Comedy, Cult Classic
Director: John Waters
Starring: Divine, Edith Massey, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce
Divine (Divine) goes underground in a rinky-dink trailer in suburban Baltimore and assumes the name Babs Johnson. A tabloid publishes headlines announcing Divine as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” The Marbles, Raymond (David Lochary) and Connie (Mink Stole) take issue with that statement and seek Divine out. As runners of a a black market baby selling ring, exhibitionists, and all around sexual degenerates, they feel entitled to the label “Filthiest People Alive,” and take measures to prove it. When the Marbles get a lead on Divine through their spy Cookie (Cookie Meuller) who dates Divine’s perverted son Crackers (Danny Mills) and meets Divine’s playpen-ridden, mentally challenged, and egg obsessed mother Edie (Edith Massey), and their voyeur friend Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) they begin to realize that Divine has more in her bag of tricks than they thought.
Pink Flamingos stands as the epitome of writer/director John Waters’ films, nothing does it like this. It is the king of the shockers and it takes no prisoners. Just because the film saw its release in 1972 don’t think it mellowed with age, not quite. Perhaps films since have come up with more shocking scenes than a man actually killing a live chicken during a sex act, a mother blowing her own son (the mother being played by a man in drag), and a man lip-synching the lyrics to the Trashmen’s classic tune “Surfin’ Bird” with his asshole, among other such things, but they just don’t have the panache that Waters and his cast do to pull these kinds of things off the way they do.
Of course this all has to do with Waters’ unique outlook on the world. He doesn’t pull any punches on what he does, even when he directs a mainstream film, and he’s no idiot. He’s just the sort of mad genius like Ed Wood and H. G. Lewis before him that gets his hands on some film and expresses his innermost imaginings. Yes, much of it is shock for the sake of shock and why not? Using shock in art stimulates humanity and reminds it not to take itself too seriously. Sometimes meaning can come from things with no intended meaning at all. After all, isn’t the attempt at meaningful art mostly pretentious? Pink Flamingos certainly doesn’t fall prey to that. Everyone must see this before they die. If you haven’t seen Pink Flamingos you don’t know shit about movies.