This week Team Experience pays tribute to John Waters for his 75th birthday.
by Nathaniel R
Unlike eggs and fresh meat, both of which are memorable supporting characters in John Waters Pink Flamingos (1972), movies don't come with expiration date. Nor should they. The expiration dates for movies are theoretical, figurative, and cultural, and are thus almost never agreed upon. Some movies magically live forever losing little of their original flavor. Some become even more flavorful and would be better suited to a wine analogy than this ill-advised animal byproducts one we're pursuing. We call these expiration-date busting films, classics. Whether they make you sick, these "old" movies, is entirely up to you. Can you remove yourself from the now while watching them or do you expect all movies to cater to the accepted opinions, values, and mores of the right now (which will have its own expiration date)? These are questions we might ask about any classic especially in our current very volatile and angry social climate, where everything is being reevaluted (which is a good thing) and mostly branded unacceptable (an unfortunately reductive thing, especially when it comes to art from previous eras).
But since our subject tonight is Pink Flamingos (1972) which wants to make you sick, it's the wrong question altogether. Maybe we don't have a question at all. Our eyes are still wide, heads still spinning, and feeling slightly nauseous...
Divine playing "Divine" as "Babs Johnson" in her trailer park home without an address. Got that?
Reader I have a terrible confession: Though I have loved John Waters since first seeing Hairspray (1988) when it was released and saw everything thereafter and backtracked to a few of the earlier ones, I somehow never made it back to arguably the most important one! Pink Flamingos is one of those movies that people feel like they've already seen due to the familiar lore surrounding it and the classic bits. Everyone knows that Divine eats dog shit. And everybody knows about the 'egg lady' but knowing about a movie and some of its classic scenes is always a different experience than entering the world and committing to it. Especially if true lunacy is involved. As a result, watching Pink Flamingos is a curious smelly mix of "I have seen this!" and "What am I looking at!?! How does this exist?!?" which, if you stop to think think about it, are incompatible reactions.
Since John Waters stopped making movies in 2004, younger audiences know him better as a celebrity than as a filmmaker hence this mini retrospective. We think Waters would love that it runs concurrently with Oscar week as this is the exact kind of outlaw art that would have awards voters of any era clutching their pearls. Yes, even in the early 70s when they were at their most adventurous! Pink Flamingos had its world premiere just three days after The Godfather. Needlessly to say, it did not go on to 11 Oscar nominations and a Best Picture win but it's hilarious to imagine a twisted alternate history in which it did!
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the very serious plot, it involves the despicable sadistic perverts Raymond and Connie Marble (David Lochary and the great Mink Stole, the only actor to appear in every single Waters movie) who run a black market baby-ring selling their infants to lesbians. They want to be the "filthiest people alive" and they are, indeed, quite filthy. The problem is their nemesis Divine already has the title. They think she's just a common thief and murderer and their crimes are much greater (true but not the point). They want to destroy Divine but she's gone into hiding living without an address under the pseudonym "Babs Johnson" with her egg-obsessed mentally ill mother Edie (Edith Massey), her chicken-murdering son Cracker (Danny Mills) and another pervert Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). The film covers the escalating war of filthiness between the Marbles and Divine and family.
And it is very filthy.
If one were cynical about John Waters and his partners in crime, "The Dreamlanders" (the Baltimore freaks who acted out his transgressive art with such abandon) one would think they had a checklist of offensive acts they were trying to include: kidnapping, voyeurism, rape, exhibitionist, theft, cannibalism, animal abuse, cropophila, incest, rape, mass murder, shoplifting, kinky sex acts, public indecency, rudeness, narcissistic personality disorders, general lawlessness, cop-killing, mutilation, trespassing, arson. But in Divine's Kangaroo court "assholeism" (which she herself is definitely guilty of!) is the worst and the sentence is execution.
While Pink Flamingos has many jokes and funny lines, its best laughs are inferred and conspiratorial. They're in the perverse thrill of both wanting and not wanting each scene to go where you can see it's going and then the simultaneous relief and true disgust that it went there!
My favourite joke is the least outre and the most visual. We're told over and over again that Divine is in hiding as Babs Johnson and yet she struts through the streets of Baltimore with focus pulling "look at me!" star magnetism. There is no one in the whole world who was ever worse at going icognito than Divine. The crowds she struts by are clearly real -- watch the heads turn -- in the guerilla filmmaking. The cherry on top is the scene's superbly chosen track "The Girl Can't Help It" as accompaniment.
Pink Flamingos premiered in March 17th of 1972 in Baltimore, Maryland where it was filmed before eventually becoming a very hot ticket in urban markets and at midnight screenings around the country. The original trailer was perfectly judged, including not a single clip from the film but just the amused, outraged, and gleeful audience reactions as they exited the theater. Filmed on a budget of around $10,000 the movie grossed over $7 million making it one of the most profitable films of the 1970s.
John Waters and Divine were rising stars of underground cinema at the time and went from infamous to famous as a result. That they kept their infamy in play for another decade with subsequent efforts, despite increasing mainstream celebrity, is a testament to the authenticity of that outlaw spirit. They didn't transgress to become famous as lesser shock-artists have but because they were born for it. To paraphrase the film, 'Filth was their politics. Filth was their life!'
So does Pink Flamingos hold up?
If you're mock-shouting "Filth is my life" or quoting any of its outrageously funny and perfectly stupid lines, looking away in disgust at any point (I couldn't watch the chicken scene), and Divine's (literal) shit-eating grin is as gross as you can imagine, the answer is yes. Somehow Pink Flamingos maintains the power to shock 49 years later. The secret ingredient isn't the raw meat shoved in Divine's own "oven" or even the endless hard boileds that Edie is devouring but its incongruously childish joy at adult provocation. Pink Flamingos is sickening in both the classic and the modern vernacular definitions but it's also a perverse infectious joy. These girls can't help it. Especially not with their mischievous auteur egging (sorry) them on at every turn.
More from our John Waters Celebration
Female Trouble (1974)
Desperate Living (1977)
Polyester (1981)
Pecker (1998)