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| From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m47RlRiYoAg/SNwetpuHu0I /AAAAAAAAArE/4WZNSKsO_oY/s400/Pink_Flamingos.png |
Dir. John Waters
My first John Waters film. What would happen and how would I react? I was
not expecting how rough it was. I admit to expecting something with a glossy
camp, even this early in the director's career, candy coloured to match the
titular garden ornament outside the Divine family trailer home. Instead its
very much a homespun creation. Zooms are John
Waters' friend in dialogue exchanges instead of editing, and its unexpected
for me to hear a young, nasally Waters
narrating over the images with the same heightened tone as the characters
onscreen. What was welcomed was how lurid and purposely tasteless the dialogue
was. The dialogue brings the film up in quality. It'll be amazing for readers
to know too that the infamous "singing arsehole" sequence was
actually normal for me. The only concern with it was if the man performing it
could end up with a ruptured rectum if he kept doing the stunt. The other
infamous aspects on the other hand were as surprising now in 2013 as it was in
1972. And there are some things never talked about that would raise a vicar's
eyebrows let alone my own. |
| From http://www.virginmedia.com/images/weirdfetishes-pink-flamingos-590x350.jpg |
When all she wants is to be left
alone with her son Crackers (Danny Mills),
lodger and ideological soul mate Cotton (Mary
Vivian Pearce), and her egg obsessed mother (Edith Massey), "the filthiest person alive" Divine (Divine, real name Harris Glen Milstead) finds herself tormented by the Marbles. A
couple (Mink Stole and David Lochary) who happen to run an
illegal baby breeding organisation, kidnapping women and having their servant (Channing Wilroy) rape them to sell the
resulting babies to lesbians, and want to take the title of "filthiest
people alive" for themselves. At first it was slow to start, suggesting
what would be offensive and bad taste for others was just pure camp for me.
Then the moments that made it a midnight film legend took place. The chicken
sex scene which John Waters defends
as allowing a chicken to live longer, be on film, fucked on film, and then
eaten after scene. The illegal baby breeding operation. Divine and Cracker's
intimate mother and son relationship. The infamous ending that I knew about
long ago, when I was a young teenager looking into these sorts of films online
when I couldn't see them, and admit I gagged a little watching. It's very much
a first film, though not Water's
debut at all, which intentionally goes out of its way to shock. But it does
come off as playful to. It's a film which saddles itself in lurid Hollywood
films like Elia Kazan's Baby Doll (1956) and the intentionally provocative
takes on human society like Pier Paolo
Pasolini's Theorem (1968),
comparisons I can make because, to my surprise, posters for films like this,
alongside Elizabeth Taylor films I've
yet to see, are on the walls on the Marbles' home. But these two examples befit
the film's tone, even if it is its own creation. At one end, tackling taboos
with no restraint to purposely undermine good social taste - real sexual acts,
real faecal matter, extreme anti-social behaviour like cannibalism and
celebrating Divine because she is
the personification of it. At the same time it's a director-writer writing the
most arch dialogue as possible and improvising anything that came to mind.
Deleted scenes included with the version I saw, narrated by Waters, prove this when you even have
cast members singing a song about being the filthiest in Pig Latin. It nestles
itself well in the bosom of confrontation art cinema and the excess of American
exploitative cinema on its own home grown budget.
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| From http://ktismatics.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/pink-tongue.png |
It's the charisma of everyone within
it that makes Pink Flamingos a great film. Divine's onscreen magnetism is clear. John Waters' use of sixties pop songs is inspired, managing to get
the rights to it all making a sizable impact on the film's playful tone, and Divine's prescience is enough so that a
version of The Girl Can't Help It by
Little Richard is justified to be
played over scenes of her walking the streets as if she's a bombshell. Everyone
else is the same. Edith Massey, in a
playpen, is charming despite being utterly bizarre in her prescience asking for
the Egg Man, everytime that name is brought up causing me to have acid flashbacks
of The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour (1967). Danny
Mills as Crackers suitably demented, and making a nice one-two interaction
with Mary Vivian Pearce. David Lochary is great as Mr Marble,
blue hair, both collar and cuffs matching, thanks to felt tip pen, and with his
habit of public exposure compromised by who I confess openly to being an
extremely attractive and game transvestite. But I have to give some extra
credit to Mink Stole, really
exemplifying how you can't help but love the dialogue's luridness when she's
swearing and spurting obscene lines from her mouth. The nice subplot of how her
servant is completely sick of his place in life emphasises a deliciously
distorted taste on reality here where all the gaudiness of it and vulgar
language is strengthened and emphased, made to work because of the actors'
personalities onscreen like Stole.
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| From http://s1.favim.com/orig/5/1972-john-waters-pink-flamingos-Favim.com-161044.jpg |
A large sizable chunk of why the
film works is that every transgressive and campy thing within it feels
connected to real life and the ridiculous at the same time. Ordinary people are
literally acting on screen rather than Hollywood actors. Ironically like Pasolini, Waters has no hesitance to using non-actors in his films, even if
making such a low budget film meant he would have to, and make them as
important, or more so, than a professional one. Like Jack Smith though, like the director of Pin Narcissus (1971) James
Bidgood, his desire was to recreate Hollywood melodrama through the
sensibility of mixing high and low art with no distinction. I'm grateful to say
I've seen Baby Doll too, and a film
like it, even if it's great, and well made and shot, is very much a grubby
little movie with scuzzy dialogue. Hollywood has its fair share of sleazy films
hiding in glossy clothing, and aside from being able to get away with far more,
Waters was clearly recreating one
here. You're watching effectively a story that could have been seen in a Oscar
worthy drama, a conflict between a trailer home family unit and a snobbier
middle class couple, like one is watching a soap opera with more pyromania and
shit eating. The result of these potentially contradictory sides, fitting to
depict through those two film posters seen in the backdrop, is seen here in how
it goes about mixing the homespun with the absurd. It's a film with no shame in
enjoying its taboos rather than telling the viewer off for them as they get their
rocks off with the material beforehand. It has no intentions of taking itself
seriously, yet the act of doing what it does, while made in places very
rudimentary, feel like something taking advise from art cinema of how being
transgressive means weaving it through a sense of reality. It drags the desire
to make a Hollywood melodrama into a Baltimore trailer park home, glamorous
costumes and sets against grassy ditches and grotty basements. The fantastical
and ridiculous is played off with ordinary people off the streets in their
hometown.
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| From http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/67/6722/FIUA100Z/posters/pink-flamingos-edith-massey-1972.jpg |
Recently I found a hilarious
quote from Waters, a lover of trashy
cinema, that his true guilty pleasures were art house films, going to them as
if he was going to a porn theatre in a filthy mack. This willingness to balance
both sides in the film, while very much being part of a new type of cinema of
the time called the "midnight movie", is clear. Seeing a film of his
now confirms, now a wise and unbelievably charming older man in interviews, so
polite even when discussing bizarre sexual fetishes, fully explains the clear
idea of his that anything offensive is of reward if done right. Nothing in bad
taste is morally wrong, but more mature an attitude if it plays it off beyond
merely shocking to being perversely charming. He's able to get away with it because
his mindset is very progressive and open. A gay man, his film is pansexual. The
women are as strong as the males, and probably have the most biting, foul
mouthed insults. Male and female full frontal nudity is a given, and no one is
left out from something really taboo or memorable. It shows so much to make me
excited about watching his other work. Why did it take so long to see one of
his films though? A viewer of anything, there are still substantial gaps in my
film viewing considering my interests. But I've now started with his work. And
it was what I was hoping for.
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| From http://cdn.mos.totalfilm.com/images/p/pink-flamingos-1972--05.jpg |
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