![]() By employing trash aesthetics as a Trojan horse for a message of queer belonging, Waters manages to reframe the midnight movie as a triumph in the modern canon of LGBTQ+ cinema. Yet in the midst of the onslaught of filth that pervades Pink Flamingos, John Waters sneaks a meaningful story of queer self-declaration centered on Divine’s pursuit of subversive greatness. Even as the infamous climactic scene depicts Divine eating dog poop to prove - in a meta-moment narrated by Waters himself - that she is both the filthiest person and the filthiest actress on earth, Pink Flamingos never loses sight of its import as a sociocultural statement and a cult artifact. Featuring darkly humorous sequences of surprise flashing, unspeakably bad birthday gifts, and even faux murders, Pink Flamingos channels societal fears into a cathartic collage of rebellion that uncovers the most disturbing corners of midcentury America for satirical involvement. By situating the film on a bad taste battle between Divine’s antihero Babs Johnson and The Marbles, a kidnapping couple played by Waters’s stalwarts David Lochary and Mink Stole, Waters engages an increasingly grotesque crescendo of transgressive behavior to critique the perceptions of the Vietnam-era counterculture held by the Nixonian public. ![]() Although the infamous lobster sequence and “rosary job” at the center of his first feature Multiple Maniacs ignited his filmmaking career through controversy-driven subversive marketing, the seemingly endless menagerie of shock humor in Pink Flamingos illuminates how the film to tower above the rest of his career as Waters’s definitive countercultural statement.įrom the opening trailer park set sequence introducing Divine as a chief competitor for the position of “filthiest person alive” to the infamous dog poop sequence that concludes the film, Pink Flamingos maintains an unprecedented pace of shocking moments without ever dipping into humorlessness or empty provocation. Starting from his early short films like Eat Your Make Up, which saw Divine impersonate Jackie Kennedy to hilariously brutal ends, and Mondo Trasho, a mostly silent proto- Pink Flamingos, Waters gleefully upended notions of public decency to help create an alternative cinema outside of the structures of personal propriety and storytelling decorum. By utilizing the notoriety of his works as word-of-mouth advertising, John Waters transcended his low-budget trappings to gain a cult audience from the outset of his career. By solidifying Waters’s trash-infused camp sensibility through the story of a community competing to uncover “the filthiest person alive,” Pink Flamingos remains a shocking Midnight masterpiece and delightfully subversive expression of queer freedom.Ĭombining the cult showmanship of midcentury auteurs like William Castle and Roger Corman with the countercultural aesthetics of New York underground artists like Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, the career of John Waters leading up to Pink Flamingos saw the director subvert traditional modes of cinematic viewership as a form of deliberate rebellion against a Vietnam-era conservative establishment. From the glorious scene of Divine parading around Baltimore to the tune of “The Girl Can’t Help It” to the infamous final sequence, Pink Flamingos helped define the midnight movie through its dismantling of good taste as well as its promotion of a burgeoning queer cinema centered on self-acceptance and public expression. This week, as Pink Flamingos becomes the fourth of the director’s films to enter the Criterion Collection, it is essential to acknowledge the bold and subversively beautiful balance of unprecedented queer celebration and countercultural shock value held within Waters’s breakout hit fifty years after its original release. ![]() From his role as the forerunner of shock-driven cinema on the underground movie circuit to his unlikely transformation into the critically adored “Pope of Trash,” John Waters’ career has successfully shifted from a place of public provocation and mass revulsion into a space of auteurist praise and intellectual intrigue by critics and audiences alike.
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