Where does John Waters's poor taste leave off and his characters' poor taste begin? (Which came first, the chicken or the egg?) His deepest wade into the mainstream to date (but no higher than the ankles), this is sort of his personal American Graffiti, set in Baltimore in 1962. And more than ever he has become a documentarian, or museum curator, of American pop culture, its furniture, its fabrics, its hairstyles, its dance styles — all pushed to the nth degree, so that you feel at times you are watching a science-fiction film set in the 23rd Century. That degree of exaggeration is of course permissible in a satire, and in fact the satirical aspect — the cold-bloodedness toward the characters — conduces to a kind of accuracy about the Olden Days that isn't possible when filmmakers are bidding for audience identification (cf. the twenty-years-ahead-of-time hair and dance styles of the heroine in Dirty Dancing, supposedly set only one year later than Hairspray). This also helps to take the square edges off the integration theme in the movie. To have as our leading social crusaders a couple of average white teenage girls — who certainly haven't acquainted themselves with the thoughts of James Baldwin and Malcolm X, but who are well acquainted with Dee Dee Sharp and Little Eva — is a stroke of either genius or dumb luck. It individualizes the activists, and the motives for their activation, much beyond those ambulatory abstractions of, for example, Cry Freedom. And yet the underlying sentiment isn't totally eroded. The genuine liberalism of the movie, the wide-ranging tolerance and unquestioning acceptance, is borne out in the attitude of the director and (some) other characters alike toward the fatness — or pleasing plumpness, as you prefer — of the heroine. This is the most sanguine of satires: broad-mindedness has never been so improbably rampant, or anyway never among teenagers. Ricki Lake, Divine, Sonny Bono, Debbie Harry. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd