“Happy-go-lucky me,” gulps the corn-pone music on the soundtrack as Pecker (Edward Furlong) skips good-naturedly through his life, despite a grandmother who inexpertly ventriloquizes a statue of the Virgin Mary, a sister who emcees at the local gay go-go club, a bartending dad who broods about losing business to a lesbian strip joint (called the Pelt Room!) and a kid sister with a perpetual sugar jones. Like all of Waters’ movies (“Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray,” “Serial Mom”), “Pecker” is full of freakish eccentrics and depravities, but like all of his recent work, it also feels strangely innocent and clean — even as he’s filling the screen with the image of two (patently fake) rats humping. You couldn’t find a better argument for gleeful degeneracy than Waters, who seems delighted with life. His enthusiasm infects everything he creates — especially “Pecker,” which he calls “a feel-good movie for lunatics.”

Your title for this film manages to be obscene without actually being censorable.

I would argue that it’s not obscene, although it’s certainly vulgar. You can’t talk dirtily with it — no one says “Suck my pecker.” Men don’t use it, but women do, to slightly make fun of someone and take away a little of the power of the penis. It’s a word I’ve always wanted to use because it’s funny and almost no one ever says it anymore.

What about “peckerhead”?

That’s an insult, and a Southern one, a white trash word. No black people are peckerheads. A peckerhead is a dumb white person, a hillbilly.

Did the name come first, or was it the concept of the young photographer?

The name. I’d had a series of characters in movies whose last names were Pecker, including one character name Rodney Pecker, who was a stalker of a movie star and was going to be played by Johnny Depp. I liked the name because writing it and saying it out loud made me laugh. And I thought that I could get away with it, which so far I have, barely. The Motion Picture Association of America first said we couldn’t, but we got it overturned. The foreign translation is tricky, though. It should be “Willie” in England, but then my explanation for his nickname doesn’t work, the idea that his family calls him that because he pecks at his food. Because there’s nothing especially sexual about peckers in the movie. Like everything else about Pecker’s family, in context it’s completely normal. Out of context, people snigger and laugh. Irony changes everything.

Many people are going to see this film as autobiographical.

I think they’d be wrong, although it’s a fair question. The difference is, I was in on the irony of my career from the beginning. I was ambitious. I read Variety from the time I was 12 years old. I was very anxious for someone from New York to discover me, and it didn’t happen accidentally. I tried for eight years to show my films in New York.

My irony was intentional. It was terrorism against hippies, really — even though that was my audience — glorifying violence and everything. I remember one of my friends tried to volunteer for the Venceremos Brigade to go pick sugar cane but she had eight-inch heels, bleached blond hair, red lipstick and looked like Jean Harlow, and they said, “Get out!” That was a political sin, to be a lipstick communist. All my friends were lipstick radicals and gay yippies, which was pretty rare then.

There weren’t many gay yippies?

The gay movement was pretty square in the ’60s, until drugs. Drugs made gay men much hipper. I used to go to the riots because all the boys with the bombs were so cute. I was against the war in Vietnam, but I was more interested in the parties.

I remember the first gay liberation speech I ever heard. It was at Yale. We’d crossed state lines, to riot basically. None of us had jobs, the whole thing. It was to free Huey Newton. There were big riots, fires, tear gas — a wonderful weekend. This guy got up and gave a gay liberation speech and everyone, Abbie Hoffman, was horrified. They weren’t against it, but the Black Panthers were taken by surprise. It was a new thing, off the coattails of women’s liberation, which was also a new thing to them. These women were getting sick of cooking for all those radicals while they were out throwing bombs.

All that lentil soup.

Exactly. All that macramé — they were getting ready to strangle them with it! So it was very rare for someone to be openly gay in the context of Vietnam, Black Panthers and Rap magazine. That sort of stuff was really about the fun of being a brat. It wasn’t completely out of the goodness of my political soul that I did it. It was fun.

That’s a valid combination. Fascinating as this is though, we should get back to the movie. It’s about an encounter between New York and Baltimore.

“Pecker” reflects two sides of my life that I’m very fond of: blue collar Baltimore and the New York art world. Every weekend I decide if I want to go to a biker luau or a dinner after an opening at the Museum of Modern Art.

All of my movies gently make fun of the things I love, which is why all of my films, even the most radical ones, were never mean-spirited. I looked up to what I made fun of. I never put it down for real, except for people who judge other people — they always wind up murdered in my films. No one’s murdered in this movie. There’s not one violent act.

Baltimore does come out on top, though.

Well, the New Yorkers do adapt and come back changed. They all got laid. That’s one thing that never happens at a New York art party. The dilemma of Lili Taylor’s character [a lonely gallery owner] is basically true. Everyone is so cool in the art world. It’s so much about positioning and intelligence that I think not a lot of people get laid after art parties, no. I’ve never heard of it. Everyone’s too cool, and sex, in a way, is admitting you need something. And there are a lot of cute straight guys in that bar in Baltimore.

Not all of them are straight guys.

They’re all straight guys!

Some are women in drag!

Well, yes, some of them are drag kings, and pretending to be a straight guy is how one gets a woman to dance with her. I love sexual terrorism. Confusion with sexual identity in bars is the most fun. Otherwise it’s so boring. In “Pecker,” Martha Plimpton plays a woman who works in a gay bar and is turned on by the strippers who appeal to gay men — strippers who all identify as straight, by the way.

The bar is real, isn’t it?

It is, but I made it better.

Let me guess: You made the guys cuter?

Yes. But it used to be even better than it is in my movie because it’s right next to the prison and the guys would get a job there when they got out of jail. So it was nude prisoners — there’s nothing better! It’s all based on reality, even though it’s not like that anymore. It’s still next to the prison. The prisoners would yell when the bus with the actors pulled up: “Action, get off the bus, go in the fag bar, cut!”

The Pelt Room, I’m told, harks back to troubles you’ve had with the authorities about showing pubic hair in your films.

Pubic hair has always been an issue. In nudist films, back in the beginning, you could show everything but that: tits and ass, but no pubic hair. Pubic hair used to give you an X and later an R rating, and in Japan you still can’t show it. In bars you could always strip so far, but you cannot have pubic hair and liquor. Each state has its pubic hair rules. It’s a complicated pubic issue.

I used to fight with the censor board all the time, even when it got beyond pubic hair. She’d say: “You have to cut that vagina,” and I’d say, “That’s a man. It’s not a vagina, it’s a cheater.” I’d have to explain that a cheater was a fake pubic thing that goes over a penis with a merkin on top, which was a pubic hair wig, which I’d try to explain to her just to horrify her. She’d scream, “Don’t tell me about sex — I was married to an Italian!” I’d spend every penny I had on a movie and she’d hand me a pair of scissors to ruin a brand new print to cut two frames of what she said was “Rear entry!” which I loved, she’d scream that out — “Rear entry!” I never heard anybody say that in my life.

Now I’m proud to say that we have a full-screen shot of pubic hair in an R-rated movie. I think they were very fair about that, the MPAA. They always claim it’s about “overall tone.” The overall tone of this movie isn’t offensive. It could easily be offensive to show a man staring at a close-up of undulating pubic hair, but in a place called the Pelt Room it becomes a joke.

This movie, like a lot of your more recent movies, has a very sweet spirit.

I think it does. I’m happier in my life at 52 years old. At 25, when I made “Pink Flamingos,” I was more insane, angrier maybe, but still happy. It’s 1990 now, not the ’60s, when there was a cultural war going on. Now I’m rooting for the president to get blow jobs! It’s very different. “Pecker” has some of the edge of my earlier movies but a sweeter spirit. The sense of humor is the same. “Pecker” is a feel-good movie for lunatics.

Your sensibility has gotten a little bit sweeter, and at the same time your brand of humor is a lot more common out there in mainstream culture.

My humor and American humor generally have come towards each other, amazingly so. Who knows, “Pink Flamingos” may someday play on television. Anything can happen. Now “There’s Something About Mary” has close-ups of cum and balls caught in zippers. I think that’s great. It makes my life easier that it’s out there and has made money and was a hit. That would have been unheard-of in a movie 10 years ago, and I like to think I’ve had a little bit of influence in making that possible. I’m proud of that.

Days later, Waters’ agent in Hollywood received a scathing letter intended for the director. “In response to your sarcasms about chickens,” the missive began, “you are wrong. Chickens are intelligent, sensitive, and social birds … It’s interesting that you eat creatures whom you despise. In calling chickens ‘frighteningly stupid,’ you are projecting an image of yourself onto them.”

The letter came from Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns Inc. Davis — something of a Simon Wiesenthal for fowl — says she founded the not-for-profit organization seven years ago in part to memorialize her “companion” broiler hen, Viva, whom she had rescued from a chicken coop five years earlier. United Poultry Concerns’ main mission, explains Davis, is to “combat the negative stereotype of poultry as dumb, dirty and low on the evolutionary scale.”

Thanks to her vigilance, public criticism of the much maligned birds rarely goes unanswered these days. When Oprah Winfrey told viewers about how she switched from eating pork to turkey after seeing “Babe,” Davis fired off a letter recommending vegetarianism to the perpetually dieting talk-show host. When a farmer moaned to Dear Abby that neighbors were complaining about his rooster’s constant crowing, Davis offered her support. “In his own fascinating world of chickendom,” she wrote, “the rooster is a lover, a father, a brother, a food-finder, a guardian and a sentinel. He is nothing to scoff at.”

But Davis’ activism transcends mere letter writing. Aside from building a skylit sanctuary for injured chickens (don’t call it a coop in her presence) onto her Seneca, Md., home, UPC’s president has testified before Congress in a bid to extend “humane slaughter” legislation to poultry, promoted the concept of an “eggless” Easter, lobbied for schools to end classroom hatching experiments and been arrested for disrupting a Pennsylvania pigeon shoot and for trespassing at a county fair in Virginia that featured ostrich races.

Lately, Davis and her flock of 6,800 poultry protectors are throwing their weight behind a grass-roots campaign to halt forced molting, the systematic starvation of hens to control laying cycles. “To manipulate the supply of eggs on the market, hens are deprived of all food for an average of 10 days,” charged Davis. “It puts the birds into physiological shock, so they lose their feathers and stop laying eggs. It’s an extremely cruel practice. You can’t starve your dog or cat and get away with it.”

Davis is heartened by the recent attention focused on campylobactor, a bacteria that infects between 70 and 90 percent of chickens and annually causes millions of Americans to suffer from cramps, abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea and fever. But she still worries that her feathered friends face a bleak future. “Their fate is worse than extinction,” Davis laments. “As the world population grows, poultry will be produced in greater and greater numbers and be subjected to continued misery and degradation … We have a bad attitude towards chickens as symbolized by depraved comments like Waters’. He disgraces our species.”

Waters, however, remains unrepentant. “I’d be willing to bet that [Davis] has a rotten sense of humor and no (human) friends,” he said with a chuckle during a telephone interview. “Her letter was astounding. I thought I had written it to myself as a parody. I’m just glad this woman doesn’t have my home address, because she’s the kind of person who will one day don a chicken outfit and be at my door with a chain saw.”

Two years ago, 26-year-olds Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn left behind their fledgling Hollywood careers and set out on a six-month cross-country trip with a couple of cameras they didn’t know how to use and a list of 200 people they wanted to talk to. Their goal — at once ambitious and naive, clichid and timeless — was to find out whether the American Dream still exists. The result, “Anthem,” is a frequently charming but amateurish and painfully earnest documentary that reveals as much about the all-too-American naiveti of its creators as it does about their country at century’s end.

The biggest problem with “Anthem” is that, like most well-intentioned but hastily planned passion projects, it’s both literally and figuratively unfocused. Gabel and Hahn exhibit a determination and moxie that makes you really, really want to like this film, but you wish someone had urged them to take a cinematography class before they started it. At its worst, the film resembles something you might see on late-night public access cable TV. But at its best, the film has the invitingly earnest feel of a Charles Kuralt feature, bringing you into the living rooms, kitchens and cars of some very unlikely heroes. The novice filmmakers’ self-deprecating style endears them to their subjects, allowing them to capture some candid and unexpectedly intimate moments with both ordinary people and luminaries like Studs Terkel, John Waters and poet laureate Rita Dove.

Thanks to their instincts and serendipity, Gabel and Hahn repeatedly find themselves in the right place at precisely the right time. They’re with former Sen. George McGovern the day Sen. Bob Packwood resigns, with a post-op Michael Stipe the day after he cancels a show because of an emergency hernia operation and with Hunter Thompson the day Jerry Garcia dies. One of the film’s most compelling, strangely moving moments is watching Thompson struggle at the typewriter, attempting to write a eulogy for Garcia for Rolling Stone.

“Anthem” captures a fairly diverse cross section of Americans without resorting to tokenism. Like Terkel, Gabel and Hahn display a laudable respect for average Americans, leaving in the lengthy — and interesting — philosophical musings of a 20-year-old Pennsylvania gas station attendant while cutting short ex-Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic’s idiotic ravings about Jesus being a “lefty.”

But earnestness only carries the film so far, and about three-quarters of the way through the two-hour film, you start wondering exactly what it’s about. You walk out of “Anthem” feeling like you’ve just had an encounter with a well-meaning, all-purpose activist: You agree with most of what they’re saying — heck, you might even be willing to sign their petition — but after listening to their entire spiel, you still can’t tell if they’re trying to eradicate world hunger or lobbying for wider bicycle lanes. All of the 28 subjects who make it into the final cut are asked the same kind of trite and impossibly vague questions you might expect MTV News’ Tabitha Soren to ask. Questions like, “Do you believe in the American Dream?” and “What is an American hero?” (rapper Chuck D’s answer: “A big submarine sandwich”) invariably produce the same responses, with virtually everyone quoting Thomas Jefferson at length. This has the unfortunate effect of making even Tom Robbins look like he shares something in common with Christian Coalition Oregon Chapter President Jim Adkisson.

“Anthem” aspires to be as much about the documentary process as it is about its putative subject. And it’s often Gabel and Hahn’s off-the-cuff observations about their own American experience that are the most culturally astute (“Everything we’ve eaten has been handed to us through a window by a woman in a beanie”). But there aren’t enough of these to make the film much more than someone’s better-than-average vacation photos. I can’t imagine that they would be any more interesting in text form, either. (The travel journals are being published by Avon.)

The film bottoms out at the end; McGovern’s pathetic lamentations (“It’s really too bad we couldn’t have won in 1972″) come across like Andy Rooney’s irrelevant ramblings at the end of “60 Minutes.” The fact that the two young filmmakers gave McGovern pride of place is instructive. Like the “American Alzheimers” that Studs Terkel talks about in what turns out to be “Anthem’s” best interview, the filmmakers’ sense of history ends with the last thing they can remember.