Kill Everyone Now: the Abject Strikes Back in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972)

Cinematekene er et samarbeid om felles digitale visninger på cinematekene i Bergen, Kristiansand, Lillehammer, Oslo, Stavanger, Tromsø og Trondheim. Montages setter fokus på filmene i utvalget gjennom ukentlige artikler. John Waters trashfilmklassiker Pink Flamingos (1972) vises fra og med torsdag 29. august  – sjekk tidspunkter i oversikten hos ditt cinematek.

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CW: sexual violence, animal cruelty, incest, cannibalism, scatology

In an era gone by, an exhilarated crowd steps out of the Elgin Theatre and into the streets of nighttime New York. A camera crew approaches and asks one of the figures what he thinks of the movie he just watched. “l think John Waters has got his finger on the pulse of America,” he replies, “I think he’s got his thumb securely up America’s ass.”

Rarely do I encounter a film that is so damn difficult to articulate a straightforward opinion about as is Pink Flamingos (1972). Fine, it isn’t a critic’s film, exactly, and I couldn’t quite call it a crowd-pleaser, either. And it’s not the shock-value that upsets my aesthetic tastes, either – if anything, it’s actually quite pleasing to the eye, with its wonderful 16 mm trailer-park-cum-aerobics-class-chic. But while it is objectively too much – punk, grotesque, revolutionary and, oh, dare I say, revolting – it also does not go far enough in its undoubtable queerness.

One of the cornerstones of transgressive cinema, Pink Flamingos was born to offend. “An exercise in bad taste,” the poster enticingly proclaimed, and crowds flocked to see for themselves just how bad an aftertaste you could get. It filled the void El Topo (1970), the first midnight movie at the cinemas, left in the budding subculture. Immediately attracting a crowd of devotees, especially from the local queer scene, Pink Flamingos was the (shit)talk of the town. Also of the courtrooms – Waters proudly admitted he couldn’t at all defend himself against the multiple obscenity cases filed against the film. A fair enough if there ever was one.

In an interview, Waters contextualised his film as riding the wave of recent legalisation of porn “which left exploitation and art films with nowhere else to go. So I tried thinking up things that weren’t illegal on film yet, but should be.” It was truly a middle finger up the fleshy, pasty, affluent buttocks of American propriety. Just to give a little taste, it revelled in coprophagia, murder, cannibalism, ass-singing (don’t ask), and, quite endearingly, egg worship. More importantly, with Pink Flamingos, a star was born. Divine, one of the most iconic (and iconoclastic) drag queens, became a sensation overnight. She flaunted a deliciously irreverent womanliness. A monstrous feminine, brimming with joie de vivre, paving the way for a different kind of drag as her legacy – radical, mischievous, and very, very filthy.

Indeed, in Pink Flamingos Divine even gets proclaimed “the filthiest person alive” by the tabloids and flees this glorious infamy. She adopts the name of Babs Johnson and moves into a pink trailer on the outskirts of Phoenix, Maryland with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Marble) and a bunch of pink flamingos to grace their lawn. Unfortunately for them, a local couple by the name of Marbles (Mink Stole and David Lochary) have monopolised the business of being filthy, and they won’t tolerate any competition. They set out to sabotage the idyll of the Johnson family through accelerating harassment (on top of terrorising other Baltimore residents as a daily treat). The battle of filth ensues.

Well, going into great detail about how their upmanship goes exactly would be like describing the flavour of popcorn you’ll get at the cinema. You’ll have to see for yourself—though beware allergies. It’s also because nothing else goes on in the film, not really – Waters proclaimed his hatred for “message movies” and that his work proudly has “no socially redeeming value.” Of course, I’m the kind of critic who listens to this and hears a challenge, but I also can’t help but respect the fact that with Pink Flamingos, the Dreamlanders—his regular cast & crew—showed up on the scene to purely wreak havoc. And they sure succeeded in it, too.

Even if lots of the shenanigans that happen on the screen are infantile (hey, did you know Waters made a children’s version of this?), even the most stern viewer will experience some of the glee that the characters burst with. It’s the mischief, the ecstasy, the love they have for each other, no matter how otherwise messed up they might be. It’s the unapologetic joy of owning your freakishness that has drawn queer viewers through the decades. It is very punk, as in it predates punk to the extent both Mink Stole and David Lochary had to use ink to dye their (pubic) hair red and blue. It’s how she plays herself, but not as a drag queen at all — just as a cis woman with half of her skull shaved to make space for satisfying eyebrows. It’s the fabulous wardrobe and the deliciously over the top acting. It’s the birthday party where they eat cops for dessert. I mean, it is difficult not to love Pink Flamingos at least just a little bit.

Behind the farce, however, there is a little more to consider than what Waters lets on. Pink Flamingos has been described as belonging to abject art, since it, eh, widely utilises bodily functions in its storytelling. But the excrement galore is not at all what I think of when I see Pink Flamingos as dealing in the abject. Fleetingly, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva thought about abjection as the process of witnessing something that blurs boundaries of categorisation (say dirt, rotten food, a corpse) and viscerally rejecting it in order to maintain one’s own distinct subjectivity as not that. Social abjection works this way – reject the poor, the homeless, the deviants, and you’ve got yourself an illusion of a morally righteous, neat, wealthy America.

Pink Flamingos tramples on societal norms because it is made by the rejects punished by those same suffocating norms. It’s just as much about gender and sexuality non-conformists as it is about the white trash (isn’t it a funny name, now that you think about it?). In Pink Flamingos, the Johnsons embrace their social abjection. The abjected in this film have no regard for your capital, the nuclear family, your beauty standards, America – the very things that dictate how much dignity a human being deserves. These freaks value filth and obscenity, because they know the price of purity and propriety – they’re the ones paying for it.

Somewhere on redditsphere film buffs are arguing whether Pink Flamingos posits queerness as horror. That is, whether it lives out the scaremongering tales the conservatives believe—or at least peddle, in their quest to punch down – about the queer community. That maybe it shows (and revels in) the abjectifying fantasies of bourgeois society of what the poor might be getting up to. After all, Pink Flamingos was absolutely made to offend. Even so, I don’t quite believe that’s all what it’s about. If anything, for me Pink Flamingos amplifies the horrors of the heteropatriarchal regime, of the antagonistic society that reduces marginalised subjects to objects to fuel the American dream delusion.

Connie and Raymond Marbles are generously straightforward in their villainy. They’re a successful, heterosexual couple – the American dream itself, at least the way that the Sacklers are. Raymond goes around exposing himself in parks to steal the forgotten purses of women fleeing him. The Marbles kidnap women off the streets and keep them in the basement of their suburban house, as their main income is a baby-ring business. Which they use to fund their heroin-for-kids hustle. I mean, you were warned about the bad taste for a reason. They’re crazy about each other and all these sadistic antics contribute greatly to their sexual attraction towards each other. Well, I guess you have to keep the married life exciting somehow.

The violence the Marbles gladly execute left and right is so blatantly gender-based and so cruel that it mirrors, in a manner only slightly hyperbolised, the systemic violence and exploitation imbued into a society driven by profit and conservative righteousness. Pink Flamingos caricatures what a pearl-clutching heteropatriarchal system turns a blind eye to, and what it gapes at, instead. This amplified hypocrisy comes with a small but important footnote in the film – the Marbles sell babies specifically to affluent lesbians. Perhaps a scoff at gay assimilationists of the time?

This kind of anti-human violence is less interesting to the spectacle-loving tabloids than is the filth of the Johnsons. Their vulgarity is a lot more childish, driven by innocent carnal delight and communal-spirited bacchanalia. Even when Divine exclaims her iconic and absurd rallying cry: “Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!,” it’s somehow life-affirming. It’s inspirational, unlike the behaviour of the Marbles, who get convicted for the worst crime imaginable—assholism. Rightfully so.

And yet. And yet… While the seize-the-filth philosophy of the Johnsons is endearing, it’s also where Waters’ refusal to build any sort of message gets everything muddled. Because, see, the Johnsons aren’t really any better than the Marbles, even if the queer fans might be ecstatic about this chosen family. The Johnsons are also punching down. Raping women. Unsimulated torture of animals. Commiting incest (the prime example of how heteropatriarchal violence abuses subjects into objects in the real world, not the ha-ha-isn’t-this-scene-gross world). The Johnsons aren’t exactly seizing their power from all the right places.

And I’m not much offended by this unchecked misogyny, or anything else going on in the film. I’m just disappointed by the missed opportunity to make Pink Flamingos even more radical in its praxis. I’m not advocating for a filth-less life, but had the Dreamlanders stayed focused on the rage, we would have had something truly revolutionary in the badness of taste.

Then again, Pink Flamingos walked so that, a few decades on, New Queer Cinema could run. Perhaps there hadn’t been enough collective rage in the gay liberation movement until the AIDS crisis left the putrid mechanisms of social abjection exposed. Maybe Waters himself hadn’t enough to be really pissed about—he never belonged to the white trash, anyway, even if he’s the self-made PR manager of the lot. Not everyone’s film budget fits into your dad’s wallet. When you’re white trash, your dad’s probably gone AWOL, honey.

Still, Pink Flamingos is transgressive in a way that a lot of films that belong to the genre are not – it’s not as gratuitous as you might expect. It does have something to say behind all the shlock value, even if it suffers from being an exercise in incongruity. And it is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Unless you visited the dark edges of the Internet and managed to return intact, I guess.

Pink Flamingos is a curiosity from a truly specific time and place, and can be appreciated for its legacy. But don’t think you have to prove anything when you watch it. Don’t be afraid to turn a blind eye here and there – in this case, it won’t make you an asshole.

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Gabrielė Liepa (b. 1993) is a film & literature graduate from Amsterdam University College. Their interest focuses on arthouse, queer and/or Eastern European films. They are currently studying creative film production in Berlin.