fading Hollywood movie star Honey Whitlock, played by Melanie Griffith, is in Baltimore for the premiere of one of her movies. The scene is infiltrated by the Demented crew, disguised as the worker staff at the premiere; waiters, etc. They kidnap her and force her to act in their underground movie.
  “Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented, the director tells her as she sits bound and taped up in a chair in the gang’s old movie house hidaway. The colorful crew and cast introduce themselves. Each has a tattoo of the name of  a legionary, off mainstream, or maverick, director hero. Cecil’s is Premminger. The crew, Warhol, Peckinpah, Anger and others. This establishes that these outlaw film crew terrorists are products of the influence of movies. It is the movies, by highly successful internationally renowned filmmakers that have made them what they are.

They proceed in shooting their movie with the captive Honey. Lots of other movie reference stuff familiar to most movie fans goes on, plus more inside production material that would delight anyone who has worked on mainstream movie or TV productions. There is a tone of revenge flick. They attack movie related events and eventually a big production of a Forest Gump sequel as armed outsiders righteously enraged at being left out riding in on a high horse of disgust at the entire bloated big money system and the boring redundant products it continuously spews forth.

“Death to mainstream cinema!” cries former mainstream tool Honey who, after some resistance, has become a convert by way of passage through a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Honey, now one of them, is attacking the very thing that created her. She is along with the others who are attacking what has made them, through manipulation of their consciousness, but leaving them confused wannabe outsiders without any of the success of Honey the movie star.

  The movie is filled with really great movie connected locations and set pieces, including a very funny scene in a porn theater among the wankers and the climax at a drive-in movie theater.
  The viewer can easily be pulled into the revolutionary fervor of the lovable outsider terrorist crew. Aren’t we all movie lovers? But are we not movie haters too? We love the products that we love but hate some other stuff with a vengeance. We know it’s a big eliete money game that we aren't a part of no matter how strong our wannabe dreams might be. We know it’s just another enormous global big business but one that we are more hypnotically sucked into. We know how powerful it is, akin to That Ol’ Time Religion which it has been partly responsible for replacing. We feel how it has implanted and distorted much of what makes us human, our ideas of what love is, what success is, what is right and wrong. We can resent that and are enraged within at how we have been manipulated by this outside and out of our control power, even if we are not consciously aware of that manipulation and the resulting rage. Yet we can’t turn away and continue to feed in the endless streaming of big budget products. We are addicted to the dopamine thrill of the 2 million dollar action scene and the empathy we feel for the coming together of the play-acting yet completely convincing lovers. We watch people interacting with their “Friends” while we, in viewing isolation, have no friends. We know we love it, and are constantly told we ought to so that we bury rage at it all within us. This is the rage that can reemerge in self-hatred knowing that we can never measure up or really be involved. We are just enslaved consumer couch potatoes.

Cecil B DeMented and John Water knows all this. He is the one, the unique individual who more than any of the others came up out of us, out of the deep filthy underground our fandom and rage and breached that gated community. Yet the movie shows it all to be a suicide mission. A åfailed attempt to fight fire with fire.
“Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented. Indeed!

There is also a real story fictionalized, hidden in plain sight in this great and culturally astute movie. Patricia Hearst has a small acting role in it but her real life story parallels that of the Honey Whitlock character. Patricia Hearst was a princess of the ruling class and kidnaped in 1974. She sooned joined that ragtag band of revolutionaries biting the hand that created her, either a converted revolutionary or a victim of coercion, the Stockholm Syndrome. She participated in bank robbery until her eventual capture.

In view of this the Cecil B Demented crew is also revelied as a unhealthy personality cult following their leader into destruction or others and themselves. There is even a long scene where Cecil demands that they all submit to being branded with his initials. Was Keith Raniere (NXIVM) influenced by this movie? The same demand for control and submission in his cult many years after the movie was released particularly stands out, the branding of the DOS sex slaves.  

Cecil B Demented is a great movie.