'Pecker': Home Is Where the Heart Is, Hon By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 25, 1998

In John Water's "Pecker," Edward Furlong is catapulted to fame. (Fine Line) Director: John Waters Cast: Edward Furlong; Christina Ricci; Lili Taylor; Brendan Sexton; Mary Kay Place Running Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes Nudity and profanity

That is why he christened the city the "hairdo capital of America," for those towers of shellac-blasted, dye-scorched (orange is popular) pure protein that loom atop the ladies who snack (a lot) in Baltimore's least visible, but homiest, precincts.

But here's what's so great: He never condescends. He isn't "better." He laughs because he knows, not because he fears. He's not an escapee, but a devotee. Like Faulkner, and unlike Wolfe, he has found that you can go home again, and even better than that is never leaving it in the first place.

His new movie, "Pecker," is an anthem to that metropolis but it also advances an argument about the usage of irony. It's a fairy tale, with Pecker – the artist as naif – as Dorothy, Baltimore as Kansas and New York as Oz. The Wicked Witch of the East is an art dealer who knows which wine to serve with which dish. New York is an evil Oz, Waters maintains, because it puts quotation marks around everything. Baltimore is Kansas pure because it puts quotations around nothing.

Edward Furlong plays Pecker, a Hampden kid (Hampden being a tight-knit blue-collar zone west of Johns Hopkins University that still awaits the arrival of the '60s) who works in a sandwich shop. His name, or so Waters insists without irony, is drawn from his habit of pecking at his food, and to look at Furlong's utter scrawniness is to believe it.

Pecker is a photographer. When he's not burying cold cuts in mayo on his day job, he's wandering the city with an old-fashioned camera, snapping pictures of his neighbors, his family, his life, his city. The world according to Pecker (the photos were actually taken by photographer Chuck Shacochis) is grotesque without being menacing, spontaneously stylish (he has the eye), and somehow real. He doesn't judge it, he merely reports it, for his own amusement and the amusement of his friends, one a cheerful burglar (Brendan Sexton III), the other his girl (Christina Ricci), who runs a launderette.

This, Pecker is saying, is working-class Baltimore, from his father's faltering bar to the gay club where his sister works to a lesbian strip bar that's moved into the neighborhood to his grandmother's religious delusions to his mother's secondhand store with its collection of shabby '50s merchandise.

Enter New York, with its sense of innate superiority, its savoir-faire, its knowledge, as represented by art dealer Rorey Wheeler (Lili Taylor). She sees with quotation marks. To her, it's not Baltimore but "Baltimore," a zone of such witless crassness, such intellectual emptiness (these people don't even drink Pellegrino but some gawdawful concoction called Natty Boh), such styleless naivete, such a commitment to Not Getting It as a lifestyle that dollar signs dance in her eyes. Art is irony, irony is art. Pecker is ironic, Pecker is irony, Pecker is art, Pecker is dollar signs.

"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Baltimore anymore," Pecker is probably thinking when someone offers him $10,000 for a picture of a woman shaving her legs on a bus.

It's a tightly wound moral fable: Pecker sells out, becomes a hit, is offered the world on a clamshell, takes it, and it only costs him his soul. Back in Baltimore, there is pain, for through his photos the world laughs at the tiny dramas of Hampden reality as lived by people who talk funny and go downy ocean every summer, hon. But people who see only "Baltimore" have no imagination for pain, for nothing that dwells between quotation marks can really be alive. Pain, after all, would be getting the '84 Pouilly-Fuisse when one had clearly ordered the '85! God, the agony!

And so it is that Pecker must choose. Baltimore or "Baltimore"? Love or money? The film asks the following question: Can the ironic and the non-ironic cohabit? It is fundamental to Waters's commitment to Baltimore that they can; it is fundamental to his commitment to "Baltimore" that first of all there has to be some wicked fun in it, and that where irony is concerned, turnabout is fair play.

The movie, then, works more as an essay than as a story. Frequently funny, just as frequently repulsive, it's filmed in Waters's trademark deadpan style that some adore and some loathe. The movie just happens to be in a film grammar that's undeceptively simple, though I think at one point the camera actually moves a bit.

Of the performances, some are better than others. Ricci has done better work this year, maybe even this week, and seemed to be the only one in the cast not in on the joke. Martha Plimpton, as Pecker's gay-loving sister, has the time of her life, as does Mary Kay Place, playing Pecker's mom.

The old Waters is gone. The anger that made him corrosive, dangerous and hysterical, the utter refusal to acknowledge a limit, the freedom for Divine to find nourishment on the streets of Baltimore: all gone. The artist who remains is happier but wiser, and knows that there is life both inside and outside the quotation marks.