Pink Flamingos: The Battle of Filth

In the classic crime-boss—or superhero—iteration of hiding in plain sight behind a fig leaf of normalcy, the Filthiest Person Alive has a double identity: Babs Johnson, proud trailer-mom to scuzzy longhair Crackers (Danny Mills, who here has a love-starved-rabid-puppy quality), caregiver to mother Edie (the incomparably daft Edith Massey, ensconced in a crib as if that were the most natural domestic arrangement in the world), and senior partner to sleaze-glam “companion” Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce, enthrallingly déclassé).

The highly serviceable plot conventions are pulled from exploitation films (with repeated nods to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast), trashy serious cinema (the Baby Doll playpen and the Tennessee Williams–on-quaaludes dialogue), and the Andy Warhol/Jack Smith/George Kuchar wing of the avant queer underground. Planted in the middle of Maryland’s badlands, the titular lawn ornaments in front of the decrepit house trailer represent genteel poverty gone completely to rot. From the first baleful notes of Link Wray & His Ray Men’s rockabilly instrumental “The Swag”—which provides the soundtrack to Pink Flamingos’ amateurish titles, strung over a shot of that solitary trailer—this is gloriously subunderground filmmaking. Waters anointed his home/“studio,” a shoestring operation the size of a bedazzled dumpster, Dreamland. Dreamland was more than a cheeky name—it was a way of life and badge of commitment. A tribe, a species apart: Mole People as opposed to Art Junkies or Day Hipsters.

The central conflict of Pink Flamingos is the rivalry between Divine/Babs’s clan and the wondrously horrible Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary), who covet the filth crown like nouveau riche pretenders who think they are owed top billing in the social register. They are uptight offenders who imagine themselves the upper crust of scum—as Peter Blegvad sang, “the crumb de la crumb”: they don’t just kidnap, torture, and impregnate wayward young women in their suburban basement, they also run an adoption racket and sell the babies to lesbian couples. They are bourgeois degenerates—public-spirited, class-conscious folk who have standards.

Stole and Lochary, their freaky hauteur underscored by their respective red and blue hairdos, are marvels of pretentious monstrosity. Neither actor is good in an accepted sense, and both are utterly great: epitomes of a performance style pitched to the sweet spot between actual-inmates-take-over-the-Marat/Sade-asylum and talent night at the Untamed Youth reformatory. Stole enunciates words like a prim stun gun. Connie Marble to a rejected applicant: “I guess there’s just two kinds of people, Miss Sandstone. My kind of people and assholes. It’s rather obvious which category you fit into. Have a nice day!” Lochary defines deviance upward, issuing pronouncements like a louche Confederate general. Upon setting fire to Divine’s home-sweet-home trailer: “The battle of filth has been won!”

Pink Flamingos unfolds as a stream of sight gags (such as the delightfully punchy variations on Lochary’s exposing himself to “innocent” bystanders), arch monologues (these actors had to memorize reams of lines; they weren’t winging it), and strange interludes (the famous “singing asshole” routine, a prolapse in taste wherein a puckering performer anus-synchs to the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird”). Music is Waters’ secret weapon throughout: deploying songs such as the Nite Hawks’ “Chicken Grabber” and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers’ “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” with real outlaw panache, he pioneered punk sensibility before it got codified. 

The key to the film’s pièce de résistance, in which Divine scoops up and munches a couple of petite, freshly deposited dog turds, is the juxtaposition of the image with Patti Page’s rendition of “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window.” The most nauseatingly white-bread, widely reviled immediately pre-Elvis pop hit imaginable, the song almost single-handedly called rock and roll into existence by dint of its oppressive wholesomeness. The way the turd scene is tacked on at the end of Pink Flamingos, like a coming-attractions trailer for the movie you’ve just witnessed, reinforces the film’s ebullient unholiness. It’s the secret dream response to the entirety of fifties sing-along, sitcom corniness, as piquant as if Waters had uncovered and incorporated a stag film of TV supermom Donna Reed or found footage of the Danny Thomas–underneath-the-sex-worker-defecating-on-a-glass-coffee-table legend.

This placement at the end is shrewdly strategic—delivering the proverbial money shot of true filth that audiences have come for, but at a point when it’s too late to walk out if it proves too much to stomach. It’s the counter­culture (or maybe counter-counterculture) version of a William Castle audience-grabbing gimmick, and it definitely sears Pink Flamingos in the mind of anyone who sees it. But in a movie dedicated to calibrated gratuitousness, it’s just one hook among a parade of jaw-dropping episodes. Waters isn’t a slave to shock value; sometimes his best effects are achieved by deadpan means and other times by semaphore-signaled acting that wouldn’t be out of place in the time of the silents-to-talkies transition. Just as memorable as the ending for me is the poignant moment straight out of The Trash Menagerie when Babs comforts her egg-fetishist mama. The exchange’s outrageousness lies in how heartfelt it is, daughter and mother switching domestic roles, Massey’s childlike anxiety pacified by Divine’s maternal reassurance: family as a bow of benevolence tied around a couple of basket cases. 

EDIE: Is it true, Babs? If there weren’t any chickens, there wouldn’t be any eggs? Is that true?
BABS: I suppose so, Mama, but there will always be chickens. You can be sure of that.

Vivien Leigh couldn’t have delivered those tomorrow-is-another-day lines with any more Oscar-ready, sunny-side-up conviction than Divine musters: a little Old Hollywood feeling slipped into a brazenly profane performance.

Bear in mind that the early seventies were also the time of both prime Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism. RW’s rough-trade ménage of Jean-Luc Godard and Douglas Sirk effectively intellectualized pulp; WR stands for Wilhelm Reich, and that film aimed for a dialectical (or dialectic-adjacent) montage of Soviet Bloc satire, porn, Warhol, and Reichian psychology. On the other hand, Waters and the Dreamlanders proceeded with slap-happy indifference to the intellectualization of deviance. You don’t need special knowledge to appreciate their sordid goofs, just a drive-in mentality and a sick sense of humor. Waters’ Creatures from Beneath the Underclass are proud and loud. They’re wrestlers from a league of polymorphous perversions who talk shit, gift wrap it, and put it in the mail—even eat it for the sake of a good gag—but they don’t take it from anybody. Divine virtually announced to the Petra von Kants of the cinema: Honey, you can kiss my skid-marked ass.

Writing in his 2010 book Role Models about his hero and inspiration Tennessee Williams, Waters says that in the playwright’s work he saw an opening into “a universe filled with special people who didn’t want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.” As a standard rationale for deviation, this has since become something of its own dreary conformism. But the people in Pink Flamingos are more than “special”—they aren’t earning merit badges in marginality, they are honest-to-God marginals. (It says something that the most “conventional” actor may be Cookie Mueller, who gives off a splendidly surly Chelsea Girls–in-the-chicken-coop vibe.) They really relish the idea of attacking bourgeois norms and rubbing their unmentionables on piety’s every spotless surface. They are mostly fearless—occasionally Waters lets their exaggerations turn into blow-job shtick, to let us know they don’t mean any harm with these indecent acts—and throw themselves into the moment with happy abandon.