The lawn sculptures have become “loaded objects” of rich people mocking bad taste.
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“My movie wrecked that.” Over the years, flamingos have become a fixture of high-end sensibility, shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness and camp. “The people who owned them had them for real, without irony,” Waters said. In the past, the wading birds were a “straight” (in both senses of the word) attempt at making working-class neighborhoods more attractive. They all share residence in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, framed by two plastic pink flamingos. She lives with her obese dim-witted, egg-loving mother Edie (Edith Massey), her degenerate son Crackers (Danny Mills), and her duplicitous traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pierce). Divine plays Babs Johnson, a criminal on the lam from the FBI hiding out in a trailer. In this film, Waters depicts a dysfunctional family before the term was invented and became popular. Over the years, it has become a “notorious” classic, and one of Waters’ most profitable pictures, grossing worldwide north of $10 million. After screenings at universities and basements across the U.S., the film was distributed theatrically by Saliva Films, and later by New Line Cinema. When “Pink Flamingos” was initially shown, it caused controversy due to its perverse acts, all performed realistically in explicit detail. The people that used to beat him up later stood in line and asked for his autograph.” This was the sweet smell of revenge–not to mention irony–for both director and leading lady.
“Divine was hassled and bullied a lot as a boy,” Waters recalled, “I’m proud that I gave him an outlet for his anger and revenge. Divinebegan his career as a joke, mocking the desire of drag queens to look pretty, but there was always rage in him and sometimes outright hostility. In the next decade, the duo developed what could be described as a version of the famous Josef Von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich relationship-without that couple’s notorious sex, gossipy intrigue, and sado-masochistic relationship (acknowledged by both director and star). “Pink Flamingos” made an underground star of Divine, the flamboyant 300-pound transvestite. “I don’t remember ever seeing a pink flamingo where I grew up,” he mused. In their suburb, lawn ornaments, especially plastic pink flamingos, were anathema. His mother, the president of a garden club, cultivated flowerbeds and precise hedges. “To this day, I’m convinced that people think it’s a movie about Florida.” It certainly did not reflect Waters’ personal background, whose home was done in good taste. “The reason I called it ‘Pink Flamingos’ was because the movie was so outrageous, that we wanted to have a very normal title that wasn’t exploitative,” Waters said. The movie has little to do with the tropical fowl that stands sentinel during the opening credits. The set was like a hippie community, as the cast and crew operated out of a farmhouse without hot water and other facilities. The shoot was a gratifying experience, personally and collectively. Made on a shoe-string budget of $12,000, it was shot on weekends in Phoenix, a suburb of Baltimore. For the score, he donated several of his single B-sides and hits of the 1950s and 1960s. In the same movie, viewers are exposed to the spectacle of an “Egg Lady,” begging for poultry from her crib, and to the rape and murder of chicken.Ī transgressive black comedy, “Pink Flamingos” is an auteurist effort–written, produced, directed, edited, and “composed” by Waters.
It shows in one continuous take–without the benefit of artifice or special effects–Divine stooping to eat a dog’s excrement. A notorious scene from “Pink Flamingos” added a non-sequitur to its ending. In these camp movies, he places “filthily lovable” characters in intentionally outrageous, deliberately contrived situations, investing them with hyperbolic dialogue. “Pink Flamingos,” “Female Trouble,” and “Desperate Living,” which Waters has labeled the “Trash Trilogy,” contest the boundaries of conventional morality while challenging American censorship. Waters exploded into the cultural scene in 1972 with “ Pink Flamingos,” his third feature, a darkly comic, unwholesome parade depicting murder, bestiality, rape, dismemberment, coprophagia, and other dizzying sexual perversions.
Offering a unique vision and distinctive perspective on American life, his early work attacks suburban life as his target-it’s his pleasure dome.
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John Waters rose to national fame with a series of shaggy, amateurish, Baltimore-set and shot features, which later became cult works.