Movie Review – Pink Flamingos

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Pink Flamingos (1972)
Written & Directed by John Waters

Well, Pride month is here, which means corporations & municipalities all around America will temporarily use rainbow avatars on social media and paint homeless deterrence rainbow colors to celebrate. Unless they are one of several states actively legislating against LGBTQ people, where Pride celebrations have either been banned by city leadership or heavily threatened with violence by reactionaries state & federal leaders feel no desire to do anything about. So I decided that I wanted to watch a bunch of queer cinema I’ve heard about for years as a way to see & write about these films and maybe provide solidarity for some readers out there. 

In the last week, I have watched Pink Flamingos, Paris is Burning, Maurice, My Own Private Idaho, and But I’m a Cheerleader…so I have had so much queerness in my life that I might be gay. Who knows? I am incredibly excited to write my review for My Own Private Idaho, one of the most impressive pieces of art I have ever seen…but let’s start with a core early queer film made by that master of filth John Waters. For some reason, as a kid, I was allowed to watch the original Hairspray. It was rated PG, which is how it snuck under the radar, and I remember enjoying it a lot. I didn’t understand then that Edna Turnblad was a male drag performer. I just thought she was a funny lady. Jump to my college years, and I learned about the more extensive filmography of John Waters. I can’t say I’ve explored it enough, but I hope to remedy that in the future. 

In Pink Flamingos, we follow the outrageous & vile exploits of the notorious drag queen Divine (Divine), who lives under the pseudonym Babs Johnson. She lives with her lovely family in a trailer on the outskirts of Phoenix, Maryland. There’s Edie (Edith Massey), her crib-bound egg-obsessed mother. There’s her sexually deviant son Crackers (Danny Mills). And finally, her traveling companion, Cotton (Mary Vivian Pierce). Divine is named the “filthiest person alive” by a local paper and draws the ire of her rivals, Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary, respectively), who hatch a plan to ruin Divine and secure the title for themselves. Part of their method of achieving this is to have their loyal manservant Channing kidnap young women, impregnate them, and sell the babies on the black market, all while keeping the women chained up in their basement. A series of nauseating and hilarious vignettes follow, not amounting so much to a plot but Water & Company mocking the heteros, which culminates in one of the most stomach-churning acts ever put to film? Or at least for most normies, I suppose

Where do you start with this one? I didn’t love it, but I certainly didn’t hate it. Of the Waters films I’ve seen from his pre-Hairspray period, I still like Female Trouble the most. These same actors deliver better performances, and you can tell Waters is trying to shape a more cohesive narrative in that picture. However, I respect the fuck out of Pink Flamingos for the sheer audacity to make it. In 1971, being queer was definitely something that could get you killed, and these people were courageous to not just make a movie but also to infuse it with their sensibilities and sense of humor. Among modern comedy, artists like Jim Hosking (The Greasy Strangler) or Tim Heidecker & Eric Wareheim have clearly been influenced by the mix of transgressive satire that Waters was working in.

Pink Flamingos is considered a piece of abject art, which is to say, a piece of art that explores themes that are in conflict with the mores of society. The point of Pink Flamingos is to disgust you. Throughout its 107-minute runtime, the viewer is treated to scenes depicting graphic nudity of all types of bodies, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, cannibalism, castration, and more, concluding with the infamous scene of Divine bending down and literally eating actual dogshit off the ground. Full disclosure: I couldn’t watch that last scene, so I had to put my hand up to cover my eyes. My wife did at first but then took it hers down and exhibited what I can only describe as a mix of gagging & shocked laughter.

Pink Flamingos was banned not just in many places in the United States but also in Switzerland, Australia, and some provinces of Canada and Norway. Where it wasn’t forbidden, it was issued ratings from the censorship boards of countries that allowed them to pretend they upheld free speech while making public showings of the movie challenging to make money off of. That’s the thing about so-called Western liberal democracy: they have to feign a love of free speech while using mechanisms of the establishment to try and box it out. The joke was on them, though, as Pink Flamingos gave a messy birth to the Midnight Movie phenomenon. Waters has become a renowned artist who kept making movies, kept mocking the hypocrisy of the hetero world he was born into. 

You don’t have to like Pink Flamingos, it was a film made by Water for him and his friends. He was just kind enough to share it with us. You may not find much value in a man with a singing butthole or the twisted sexual perversions of its characters, but they are a part of reality. What the fascists seem to not understand is that you cannot call something “unnatural” if people do it. Sex is natural. Men have sex with men, women have sex with women, and some people born with male genitalia can live as women and vice versa. These are natural because they happen. What the reactionaries really want to say is that their personal aesthetics, kinks, taste in humor & fashion, etc., should be dictated as the norm for every human. Instead, they have a sick fetish for controlling others without consent. That is also natural, as we see from nature, but more the behavior of the animals we like to believe we have evolved beyond. Divine was an utterly natural person, far more natural than the desperate, gender-insecure Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro. 

Part of understanding Pink Flamingos is that it is an attempt to mock the straight imagination about queer people. Divine makes himself larger than life and monstrous to play into those fears. If you ever read anything about him, you’d know Divine was a warm, loving person known by friends to be extremely shy and quiet in private. Waters would later say that Divine thought up his drag persona to scare hippies. This was a movie monster seen through a queer lens, poking fun at unfounded fears of “the gays.” Our world would be better off if someone like Divine was still with us while the Jordan Petersons and Steven Crowders of the world were…well, I’ll stop there to be nice. Bless their little hearts.