Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. Just make sure you know your way to the exit. The place to see Pink Flamingos is in a cinema, preferably at midnight, surrounded by a crowd that is either laughing or gagging or both. The BBFC-approved cut of Pink Flamingos came out on video in 1991, but it wasn’t until 2008 that an 18-certificate was awarded to the full, unexpurgated film – and then the distributors decided to cancel the release. You might not be able to see all that very easily, though.
And you can see murderers being turned into mass-media celebrities, 22 years before Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers. You can see the kind of degenerate misfit family that would lurk in such 1970s horror films as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. You can also see the seeds of punk rock in the film’s trashy fashion sense, its violent nihilism, and its use of 1950s rockabilly. “It pushes back against the liberation-era gay politics of the 1970s, which were about being nice and fitting in,” says Gary Needham, a film lecturer at the University of Liverpool, “and anticipates the radical queer politics of the 1990s which were about a refusal to assimilate.” Pink Flamingos is ahead of its time, too. Instead, he made a film with a gleefully celebratory mood, some hilariously mock-grandiloquent dialogue, and a pointed satirical storyline about US moral hypocrisy. “I could make a ninety-minute film of people getting their limbs hacked off.” But this, he added, would not be “very stylish or original”. “It’s easy to disgust someone,” said Waters in Shock Value. The promise was that they would show audiences things that they couldn’t see anywhere else.”Īs grotesque as it is, though, the film wouldn’t have lasted if it was simply an endurance test. At that time, films like Reefer Madness, Sex Madness and Child Bride were often put on in big tents by people who had a carnival background. “It’s a carnival movie,” says Ian Hunter, the author of Cult Film as a Guide to Life, “a freak show, in the long tradition of exploitation movies that goes right back to the 1920s and 1930s. Seven nights a week, queues of thrill-seekers would stretch down the street, certain that they were about to see something unique. But in 1973 it was booked by the Elgin Theater in New York, the home of the ‘midnight movie’. There was no chance, then, that it would ever be a blockbuster or an Oscar contender.
In essence, Pink Flamingos is a cult movie about being in a cult.
And, as Mercer says, the characters they play are true outsiders who despise society’s conventions. His cast was a gang of shoplifting, drug-taking friends he called ‘the Dreamlanders’, most of whom hadn’t acted before. The man who called himself ‘the king of sleaze’ and ‘the prince of puke’ made low-budget indie films in his home town of Baltimore, sometimes using his own house as a set. But in the early 1970s, it was a different story. Waters would go on to write and direct the relatively mainstream Cry-Baby, starring Johnny Depp, and Hairspray, which was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. It’s the paradigmatic example of cult cinema.” It was made by someone who was an outsider, it was about outsiders, and it was shown at the margins of cinematic distribution and exhibition.
“It isn’t like Showgirls or Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. “This isn’t a failed film that gained a camp following and then became popular,” says John Mercer, the author of Gay Pornography. It is also the ultimate cult movie, in that it was always bound to have a select but devoted circle of admirers. Just to be clear, Pink Flamingos is a comedy. Oh – they also peddle heroin to high school children. The Marbles make a living by abducting teenage girls, locking them in a basement, raping them, and then selling their babies to lesbian couples. Its villains are Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary), “a jealous, publicity-hungry couple” who try in vain to prove that they are even filthier than Divine and her clan. Having been condemned in the press as “the filthiest person alive”, Divine has adopted the alias Babs Johnson, and fled to a derelict mobile home in the woods with her hillbilly son (Danny Mills), her son’s voyeuristic girlfriend (Mary Vivian Pearce), and her mother (Edith Massey), who is described by Waters in Shock Value as “a 250-pound senior citizen who sits in a playpen dressed in a girdle and bra and worships eggs”. Harris Glenn Milstead, better known by the stage name Divine, stars as a woman who is also called Divine, a vision in a tight sparkly dress, with a back-combed coiffure, and iconic eye make-up that reaches all the way up her forehead. The plot, says the BBFC’s website with exquisite understatement, “is unusual but fairly straightforward”.