Pink Flamingos - John Waters

Art is filth. Wild, unqualified, great art that is. This is the metaphor at the heart of Pope of Trash John Waters´riotous exercise in bad taste Pink Flamingos.
In the 1972 experimental film, Waters´muse Divine – played by the late Harris Glenn Milstead - is "the filthiest person alive". She has being filthy down to a fine art. Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary) – the bourgeous pretenders to her throne – pale in comparison.
Divine has gone to ground following a tabloid scandal when we first meet her, and is going be the name of Babs Johnson. She is living in a caravan with her son Crackers (Danny Mills), who indulges in three-ways with chickens, Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), who likes to watch, and Edie (Edith Massey), who spends her days in a children´s play pen fantasising about eggs; she likes them sunny-side up.
Like Hannibal Lecter when we first encounter him, composed and quiet in his glass cell, Divine appears harmless, almost pleasant at the outset. But as she drives to town her true colours start to flare. She runs a jogger off the road and taunts a hitchhiker whilst laughing uproariously. She´s making the trip because she wants to fall in love. "I haven´t fallen in love for three whole days," she sighs. So her first stop, naturally, is the butchers. She buys a beef-steak and slides it between her legs to the strains of Frankie Lymon singing I´m Not a Juvenile Delinquent. Lymon segues into Little Richard´s version of The Girl Can´t Help It. Divine struts round Baltimore, everyone rubber-necking her as she passes. "If she smile, the beefsteak get well done," Little Richard squawks. Before long Divine is butchering and eating policemen, licking furniture and fellating her son, proving to all the nay-sayers in the audience that she is indeed the filthiest person alive.
Among the nay-sayers are the Marbles, two "jealous perverts" who are plotting her downfall. "We won´t be upstaged by that fat hog!" Connie cries. "We far surpass her in every aspect of the term filth!"
But Connie and Raymond are not filthy. Yes, they keep two girls chained up in their basement. Yes, their "rather fertile" servant Channing impregnates them and the Marbles sell the babies to lesbian couples. Yes, if a girl dies in childbirth they kidnap another. But this does not a filthy person make.
They are middle-class, capitalist pigs. "How disgusting!" Divine declares when she sees that they have central heating. Divine, with the help of son Crackers, then curses their bourgeous furniture with her saliva and thus ensures that the house and its contents now recognize true filth and duly reject the charlatan Marbles.
Connie and Raymond Marble´s designs on the crown of filth are doomed to failure. When they send their nemesis a bowel movement for her birthday, they think they´ve done good. But Divine is in a league of her own, and effortlessly out-filthies them in the film´s notorious final scene. The Marbles are not creative, bohemian, artistic, ie: filthy. They are assholes. When Connie gently breaks the news to Miss Sandy Sandstone that she has not got the job of spying on Divine for them, she says: "I guess there´s just two kinds of people Miss Sandstone. My kind of people and assholes. It´s rather obvious which category you fall into Miss Sandstone. Have a nice day." But it is Connie, along with husband Raymond who will eventually be convicted of assholism by Divine´s kangaroo court, while Divine and her entourage don hot pink Elvis Sideburns and head for Boise, Idaho, a place where the streets will be paved with filth.


Stephen Lucas