Year: 1972
Director: John Waters
Stars: Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary
Two things happened this week that made me feel like coming back to Pink Flamingos. Firstly, I sleepily checked out Josh Greenbaum’s good natured travelogue Will & Harper on Netflix, which follows Will Ferrell and Harper Steele on a road trip across the country in the wake of the latter’s recent transition. Among the eclectic music choices that catalogue their journey is Link Wray & The Wraymen’s twanging 1958 B-side ‘The Swag’, a jiving earworm that nagged in my brain… where did I know it from? In the moment I assumed it was an old TV theme, but it wasn’t long before I placed it as the opening cut from Waters’ midnight movie classic, a usage that perhaps forever ‘queered’ it in the cultural lexicon (making its selection for Will & Harper a rather canny act of association).
The second was, well, the mortifying (but grimly unsurprising) reelection of President Donald Trump, assuring us another tiring four years of his fatuous gasbagging (and that’s surely the least of it). The echo chamber of my social media selects became the predictable soundboard of exasperation, panic, anger and rueful gallows humour. And, naturally, in the wake of this dark revelation the following irrepressible exchange from Pink Flamingos came flooding back to the forefront of my mind:
Divine’s raucous, sassy TV interview from the dramatic culmination of Pink Flamingos sums up a few different feelings. First, it’s a quick-hit expression of that Done With It feeling generated by the election result. The world’s going to hell in a hand basket? Fine. Can we get it over with quickly, rather than the excruciating slow-death apocalypse we’ve all been exhaustedly living through so far this century? Secondly, the above exchange feels like a perfect satirical summation of what passes for the Trump ethos. With the exception of the select, the privileged, the few, fuck – quite literally – everyone else. As the cliché truism goes, you gotta laugh, otherwise you’d cry.
So, the Pink Flamingos Criterion Collection edition, back in the Blu-ray player again. Honestly, it’s not my favourite John Waters flick. Probably not by a long way. His absolute best for me is late-game entry Cecil B. Demented from 2000 (sure to be a future entry in this series). While, of the golden age Dreamland Productions, I’m more inclined toward the movie’s bookends Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Female Trouble (1974). But in spite of this I acknowledge Pink Flamingos‘ extraordinary iconic legacy, and I really do love the film as a grotty, shit-serving paean to bad taste on the margins of Waters’ native Baltimore.
Much as I love those other Waters movies (among others), Pink Flamingos has a certain energy and aesthetic that is all its own, even in its director’s singular oeuvre. Showcasing Waters’ drag queen muse Divine in all her filth and glory, this turd in the mail is gift-wrapped with a lurid red ribbon, celebrating the thrift-store inelegance of rural fringe Americana, where trailer parks and rowhouses are the homesteads of the oddballs left out of the country’s unattainable capitalist dream. Flamingos is a wantonly obnoxious and disagreeable animal (I can’t get behind the scene involving live chickens in any way, and can’t help but find it reprehensible), but I can appreciate the political and artistic intent of such scenes; the effort to de-sanitise American cinema. And to throw the ugliness of the film industry in front of the cameras. There’s a crude honesty at work that becomes a kind of firewall of integrity. You might not like what Waters is doing, but his commitment to the bit is unblinking. It’s to the death.
Pink Flamingos wallows in the mire. Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond’s (David Lochary) repulsive basement dungeon is more wretched than the lair of The Silence of the Lambs serial killer Buffalo Bill (which it looks to have directly inspired). With its non-consensual impregnations of victims forced to carry to term, it even feels like a warped mirror of the Republican right’s maniacal pro-life agenda. Divine infamously eats actual dogshit for the film’s lamentable climax. The whole ethos of people competing for the title of the Filthiest People Alive seems absolutely pertinent to our present political position, where only the far-right receive representation in a media frenzy to appall us the most. Hell, re-watching the movie I was struck by how apt it feels so much of the time, how much it resonates with our current predicament(s). Our present filth is more grave. Empowered and platformed fascism. Denied genocides. Reactionary gender politics and whipped-up hysteria. Bodies piling up. Against all that, Pink Flamingos‘ grotesqueness feel positively light, camp, comedically uplifting. A cavalcade of trifles.
If it sounds like I don’t like this movie at all, that’s not the case. At its best Pink Flamingos gleefully subverts social norms and satirises America’s shame. Think of Divine’s delight at receiving a dirty cleaver as a birthday present. The carnival revelries of the ensuing montage set to the circling tunes of ‘Pink Champagne’ and ‘Surfin’ Bird’ – songs that feel over-stimulated, hyper, agitated. Waters’ selections are cheap picks, expressions of the film’s self-evident budgetary limitations. But they’re also absolutely perfect. Threadbare and irrepressible. The perfect auditory match for the lewd enthusiasm of an exposed, puckering asshole that looks like a mouth blowing raspberries. ’50s jukebox rock repurposed in a manner that turns it into proto-punk.
Nobody swears on camera as wickedly or as assuredly as Mink Stole. While Flamingos is framed as Divine’s fantastic showcase, Lochary and Stole do their level best to steal it as the competition for Filthiest Alive hots up. I love their lurid shocks of red and blue hair. The awfulness of their toe-sucking (their revelry, however, is weirdly empowering too. Nothing like getting your freak on and loving it). Speaking of, Edith Massey’s egg-loving cradle-living Edie is gleefully absurd… not to mention a gonzo send-up of the infantilised American consumer. Her abode-within-an-abode – within Divine’s trailer, at it’s epicentre – makes her the nesting egg in all of this weirdness. The idea that Divine and her clan live so far outside of the status quo that they proudly have no address syncs perfectly with the movie’s rejection of square, ordered society. And even if Lochary and Stole are the movie’s thieves, Divine’s exalting, so-extra line readings and general largess of personality perpetually outstrips Waters’ self-professed technical limitations. Her fierceness is real. She is his hall-pass.
Taboos are busted at every turn. Everything from rape to incest to coprophilia. Pink Flamingos is a zoo for the most unacceptable, intolerable human behaviours. But, in a strange, seemingly contradictory manner, that also makes it one of the most inclusive movies ever made. Nobody’s proclivities are excluded here… except perhaps those that staunchly hide behind and reference a set of supposedly lost American values that remain as ill-defined as they are unattainable. A soundbite mirage that is ultimately meaningless. Such conservative fraudsters are the only intolerables in Waters’ worldview.
As much as it sends up the politics of amorality, one senses in its satire an absolute rejection of the kind of hypocrisy that fuels the MAGA machine. 52 years on, it may be the most astute and pertinent movie for this moment in time. Watching it back certainly felt powerfully, even profoundly resonant. A legacy Waters’ surely couldn’t have ever hoped for or anticipated.
Fuck everything, Pink Flamingos seems to cry in 2024 but, most importantly and fundamentally, fuck them.
The Lost Highway Hotel 