John Waters and Ryan Murphy square up to taste, critics, and the problem of "camp"

Provincetown, Massachusetts, on 2 July 2026, hosted a brief and unusually frank conversation between John Waters, the 79-year-old director whose 1970s filth comedies helped invent modern American transgressive cinema, and Ryan Murphy, the 51-year-old showrunner whose Netflix deal has made him one of the most prolific producers on the planet. The format was a fireside chat at the Provincetown International Film Festival, and the subject, advertised with the festival's usual wink, was the word "camp" — and, by extension, what each man thinks a critic is for.

Both men have spent decades being misread. Waters because he insists, with some justification, that the joke was always the joke. Murphy because the volume of his output has, since the launch of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story in 2022 and its successors, made him a one-man brand whose intentions are routinely argued over by people who have not watched the work. Sitting down together, in front of a festival audience that skews queer and cinephile, they had two things to say, and they said both of them plainly: bad reviews are part of the contract; and taste, properly understood, is not the same as value.

Reading the room at Provincetown

Provincetown remains one of the few American festivals where a filmmaker can talk about failure without flinching. Waters, whose Pink Flamingos (1972) made him a hero of the underground and whose later studio-era comedies — Hairspray (1988), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998) — demonstrated that the same sensibility could survive contact with a larger budget, has long used the festival as a kind of annual state-of-the-art address. Murphy, less obviously a fit for the room, has been turning up more frequently as his screen work — Ratched, Halston, Dahmer, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, American Horror Story — has accumulated both viewers and enemies at scale.

The conversation, as IndieWire reported from the festival on 2 July 2026, ranged across bad reviews, the persistence of tabloid-style publicity around Murphy's casts, and Kim Kardashian's much-debated casting in the American Horror Story anthology. Waters played the elder; Murphy played the candid subject. Neither pretended the friction did not exist.

What critics do, and what they don't

Waters's argument, on the page and in interviews for decades, has been consistent: a critic's job is to describe a work, not to moralise at it. He does not believe a film is made better by the audience approving of it. Murphy, by his own account, has internalised that position under heavier fire, since his projects tend to land weekly rather than annually, which makes any single failure feel like a referendum.

The substantive agreement between them was narrower than the format suggested. Both treat the artist-critic relationship as adversarial by design, and both reject the idea that mass approval is a measure of artistic seriousness. Where they diverge is on the question of intent. Waters has spent his career constructing deliberately ugly surfaces to expose the hypocrisy of polite taste; Murphy's projects, even when they traffic in similar grotesquerie, are built to be watched by tens of millions of people in the first week of release. The difference is not small, and Waters — whose latest book-length work, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance, was published by Feral House in 2022 — was careful not to pretend otherwise.

The "camp" frame, and why it doesn't quite fit

The festival leaned, predictably, on "camp" as the through-line. This is a habit American writing on Waters has fallen into since Susan Sontag's 1964 essay, and it is a frame that flatters the material without really analysing it. Camp, in the sense the word is usually deployed, is the failure that succeeds — the bad movie you watch on purpose, the off-note that lands as the right note. Waters's work is the opposite case: the failure is engineered, but the engineering is rigorous. Nothing in Pink Flamingos happens by accident. Nothing in Female Trouble (1974) is unwilled. To call that camp, in the inherited sense, is to mistake the operation.

Murphy's case is harder. His shows are produced at a cadence and a budget that almost guarantee unevenness; some land, some do not. The honest reading is that he is not so much making camp as producing a kind of prestige melodrama whose relationship to taste is openly adversarial. He told the Provincetown audience, according to IndieWire's report, that he prefers to be attacked than ignored, which is the sentence of a man whose work has made him wealthy enough to mean it.

Stakes: an industry that no longer hides its tastes

The wider stakes are not about either filmmaker. They are about an industry in which the critic has lost institutional purchase just as the producer-auteur has gained commercial scale. When Netflix commits to a long-term Murphy deal — the kind of arrangement that funds multi-season shows without pilot-stage gatekeeping — the review page becomes, at best, a marketing surface. Waters built his reputation in a press economy that actually read the underground press. Murphy operates in a press economy that mostly watches the first episode and reacts.

There is a reasonable counter-argument: that the loss of the critic's gatekeeping function has opened the door to voices — Waters's own among them — that the old gatekeepers would have ignored. That is a serious point and deserves its due. The less serious version of it — that bad reviews are therefore irrelevant — was not what either man argued in Provincetown. Waters has been on the wrong end of bad reviews, and Murphy has too. What they share is the conviction that those reviews, even when they are wrong, do not change what the work is.

What remains uncertain

The Provincetown conversation was billed, in the festival's marketing, as a discussion of "camp," but the more interesting argument was about the conditions under which an artist can afford to be disliked. Waters could afford it because his audience was small and self-selecting. Murphy can afford it because his audience is large and monetised. Most artists, in 2026, can afford neither, which is the structural point the festival did not quite reach.

It is also worth noting that the IndieWire report is a single source; the full conversation, including the audience questions and any extended remarks on the American Horror Story casting decisions, has not yet been republished in transcript. The festival has not announced a public release date for the recording. Readers interested in Murphy's defence of the Kardashian casting, or in Waters's longer remarks on what he calls "good bad taste," will need to wait for that, or for the next book.

Desk note

This publication treats the Waters–Murphy pairing as a working case study in how American pop criticism has lost its monopoly on framing — and in how two figures built for different economies ended up arguing, more or less, for the same minority position. The wire coverage treated it as a personality double-act; the more useful read is institutional.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/indiewire
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Waters
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Murphy_(writer)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Flamingos
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Horror_Story