Role Models

The director of the gross-out epic Pink Flamingos and other cinematic provocations salutes the people he finds inspiring—himself foremost among them—in these self-regarding essays. Waters’s role models range from icons like Johnny Mathis and Tennessee Williams to a gay reality-porn auteur, a lesbian stripper called Lady Zorro, and ex-Charles Manson groupie and murderer Leslie Van Houten. When he pays attention to them, Waters produces vivid portraits of his subjects, especially those with really lurid backstories, but he’s happier when the spotlight is on him and his studied outrageousness. He discusses celebrity (“I’ve... gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood, and spent several New Year’s Eve parties in Valentino’s chalet in Gstaad, but what I like best is staying home and reading”) and the graphic pornography on his walls, and regales readers with scatological scandals, disdaining religious beliefs while graciously tolerating people who hold them. In the end, Waters’s war against “the tyranny of good taste” feels tired, his taboo-breaking rote, his kitsch-mongering snobbish (taken on a tour of the Vatican, he refuses to leave the gift shop and its “hideously pious cards”). (June)