Catherine (Kate) Russell defended her doctoral dissertation, "John Waters and the Divine Comedy of Cult Cinema", on Thursday, September 5, 2024. The committee consisted of James Cahill (supervisor), Nic Sammond, Sara Saljoughi, Alberto Zambenedetti, exam chair Abrahim Khan, and external examiner Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburgh).
We asked Kate about her work, as well as her plans for the future.
“John Waters and the Divine Comedy of Cult Cinema” interrogates the “cult” in “cult cinema” as a polyvalent term that has a use value for thinking through questions of perverse theology, non-normative communities, and idol worship, and examines how “cult” emerges as a concept within archival materials, film texts, affective spectatorship, and extratextual influences. This approach shifts away from the reception practices and politics of taste that have informed much (excellent) scholarship on cult cinema and attends to cult in a more expansive sense that plays with the term’s anchorage to its more archaic meaning as the worship of a divine being as well as more current uses in relation to strange or sinister communities with esoteric beliefs. I trace cult’s various meanings through queer filmmaker John Waters’s work, looking at, for instance, how his scrapbooks collage together the Manson Family and the Pope, how his editing stitches together the erotic and the sacred, how his ideal form of spectatorship produces a cultic affect through laughter, and how he performs queer detournements of tabloid sensationalism through his interpretation of cults on trial. Throughout the dissertation, I emphasize the importance of comedy and laughter to a particular strand of cult cinema embodied by Waters, drawing from Georges Bataille’s theorization of laughter as akin to religious ecstasy.
I could not have gotten this far without the unwavering support of my supervisor James Cahill, who models the best kind of academic to be: generous, smart, and always funny. I also want to thank committee members Nic Sammond and Sara Saljoughi, Alberto Zambenedetti for joining the defence, and Adam Lowenstein for being an incredible external examiner. I’d also like to reserve a special shout out for Babs, named after a John Waters characters, who has more than lived up to her name with a sweet disposition masked by incessant mischief. She’s a cat, by the way.
Her supervisor, James Cahill, had this to say about Kate's dissertation:
Congratulations to Dr. Kate Russell on the successful defence of her fantastic thesis John Waters and the Divine Comedy of Cult Cinema. Kate uses the early work of John Waters—including his scrapbooks, films, and their attendant promotional schemes—to develop a highly original account of its “divine comedy,” which mischievously conjugates the sacred and profane in the holy land of Baltimore. She develops an account of cult cinema that considers the full, multivalent promises of “cult”: not just as a form of reverent if exuberant film reception (where most scholars have placed their focus) but also as a manner of organizing aesthetic practices and creative communities, as a hermeneutic lens for gathering and interpreting the world’s mysterious signs (whether delivered by the Infant of Prague or a talking anus), and as the valuation of moving images as both icons and the hammers for comically smashing them. This work proves Kate to be a triple threat: a crack historical researcher, who can creatively interrogate formal and ephemeral archives, including Waters’ archives at Wesleyan University, holdings at MoMA and the Museum of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, and the pages of the National Enquirer; a confident and skilled theorist, who lucidly works with Georges Bataille, Alenka Zupančič, among others to develop her account of divine comedy and its miraculous irruptions; and a witty and precise writer who can manage to clarify complex problems and provide unusual insight with an expertly delivered ribald joke. Kate’s work is sure to shift and expand our conceptions of cult cinema (and John Waters) and I cannot wait to see what she gets up to next.
Congratulations, Dr. Russell!
