Film Notes: Pink Flamingos / Female Trouble

In all of cinema’s short history, has there ever been another joke as filthy, funny, perverse – and of course, well-earned – as the canonization of John Waters? At this exact moment, you can go out and spend forty hard-earned dollars on a “culturally important” boutique Blu-ray of a film which concludes on a cross-dresser eating literal, actual dog turds. If there's a more beautiful representation of the lurking good taste which occasionally threatens to puncture the bubble of our stolid society, I've yet to see it. But then again, Pink Flamingos was never about good taste.

The second major feature spotlighting the Dreamlander creative ensemble, Pink Flamingos brought queer counterculture squelching to the screen in a sticky low-budget blowout of murder, obscenities, and outrageous costume design. Somewhere deep in the sub-suburban wasteland of Baltimore, two parties go to war over the tabloid title of “Filthiest Person Alive”: drag queen trailer-royalty Divine in a career-defining role, and her rivals the Marbles; a couple (Waters regulars David Lochary and Mink Stole) printing money at their illegal baby adoption ring. What results is a no-holds-barred storm of dirty talk and dirtier play as both sides force each other down into the muck of human perversion, with everything from indecent exposure to incest on the table. Will Divine hold her title, or will the petit bourgeois heterosexual poseurs dethrone the rightful queen? Well, let’s just say Mink Stole isn’t remembered for eating feces.

It’s impossible to avoid Pink Flamingo’s reputation – or more appropriately, notoriety – as a midnight gross-out classic. To this day the film remains one of the high taboo-breaking watermarks of ‘70s cult cinema, and to the yet-uninitiated: yes, it really is that gross. If you can stomach extended conversations evoking the wet tactility of eggs, or the various full-frontal genitalia, or the sexual assault involving a chicken, or the cannibalism, or this, that, and the other thing… well, you’ll find a truly hilarious comedy and what might be filmmaking’s greatest flipped bird to the square-headed cisgender heterosexual framework which defines America. It’s telling that over fifty years later there’s still something button-pushing about Pink Flamingo’s naked queerness; it’s open disdain for the society which forces its band of outsiders (for my money, a more relatable set of characters than you’ll find in any Best Picture winner since 1972) into positions of poverty and vulnerability. Nothing will ever convince the establishment you’re more than human garbage, so why not act like it? Better to die an honest pervert than someone who can only fetishize the aesthetic and falls short when they can no longer exploit filth for a buck. In weaponizing and reflecting fears of marginalized communities, Pink Flamingo finds the heart in its satire, and – beyond the iconic looks, camp histrionics, and infinitely quotable snipes – the keystone in its enduring connection to queer audiences. This time the trash takes out you.

A mere two years after Pink Flamingos came Female Trouble, the middle entry in Waters’ self-proclaimed “Trash Trilogy” (followed by the equally hysterical Desperate Living). Stripping away the filthier elements of Pink Flamingos and doubling down on its obsession with tabloids, fame, and true crime, this 1974 epic women’s picture follows the monstrous yet maligned Dawn Davenport (another all-time turn from Divine) and her progression from troubled teen into self-styled superstar criminal; from rebellious schoolgirl to murderous maniac. Along the way you’ll find standout performances from the Dreamlander ensemble cast, the absolute funniest put-downs in any of these films (“Writin’ a book, hippie?”), and a widening of scope, budget, and technical prowess following Pink Flamingos. Although Waters’ subsequent films would turn more overtly to pastiche and parody – the Sirkian Polyester, the yesteryear stylings of Hairspray – Female Trouble is the film in which long-simmering thematics on life in the spotlight and the aesthetics of beauty and ugliness come to a head; scaffolded by atmosphere in conversation with delinquent films such as pregnancy scare movie Teenage Mother or Ed Wood’s girl gang potboiler The Violent Years. 

What results is an instant, hilarious classic and an axis point in Waters’ filmography: every prior and subsequent leading female of his melodramas pass through the fully-realized and out-of-control Dawn Davenport, from Divine as Diane Linkletter to Serial Mom’s Beverly Sutphin and even Cecil B. Demented’s Honey Whitlock. You’ll find all the pieces here – the ego, the delusions, the misanthropy, the traumas of being pushed to society’s edges – fully realized and assembled into an episodic structure which flexes Divine’s range across the eras of a life and proves his most absorbing performance. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll cry with laughter, and come away with a deeper understanding of what it's like to struggle as a woman in America. After all, who among us hasn't tried to grievously injure their parents over receiving the wrong Christmas presents? And wow, that theme song!

Some half-a-century on and we’re still gathering together to bask in the sweet, sticky climaxes of some perverts from Baltimore who pointed cameras at the gutter and made history for their trouble. Everything has changed, but somehow nothing has changed – we still live in the same society which seeks to repress and marginalize anyone who refuses to occupy the normative; we still hear the same arguments on how the same elements of queerness seek to corrupt and inexplicably dismantle the American standard of living. I say: let them. The nuclear families and hetero freaks and brainwashed cisgenders have had it too good for too long; it’s time for all us sane, normal people to take power and put the world on trial. The charge? Assholeism, of course.