Pink Flamingos

Pink Flamingos follows Divine (aka Babs Johnson), her son Crackers (Danny Mills), traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) and egg-obsessed, playpen-bound mother Edie (Edith Massey). Living together in a trailer, they pride themselves on being “the filthiest people alive”. All is peacefully rotten until Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) – a bitter married couple who kidnap young women, impregnate them and sell the offspring to lesbian couples – discover Babs’ identity and challenge her for this title.

Divine would give a better performance in Female Trouble, Waters’ best 70s film, but here he remains fabulously charismatic, like a child on Christmas morning living in a filth-queen’s body, relishing the centre-stage. His best scene is a kangaroo court and press conference, featuring his calling-to-arms those who believe in trash (“Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate murder! Eat shit! Filth is my life!”). David Lochary and Mink Stole are equally good; stroppy and self-obsessed, sucking on each other’s toes and proclaiming “I love you more than my hair colour, more than the sounds of babies crying, more than my own filthiness.”

Performances are straight, just as they should be. This is a living world, we don’t exist within it, and we don’t stand outside looking in, editorialising. Pink Flamingos is as Pink Flamingos does. Much of the film is admittedly slapdash in critical terms. Certain sequences are skittish, continuity is poor, and so on. But this is a film of such purity and humility, of self-reliance and assurance, that these are not issues. You don’t ask, “Why is there a singing anus?” – there is a singing anus and it’s more gleeful than you might’ve expected.

Pink Flamingos in its uncut form is a pleasure to behold, as it is aimed so purely at the enjoyment in imperfection and so-called distaste. What was most encouraging about its BFI screening was the palpable feeling that it is still genuinely transgressive. This lasting impact and shock value may come from the fact that rather than just holding a dog turd in the face of conservatism, Waters’ films – as he has noted – make fun of what liberalism, in all its self-righteousness and acceptance of his films, holds dear.

But without falling into the trap of gentrifying the film with the above words, to put it simply Pink Flamingos is about mockery, recreation and release, in front of and behind the camera, about defining yourself by whatever means feel right, best and most fun.

Nobody has taken up the mantle of Pope of Trash since John Waters, but maybe nobody can.

Stephen Glass

For further information on the BFI’s Uncut season visit their website here.