Pink Flamingos

Dir: John Waters

1972

**

John Waters' infamous exercise in bad taste is a tricky film to review. I think it is only right to celebrate its achievements, revel in how it changed cinema and applaud its rebellious attitude but personally I found it hard to enjoy. However, I think that was the desired effect. Pink Flamingos was an exercise in poor taste, featuring a mix of nudity, profanity, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sodomy, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, cannibalism, scatology and sensationalism, all used in pursuit of frivolity and a skewed lesson in epistemology. Breaking boundaries is good and in 1972 boundaries needed to be broken down. John Waters did everything you weren't supposed to do, from showing homosexual fellatio and animal cruelty, to not attaining a filming licence or asking permission for any of the music used, all for around $10,000. I admire most of his guerrilla tactics, he got out there and just did it, but he did have some heavy influences, with some ideas being straight up copies of other people's work. That said, no one else ever made a film like this, and in the underground 'Midnight Movie' scene, the film really took off. The film soon gained a cult following of fans who would repeatedly go to the Elgin Theatre in New York to watch it, a group that owner Ben Barenholtz would characterize as initially composed primarily of "downtown gay people, more of the hipper set", but, after a while he noted that this group eventually broadened, with the film becoming popular with "working-class kids from New Jersey who would become a little rowdy," too. Many of these cult cinema fans learned all of the lines in the film, and would recite them at the screenings, a phenomenon which would later become associated with another popular midnight movie of the era, The Rocky Horror Picture Show - a film that owes a lot of gratitude to Pink Flamingos. Waters style was clearly influenced by New York underground filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and Mike and George Kuchar. Stylistically, the film - and Divine herself, takes its cues from exaggerated ballroom drag-show pageantry and antics with Waters throwing in his know signature classic '50s rock-and-roll kitsch style. Waters' idiosyncratic style, which is also characterized by its homemade Technicolor look, was the result of high amounts of indoor paint and make-up, dubbed the "Baltimore aesthetic" by art students at Providence. His rough editing added "random Joel-Peter Witkin-esque scratches and Stan Brakhage-moth-wing-like dust marks" to the film, which were very effective, but, along with the sound delays between shots, are somewhat serendipitous. Waters swam up a sewer and came out the other end smelling of roses in many respects, although it would probably be more accurate to suggest he came out reeking of crap but everyone decided they suddenly liked the smell. That's a little unfair. Waters took a fair stand, he got lucky for sure but the risks were his, I will always admire him for that. Gus Van Sant, a director I haven't always seen eye to eye with, has described Pink Flamingos as "an absolute classic piece of American cinema, right up there with The Birth of a Nation, Dr. Strangelove, and Boom!". Dr. Strangelove and Boom! are actually British films but I do agree with him, much like Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the film is grotesque and only watchable once, but although totally different (one is a masterpiece, the other really isn't) they both are as important and as influential as each other, not just in film, but in breaking societal norms and making the viewer think, often with divided opinion. Both films are shocking, but for very different reasons and purpose. It's probably best remembered for Divine eating a fresh dog poo, which for me was barely in the top 5 shocking things that happen in the film. I always found the death of a chicken between two people having sex and a mother giving her son oral sex more disturbing but there you go. I think perhaps the legend has blurred the reality, as it's really not that great a film in the scheme of things, I'm all over transgressive black comedy but I didn't laugh, even out of shock, and I think I have a healthy and open sense of humour. However, I wasn't a kid seeing it for the first time in 1972. I would argue that it was art, just not art that I particularly like.