Pecker.

Directed by John Waters. 87 minutes. New Line Studios, 1998.

"There are people who get John Waters films," reads an interview with this cult classic filmmaker. "And then there are assholes." This litmus test sprang immediately to mind when one of my composition students posted her response to the film on our class listserv in the diction of mild-mannered critique: "I just wanted to say I thought the movie we saw in class today was a little out of the ordinary. Did anyone else think it was out of the ordinary?" She later clarified that maybe the film should not have been shown "in mixed company." I refrained from making snap judgments about her, however, and the essay that emerged from this point of tension in the classroom turned out to be one of the most interesting student papers I have read in my eleven years of college teaching.

At the time I was teaching at a mid-sized public institution in the deep South, drawing a range of students from the elite Atlanta suburb of Peachtree City and downtown counties such as Dekalb or Fulton, as well as the rural farming communities of the foothills. The course was a general education requirement, part of the first-year writing sequence, and it started with a unit on "observing the ordinary" from Donald MacQuade and Christine MacQuade's textbook, Seeing & Writing. For five weeks we experimented with seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary. The second part of this equation was much more difficult than the first. John Waters's film culminated the unit. In it, a young man named Pecker (a double entendre that, in the film, does not have sexual connotations--he got the nickname for pecking at his food as a child) photographs the mundane sights of his Baltimore neighborhood: the hamburger joint where he works, rats making love in the alley behind the diner, the oddball characters in his family, and the butch dykes dancing in the local lesbian strip club. This last part was what gave Alicia, my student, serious pause.

One running joke of the film is that "pubic hair causes crime," an explanation offered by Pecker's father for the local ordinance against selling alcohol in full-nude strip clubs. The film thus thematically addresses Alicia's concern, that looking at certain body parts in public can create discomfort or danger. I asked Alicia to shape her essay around her discomfort about being "exposed" to the dangerous sight of lesbian pubic hair in the public space of the composition classroom. The implicit use of reader-response theory made it possible to guide this student in a process of critical self-consciousness, making her response to the film the subject of her analysis, a move that coincides with my commitment to a "politics of location" in the writing classroom, in which students are asked to reflect critically on how their upbringing, social position, and value system inform their responses to texts.

The essay ultimately examined the concepts of politeness, gender-appropriate topics of conversation, and the shame surrounding explicit sexuality--concepts that continue to define the upbringing of contemporary white middle-class southern girls. Alicia never came around to liking the movie, but she did develop an awareness of the politics of liking and disliking. The ordinary, naturalized responses that made her feel entitled to speak out against the propriety of the film's presence in our class became visible to her as socially constructed and personally constraining. Her paper translates the reflex of "what I want to look at" into "what I ought to be looking at," or "what I am supposed to be looking at" (and not supposed to be looking at).

Pecker draws out this theme through the motif of candid photography and the satirical commentary on social policings and fetishizations of the gaze, as well as the social class determinants of "tastefulness" that often appear in John Waters's work. Through essay assignments that refocus attention from the offensiveness of the film to the politics of being offended--or from the text to the audience--the discomfort some students may experience in viewing this film can be made to function as the most important element of its pedagogical potential.

Merri Lisa Johnson

Coastal Carolina University