Pink Flamingos (1972)

Pink Flamingos arrives from 1972 with a tagline promising an exercise in poor taste, and it delivers with a commitment bordering on the devotional. Divine presides over a trailer outside Phoenix, Maryland, trading insults and worse with the Marbles, a couple whose income comes from a baby ring and heroin sales to schoolchildren. The transgressions are catalogued at length: the chicken, the eggs, the birthday party, the final act with the small dog. John Waters built this on twelve thousand dollars and a cast of Baltimore friends, and the result remains a landmark of abject art, preserved by the Library of Congress for reasons the institution has never had to explain aloud.

Judged by contemporary social metrics, the film is an odd specimen. Its queerness is genuine and central, with a drag queen in the lead and a trans woman who defeats Raymond's exhibitionism by revealing more than he bargained for. Yet the intent is provocation, not advocacy. There is no thesis about gender equity, no argument about economic justice, no environmental conscience, no engagement with racial politics at all. The Marbles are villains because villainy is funnier than virtue, not because the screenplay has opinions about capital. Bodies here are grotesque spectacle, not affirmations. Edith Massey is deployed as an object of fascination, and the film asks no one to feel good about it.

The most striking absence is the sermon. Waters refuses to tell us what any of this means, and the refusal is total. There is no lesson, no moral, no closing address about how to behave. For a modern viewer accustomed to being instructed, the experience is disorienting. The film simply ends, having proven its point about filth and nothing else. We are left to classify it ourselves, which is the only work it asks of us.