POLYESTER

Overweight housewife Francine Fishpaw watches her upper-middle-class family's life crumble in their suburban Baltimore home. Her husband Elmer is a polyester-clad lout who owns an adult movie theater, causing anti-pornography protesters to picket the Fishpaws' house. Francine's Christian beliefs are offended by the behavior of her teenage children—Lu-Lu, her spoiled, promiscuous daughter, and Dexter, her delinquent, glue-sniffing son who derives sexual pleasure from stomping on women's feet.

Francine's cocaine-snorting mother, La Rue, is a class-conscious snob. She compounds her daughter's troubles by robbing her blind, constantly deriding her obesity and berating her for befriending her former housecleaner Cuddles Kovinsky. Cuddles is a simple-minded woman who tries to console Francine with seize-the-day bromides and has inherited a large sum of money from a wealthy former employer.

After Francine discovers Elmer is having an affair with his secretary Sandra Sullivan, she confronts them during a motel tryst and demands a divorce. Francine then descends into alcoholism and depression, exacerbated by her children's behavior. Lu-Lu is impregnated by her degenerate boyfriend Bo-Bo Belsinger and announces she is getting an abortion. Dexter is arrested at a supermarket for stomping on a woman's foot, and the media reveals that he is the "Baltimore Foot Stomper" who has been terrorizing local women.

Lu-Lu goes to an abortion clinic, but anti-abortion picketers harass her. She returns home and tries to induce a miscarriage, causing Francine to place her in the care of a Catholic unwed mothers' home.

Bo-Bo and his friend, who have come to trash the Fishpaw house on Halloween, shoot La Rue, but she retrieves the gun and shoots Bo-Bo dead. After Lu-Lu flees the unwed mothers' home, she returns home to find Bo-Bo's body and is so distraught that she attempts suicide. Francine faints after witnessing her daughter's suicide attempt—and the apparent suicide by hanging of the family dog Bonkers, based on a suicide note left near the dog's dangling body.

A rehabilitated Dexter is released from jail and becomes an artist specializing in paintings of feet. Lulu suffers a miscarriage from her suicide attempt and is contrite about her past, becoming an artistic flower child who embraces macramé. Francine quits drinking, confronts and rebukes her mother, and finds new romance with Todd Tomorrow, who runs an art-house drive-in theater. Todd proposes marriage to an elated Francine, but she soon discovers that Todd and La Rue are romantically involved and conspiring to embezzle her divorce settlement, drive her insane, and sell her children into prostitution.

Elmer and Sandra break into the house to murder Francine, but Dexter and Lu-Lu kill them: Dexter steps on Sandra's foot, causing her to accidentally shoot Elmer, and Lu-Lu uses her macramé to strangle Sandra. When Cuddles arrives with her German chauffeur/fiancé Heintz, their car runs over La Rue and Todd, killing them. Francine embraces her children while Cuddles and Heintz kiss.

Francine overcomes her family's dysfunction, her mother and would-be lover's scheme is foiled, and her children dispatch her murderous ex-husband and his accomplice. A car accident kills her mother and the conspirator, leaving Francine free of her tormentors.

The ending of Polyester sees Francine finally liberated from the toxic forces in her life, both familial and romantic. The exaggerated violence and melodrama deliver a cathartic reversal of fortune, satirizing the traditional resolution of family dramas. Waters' finale reinforces his darkly comic vision, turning suburban misery into chaotic triumph and leaving Francine standing among the wreckage, battered but finally in control.