Still from Pink Flamingos
Underground Film Series curator Justin Bonthuys details how the John Waters trashterpiece is still relevant over 50 years later.
Recently, I was talking to a friend from Brazil about screening Pink Flamingos at IU Cinema. After showing him a clip, he asked me why the film was given that title. In trying to explain the low-culture, kitsch association that artist Don Featherstone’s lawn ornament had accrued since it was first released in 1958, I found myself unable to think of a contemporary equivalent. In the decades since the early 1970s, notions of taste have become so democratized and expanded so broadly that no single item can be said to evoke this same mix of cheerful naivety and high-brow scorn. After all, even Croc sandals have collaborated with the likes of high-fashion brands like Balenciaga. Ultimately, we have underground and midnight films to thank for freeing us from these oppressive middle-class norms, and Pink Flamingos did it first and did it best.
Watching Pink Flamingos just after the film celebrated its 50th anniversary, I am struck by how much of the popular discourse surrounding it still focuses solely on its notorious final scene as the ultimate in cinematic transgression. While it ensures that you will never look at a Snickers candy bar in the same way again, this scene no longer seems out of place in a world that subsequently experienced the rise of shock-and-awe television shows such as Jackass and Fear Factor. The thing that I believe we as scholars, creators, and viewers can still be surprised by, and, more importantly, can still learn from, in Pink Flamingos is its anti-establishment ethos, and its insistence that if we are to live in a world where everyone is free, then nothing can be sacred or off limits for critique.
Because some elements of the film, such as its costume and make-up design and its blurring of the distinction between fame and notoriety seem in keeping with present-day entertainment and influencer culture, it can be easy to forget just how prescient and avant-garde Pink Flamingos was for the time in which it was produced in 1971. For example, the brightly hued coiffures of Connie and Raymond Marble predated the existence of commercial red and blue hair dyes. Actors Mink Stole and David Lochary instead resorted to using the ink from magic marker pens on their bleached hair to achieve these effects. Similarly, Divine’s pursuit of infamy as the “filthiest person alive” and the antics of her “family” occurred decades before the rise of similarly shameless figures in reality television shows such as Big Brother, The Real World, and The Real Housewives franchises, and the viral fame achieved by the bizarre, larger-than-life figures in documentaries such as Tiger King. Ultimately, in creating the character of Lady Divine, director John Waters and actor Harris Glenn Milstead foresaw the potential for fame derived not from talent or virtue, but from weaponized notoriety, producing a proto-viral star, a pre-digital icon of shameless self-invention.
Kim Kardashian, eat your heart out.
Fifty-one years later, in an era when rebellion is often co-opted by capital, John Waters’s unapologetic vision of underground cinema remains refreshingly, filthily pure.
Pink Flamingos will be screened at IU Cinema on September 19 at 10pm as part of the Underground Film Series.
Justin Bonthuys is a Cinema and Media Studies PhD Student at IU. His eclectic tastes mean that he is as likely to enjoy a ’70s exploitation film as he is a melodrama starring his favorite actress, Bette Davis.