Pink Flamingos
Were you freaked out by Stifler eating poop in American Wedding? Did the carefully choreographed murders send you home nervous after Sever? Do you fast-forward through the surgery on ER? People complain about shock cinema and how far it has to go now to penetrate our jaded, desensitized sensibilities. Grotesque rape-ballet like Showgirls or Sin City, squirty death like Passion of the Christ, all came from somewhere. The grandfather of all these movies could be John Waters’ 1972 “Exercise in Bad Taste” Pink Flamingos.
Plotted and executed much like a porn film (with, in ’70’s terms, similar production value), Flamingos has a skeletal plot built around shock gag after shock gag, performed by people willing (if not able) to appear on screen and talk at the same time. From a filmmaking perspective (content aside), the movie is repellant - terrible acting, terrible sound, inexplicable cuts and music instead of foley sound, and awful home movie cinematography. And that’s before you get a guy raping a girl with a real chicken (yes, they killed a real chicken doing that scene, and ate it afterward). Pink Flamingos sloppily and ham-handedly goes where no one has gone before - we see a man (an extra!) attempting to prolapse his own rectum. We’ve got a number of clumsy, embarrassing sexual encounters that are just….bleagh rather than shocking or titillating. And don’t forget cussing for cussing’s sake (from the C word to dingleberry), like eleven year olds with dad’s camcorder, and of course, the infamous poop eating scene.
I am reminded of the American Pie movis, with jism in the beer, pee on the head, poop in the canapés and a trumpet in the butt. These movies owe a lot to Pink Flamingos but there is one enormous difference (beyond just skillful use of the camera and sound equipment and hiring actual actors): The Pie movies do their gross-out things in service to a set-up and a punchline, and/or a character zing. Whether you like that kind of comedy or not is secondary to its successful execution. (For the record, I like it, if it’s funny.) These gags are also funny actually because we know they aren’t real. If Jason Biggs actually put a trumpet far enough into his butt to stick out like that, or used real super glue, we couldn’t laugh at the joke. If Seann William Scott’s mouth was really full of dog doo, the frantic panicky joke of the moment would be lost.
Pink Flamingos says, essentially, what can we do next? Fellatio on screen for real! How can we fit that into the plot? Divine and Cracker get carried away in vengeful glee! Oh! Let’s make Divine Cracker’s mother! Perfect! Sure, why not…? It’s all so forced and vaguely horrible that it never quite gets to funny. The gap-toothed, mentally challenged old woman in the playpen covered with egg? OK, yeah, she fits into the mold this family is trying to uphold, but it’s not really sick (or filthy, as the characters aspire to be) so much as boringly gross. Like, a booger. That’s kind of gross, but not gross like the barbed whip tearing up Jesus’ back. The booger is just kind of there. Boring. Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival goes for the same shocks but for the most part the animation makes it funny, rather than “wrong.”
Pink Flamingos wanted to shock and disturb, but (when it wasn’t grating or tedious) it’s mostly just a random pastiche of unpalatable behavior (baby-making slave girls) and random weirdness (the fetishists). I never dreamed I would appreciate the simple and artful grossout of Team America: World Police so much.
Pink Flamingos really killed a chicken, really fellated a guy on screen, and really ate poop, but it’s still a movie. Borat managed to interrupt a real mortgage convention with real male nude wrestling - even with the black bars sparing us any prolapse risk, it’s more shocking - and hilarious, than all of Pink Flamingos.
I am glad Waters went on to make better and better movies, because nobody can depict the seediness and low class (and still sympathetic nature) of the human soul like he can. I mean, now.
MPAA Rating - rated R at the time but would get an NC-17 now
Release date 1972
Time in minutes 95
Director John Waters
Studio Dreamland Productions
