The comedy Polyester (John Waters, 1981) introduced a new cinematic experience. The screenings were accompanied by the Odorama technique in the form of a ‘scratch and sniff’ card that was handed to viewers in the movie theater. There has yet to be a serious examination of Odorama, which is usually dismissed as nothing more than a gag. This essay shows that Odorama has sophisticated subversive qualities. It confirms scholars’ and critics’ view that Polyester was a turning point in the career of Waters, one of the most important queer filmmakers of all times. The film is frequently seen as his transition from the realm of anarchistic midnight movies to mainstream cinema. This shift was disappointing to many fans, some of whom even considered it betrayal. By contrast, it is argued here that although the film was made by a distinguished auteur, it is also a parody of classic Hollywood melodramas, and playfully adopts the genre’s conventions. Unlike Waters’ previous films, in Polyester the critical ideas are all beneath the surface. It criticizes social norms, middle class values, hypocritical and fraudulent images, ‘conventional’ families, and gender dichotomies in society and their representations in the cinema. However, this is disguised in a borrowed aesthetic, and expressed through a cunning tactic which some audiences and critics missed entirely.
The success of the Israeli vampire–crime–comedy series Juda is not at all trivial, to say the least. It dared to adopt a controversial subgenre that is associated with antisemitism and blood libels. Moreover, it deals with social traumas and the ethnic conflict between the Zionist Ashkenazi hegemony and the Mizrahi sector, which accuses the hegemony of oppression and discrimination. Juda expresses a critical agenda: a dissolution of Zionist values as the only solution and chance for redemption, both for the hero and for society. Thus, despite emerging at a time when the horror genre had experienced a late blooming on Israeli screens, its appearance is connected to two other central processes in contemporary Israeli film and television: the incorporation of religion and the ascendancy of the Mizrahi hero. Juda overcomes the inherent problem in the image of the Jewish vampire—first by creating a distinction between a Jewish vampire and a gentile vampire, and second by having a protagonist who is a Mizrahi Jew.
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