It’s funny – and by funny, we mean ironic – how things that were once on the fringes of our culture, experienced by few and appreciated by even fewer, become respectable after they’ve been around for half a century or more. The Blade herself can probably attest to that.

Cheap, self-deprecating one-liners aside, there’s something to celebrate about the ability to survive and thrive for decades despite being mostly ignored by the mainstream “tastemakers” of our society – which is why, in honor of the 50th anniversary of its release, we can’t help but take an appreciative look back at John Waters’s arguable masterpiece, “Female Trouble,” which debuted in movie theaters on Oct. 11, 1974 and was promptly dismissed and forgotten by most of American society. 

Waters had already made his breakthrough with 1972’s “Pink Flamingos,” which more or less helped the “Midnight Movie” become a counterculture touchstone of the seventies and eighties while making his star (and muse) Glenn Milstead – aka Divine – into an underground sensation. Naturally, expectations for this follow-up were high among his already growing cult following, who were hungry for more of his gleefully transgressive anarchy. But while it certainly delivered what they craved, it would have been hard for any movie to surpass the sensation caused by the latter, which had already broken perhaps the ultimate onscreen taboo by ending with a scene of Divine’s character eating a freshly deposited dollop of dog feces. Though “Female Trouble” offered plenty of its own hilariously shocking (and occasionally revolting) thrills, it had no standout “WTF” moment of its own to “top” that one. Subsequently, the curious mainstream, who were never going to be Waters fans anyway, lost interest.

For his true audience, however, it was anything but a let-down. After all, it featured most of the same outrageous cast members and doubled down on the ferociously radical camp that had made “Flamingos” notorious even among the “straight” (as in “square”) crowd; and while it maintained the bargain basement “guerilla” style the director had perfected throughout his early years of DIY filmmaking in Baltimore, it nevertheless displayed a savvy for cinematic craft that allowed Waters to both subvert and pay homage to the old-school Hollywood movies his (mostly) queer fans had grown up loving – and making fun of – just like him. It was quickly embraced, joining “Flamingos” on art house double bills across the U.S. and helping the Waters cult to grow until he finally won the favor of the masses with his more socially palatable “Hairspray” in 1988.

Fifty years later, there is little doubt that “Female Trouble” has displaced “Flamingos” as Waters’s quintessential work. Riding high on the heels of the latter, the director had both a bolstered self-confidence and an assured audience awaiting his next movie, and he outdid himself by creating an ambitious and breathtakingly grotesque black comedy that frequently feels like we’re watching an actual crime being committed on film. Ostensibly framed as a “cautionary tale” of “juvenile delinquency,” it follows the life story of Dawn Davenport (Divine), who abandons social conformity once and for all when her parents fail to give her the black cha-cha heeled shoes she wanted for Christmas. Running away from home, she quickly becomes an unwed mother, leading her to a life of crime as she tries to support her unruly and ungrateful daughter Taffy (Hilary Taylor, later Waters stalwart Mink Stole). Things seem to turn around when she is accepted as a client at the exclusive “Le Lipstique” beauty salon, where owners Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochery and Mary Vivian Pearce) take a particular interest in her, and she marries star hairdresser Gater (Michael Potter) despite the objections of his doting Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), who wants him to “turn Nelly” and avoid the “sick and boring life” of a heterosexual.  

From there, Waters’s absurdly melodramatic saga enters the realm of pure lunacy. Dawn’s marriage inevitably fails, and she falls under the influence of the Dashers, who use her as an experiment to prove their theory that “Crime equals Beauty” and get her hooked on shooting up liquid eyeliner; Gater leaves for Detroit to pursue a career in the “auto in-DUS-try”, and his doting Aunt Ida (Edith Massey) disfigures Dawn’s face by dousing it with acid; Taffy goes on a quest to find her deadbeat dad and ends up stabbing him to death before joining the Hare Krishna movement; and things culminate in a murderous nightclub performance by the now-thoroughly deranged Dawn, which earns her a date with the electric chair for the film’s literally “shocking” finale.

It would be easy to rhapsodize over the many now-iconic highlights of “Female Trouble” – some of our favorites are its hilarious early scenes of Dawn’s life as a high school delinquent, the Christmas morning rampage in which she destroys her parents’ living room like Godzilla on a bender in Tokyo, “Bad Seed”-ish Taffy’s torment of her mother via jump rope rhymes and car crash re-enactments on the living room furniture, Aunt Ida’s persistent attempts to set up Gater on a “boy date,” and the master stroke of double-casting Divine as the low-life mechanic who fathers Taffy and thereby allows him to literally fuck himself onscreen – but every Waters fan has a list of their own.

Likewise, we could take a scholarly approach, and point out the “method” in the madness by highlighting themes or cultural commentaries that might be observed, such as the film’s way of ridiculing the straight world’s view of queer existence by presenting it to them in an over-the-top caricature of their own narrative tropes, or its seeming prescience in spoofing pop culture’s obsession with glamour, beauty, and toxic-behavior-as-entertainment decades before the advent and domination of “reality” TV – but those things have been said many times already, and none of them really have anything to do with why we love it so much.

What we love is the freakishness of it. Waters revealed years after the fact that Divine’s “look” as Dawn Davenport was inspired by a photo from Diane Arbus, whose work served as a testament to the anonymous fringe figures of American culture, but it could be said that all of his characters, in this and in all his early films, might also be drawn from one of her images. It’s that, perhaps, that is the key to its appeal: it’s a movie about “freaks,” made for freaks by someone who is a freak themself. It makes us laugh at all of its excesses simply because they are funny – and the fact that the NON-freaks don’t “get it” just makes them all the funnier.

As Aunt Ida says, “Queers are just better” – and in this case, we mean “queer” as in “different than the boring norm.”

In any case, queer or otherwise, celebrate your freakishness by watching “Female Trouble” in honor of its anniversary this weekend. Whether it’s your umpteenth time or your first, it will be 97 minutes you won’t regret.

If you’re an Aubrey Plaza fan, this might just be the best time to be alive.

Plaza, whose role in the hit series “Parks and Recreation” catapulted her to fame, graduated to highly regarded indie film roles and into a career trajectory that includes an award-winning turn on the second season of HBO’s “White Lotus.” She’s currently placing her edgy stamp on two of the buzziest entertainment options of the season, and in each case her very specific gifts as an actor not only shine through, but add a dimension that both fits and enhances the material – and we’re a hundred percent on board for both of them.

The most high-profile of these is unquestionably a blockbuster event. It’s the anxiously awaited “Agatha All Along,” a spin-off that picks up the story of its witchy title character (Kathryn Hahn, in a virtuoso star turn) from the Marvel and Disney Plus limited series “WandaVision” after having been trapped in a “twisted spell” by Emmy-winner Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff – aka the Scarlet Witch – during that show’s finale.

In this case, it’s hard to say much about Plaza’s performance yet – she only appears in one of the two episodes released to date, and her character, while provocative, is still very much an unknown quantity within the larger structure of the show – but it’s clear from her electrifying subtext with co-star Hahn that their relationship will likely be a key to the show’s still-unfolding mysteries, and the presence of “Heartstopper” star Joe Locke (as a gay teen acolyte) only amps up the LGBTQ factor. That’s pretty groundbreaking, considering that both Marvel and Disney have long been accused of pulling their punches when it comes to queer representation in their screen content; and such considerations aside, how can anyone resist a comedically spooky fall show about a coven of questing witches that includes Patti LuPone?

Plaza’s participation in the second vehicle might end up being considerably smaller than what she eventually delivers in “Agatha,” but her two-scene performance in “My Old Ass” leaves a significant enough impression to call her the “anchor” of the film. The sophomore Sundance-lauded feature from filmmaker Megan Park (“The Fallout”), it’s a youthful-but-wise seriocomic coming-of-age tale that blends tongue-in-cheek absurdism with magical realism and a touch of sci-fi fantasy to create a “what if?” scenario with the power to make audiences both laugh out loud and “ugly cry”, and sometimes both at once.

The film stars Canadian actress and singer Maisy Stella (TV’s “Nashville”), making her feature film debut as Elliott, a proudly queer Canadian teen who lives on her family’s cranberry farm near Ontario’s scenic Muskoga Lakes. The story opens on her 18th birthday, as she and her two besties (Maddie Ziegler, Kerrice Brooks) go off for a celebratory overnight camping trip – with “magic” mushrooms on the menu to start the party off right, and we don’t mean a microdose. Each of the girls winds up having their own individual trip, but Elliott, who is weeks away from leaving for college and a new life of adult freedom she can’t wait to start, experiences something particularly mind-blowing: a visit from none other than her own future self (Plaza), a 39-year old with a still-unsettled life and a few regrets she hopes to undo by offering up some advice to 18-year-old Elliott about choices that will soon be coming her way.

No, it’s not inside info about “the next Apple”, as the film’s effortlessly witty screenplay (also by Park) puts it; rather it’s advice not to fall in love with a boy named Chad, something Young Elliott – who self-identifies as “only liking girls” – thinks will be a no-brainer. At least, she does until a day later, when a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) signs on as an extra summer worker at the family farm. He’s immediately taken with her, and she finds herself responding to his good-natured (and irresistibly charming) flirtation with more enthusiasm than she expects. Desperate to learn more, she attempts to re-forge the time-bending connection with her “Old Ass” before she winds up making the same mistake she’s been warned against in spite of herself.

While it sounds, in many ways, like the fodder for a fanciful-yet-predictable teenage “rom-dramedy”, Park’s approach aims higher than merely turning its premise into a framework for a love story. Instead, she leans hard into a refreshingly positive depiction of a young woman learning to see life from a wider perspective, to let go of the identifying boundaries she’s set for herself and become more connected with the ebb and flow of time and circumstance that has little regard for such limitations. In many ways, it’s the non-romance-related wisdom imparted by Older Elliott that arguably makes more of an impact on her life, such as learning to appreciate her family and the time she spends with them instead of simply being impatient to leave them behind. Ultimately, though, it’s the dilemma of Chad that sounds at the deepest level, and while spoiling it would be a crime, it’s enough to say that, when all is revealed, the bold and life-affirming message delivered by Park’s disarmingly light-hearted movie is guaranteed to resonate with almost any viewer.

From a queer perspective, it’s important to note that some audiences have taken exception to the film’s depiction of a same-sex attracted person being tempted by an opposite-sex romance, seeing it as a throwback to an old-school Hollywood formula under which she just needs to “find the right man” to be redeemed from her “deviant” sexuality; yet while such objections might be understandable, “My Old Ass” has also been widely praised for its authentic portrayal of bisexuality – something sorely lacking in a film industry that doesn’t know how to handle it – and its strongly asserted message about the limitations imposed by the labels society wants us to claim for ourselves.

In any case, what makes “My Old Ass” into a truly special film is not the sexuality of its characters – though that’s definitely an important theme – but the open-hearted perspective that informs it. Park makes a point of stressing that life has its own ideas for us, regardless of what we may have planned, and further that true joy might only come from letting go of all our fears and simply embracing the experience of being. There are a great many larger, more “prestigious” movies that have tried to do the same, but few have succeeded with as much raw and unmanufactured certainty as this relatively humble gem – and while it’s definitely Stella’s movie, capturing our empathetic engagement with her from its earliest moments and showcasing her unvarnished naturalism throughout, Plaza is the presence that gives the film its necessary weight, using her two scenes to cement her stature as a talent whose unequivocal stardom is long overdue.

You can catch “Agatha All Along” on Disney Plus, with a new episode dropping each week. “My Old Ass,” given a limited theatrical rollout earlier this month, may still be in some theaters but will likely be available soon via distributor Amazon Prime’s streaming platform.

It’s no surprise that the fall movie landscape finds an unusually large number of films – most of them documentaries – about trans people and the challenges they face in trying to achieve an identity that matches their own sense of self. 

Transgender rights or even acceptance have never been in such a precarious place within the American political landscape since queer rights were acknowledged at all in the mainstream conversation. After eight years of ramped-up efforts by anti-trans activists to essentially legislate them out of legal existence, trans people find themselves facing a divisive and uncomfortably close election that will likely have an existential impact on their future, accompanied by persistent and vocal efforts by the conservative right-wing crowd to ostracize and stigmatize them within public perception. They’re not the only target, but they are the most vulnerable one – especially within the evangelical strongholds that might swing the election one way or the other – and that means a lot of conservative crosshairs are trained directly on them.

It’s a position they’re used to, unfortunately, which is precisely why there are so many erudite and artistic voices within the trans community emerging, prepared by years of experience and education gained from dealing with persistent transphobic dogma in American culture, to illuminate the trans experience and push back against the efforts of political opportunists by letting their stories speak for themselves. Surely there is no weapon against hatred more potent than empathy – once we recognize our own reflection in those we demonize, it’s hard to keep ourselves from recognizing our shared humanity, too – and perhaps no more potent way of conveying it than through the most visceral artistic medium of all: filmmaking

Particularly timely, in the wake of an Olympics marked by controversy over the participation of Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting in the women’s competition, is “Unfightable,” from producer/director Marc J. Perez. Offering up a harrowing, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring portrait of Alana McLaughlin – a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant who, following gender transition, turned female MMA fighter only to face resistance and transphobic prejudice within the rarified cultural microcosm of professional sports – while also taking a deep dive into the world of  Mixed Martial Arts and the starkly divided attitudes of those who work within it, it aims to turn one person’s trans experience into a metaphor for the struggle of an entire community to be recognized and accepted on its own terms. For the most part, it succeeds.

Unlike many such biography-heavy documentaries, “Unfightable” allows its subject – the charismatic and outspoken McLaughlin, whose presence rightly dominates the film and leaves the most lingering impression – to narrate her own story, without interpretation or commentary from “talking head” experts. From the grim-but-all-too-familiar story of her upbringing in a deeply religious family (and yes, conversion “therapy” was involved) through her struggle to define her identity via a grueling military career, her eventual transition, and her emergence as only the second transfeminine competitor in the professional MMA arena and beyond, Perez treats most of the movie’s narrative thrust like an extended one-on-one interview, in which McLaughlin delivers the story as she experienced it. This one-on-one honest expression is effectively counterpointed by the rhetoric of other MMA personalities who participated in the film, some of which is shockingly transphobic despite protestations of having “nothing against” trans people.

At the same time, the film acknowledges and amplifies supportive voices within the MMA, whose efforts to bring McLaughlin into the fold were not only successful, but ultimately led to her victorious 2021 match against French fighter Celine Provost. It’s a tale that hits all the touchstone marks of queer/trans experience for those whose lives can’t really begin until they break free of their oppressive origins, and whose fight to claim an authentic life for themself is frequently waged against both the families who ostensibly love them and the prejudices of a society eager to condemn anything that deviates from the perceived “norm”. Naturally, as a story of individual determination, self-acceptance, and success against the odds, its main agenda is to draw you in and lift you up; but it does so while still driving home the point about how far the road still stretches ahead before trans athletes – and by extension, trans people in general – are afforded the same legitimacy as everyone else.

To ensure that reality is never forgotten or taken lightly, we are offered some pretty egregious examples; from prominent fighters who insist they “have no problem” with trans people as a preface for their transphobic beliefs about trans athletes, to McLaughlin’s long wait before finding another MMA pro who was willing to fight her we are confronted with a pattern of prejudice blocking her path forward. And though it documents her triumph, it reminds us that three years later, despite her accomplishments, she has yet to find another MMA pro willing to give her another bout.

If nothing else, though, “Unfightable” underscores a shift in attitudes that reflects the progress – however slow or maddeningly hard-won it may be – of trans people carving out space for themselves in a social environment still largely hostile to their success or even their participation. As McLaughlin’s journey illustrates, it takes dogged persistence and a not-insignificant level of righteous anger to even pierce the skin of the systemic transphobia that still opposes the involvement of people like her in sports; her experience also bears witness to the emboldened bigotry that has doubled-down on its opposition to trans acceptance since the 2016 election of a certain former president who is now seeking a second chance of his own – highlighting the dire consequences at stake for the trans community (and, let’s face it, the entire queer community alongside every other group deplored and marginalized by his followers) should his efforts toward a comeback prove successful.

Yet as grim an outlook as it may acknowledge, “Unfightable” doesn’t leave viewers with a belief in sure defeat; in the toughness of its subject – who is, as it proudly makes clear, a veteran of combat much more directly dangerous than anything she will ever encounter in the ring – and her refusal to simply give up and go away, it kindles in us the same kind of dogged resistance that fueled her own transcendence of a toxic personal history and allowed her to assert her identity –  triumphantly so, despite the transphobia that would have kept her forever from the prize.

That’s a spirit of determination that we all could use to help drive us to victory at the polls come November. Like Alana McLaughlin, we have neither the desire nor the ability to go back to the way our lives were before, and Perez’s documentary helps us believe we have the strength to keep it from happening.

“Unfightable” opened for a limited release in New York on Sept. 13 and begins another in Los Angeles on Sept. 20. It will air on ViX, the leading Spanish-language streaming service in the world, and in English on Fuse TV, following its theatrical run.