_{CW: Discussions of violence, incest, sexual assault, coprophagia, animal cruelty, and all things grotesque.}

I grew up with my hand glued to my family’s desktop mouse, always searching for the hottest music videos to binge during my Saturday breaks from preschool. It was always difficult to carve out computer time for my passions when much of it was spent deciphering the ‘c’ from a ‘k’ sound in “Pussycat Dolls.” The censorship in my household was minimal but ever present. My earliest memory of getting in trouble was from watching the “Shut Up” music video by the Black Eyed Peas on AOL Music. “Should he be watching that?” My cousin Yvette whispered to my mom, who immediately turned off the computer screen and told me to “stop watching shit like that.” I was five, I had heard worse than “shut up” at this point, especially from that very censurer.

By the time I graduated to my own personal laptop in the seventh grade, I was scrolling through the gnarliest content the world wide web could offer. My high school friend group found out I was gay by going through my NSFW Tumblr likes (though, if they were really my friends, would they have had to snoop to really know these things about me?) My Tumblr feed was pretty full of glamorous film references, peach-toned model portraits, and pressed juices (any Instagram food blogs post-2018 are derivatives of iconic Tumblr staging). I would scroll past sepia-toned gifs from The Gold Diggers of 1933, dirty jokes from Skins (U.K.), and the infamous declaration, “Filth are my politics” from John Waters’ seminal work, Pink Flamingos. 

Many of these movies would end up on my watchlist, ticking each off as I viewed but I never quite got to Pink Flamingos. It eluded me. It had a crackly nature to its cinematography, a soft pink glaze over, but its premise was still vague: a woman (Divine) whose title of “The Filthiest Person Alive” is at risk of being stolen by perverted human breeders (Mink Stole, David Lochray), ending in bloodshed, feces, and filth. Just recently, I sat in a theater for a sold-out Pride Month screening of Pink Flamingos. Rainbow headbands and fur coats draped guests as they cheered for the opening credits. I sat like a normal person, awaiting a normal movie. I approached the screening the way I would a student film festival: open to intrigue and disappointment. So many films are noted as ‘classics’ but end up being snoozefests or meditations on manhood, or relying more on pure shock than visceral wowing. The 2024 audience experience was jarring. As guests cackled and gasped through the kielbasa sausage flashing and the Marbles’ perverted poltergeists “The couch! It rejected you!”

Pink Flamingos is ‘shocking’ to the average film viewer in the same way that midriffs and kneecaps horrify your mother’s cousin with bumper stickers from Sean Hannity and Live Action. I would never bring my family with me to a screening, let alone pop it on the television for a sibling movie night. But my mouth was only agape for 18% of the runtime. In a matter of moments, the crowd is in a fit of giggles and groans as the Marbles’ pregnant captive vomits as the servant, Channing (Channing Wilroy), masturbates into his hand and injects his semen into another passed out kidnapped girl—only for the scene to jump to the Marbles sucking on each others’ toes. I couldn’t tell if it was a Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque fan screening energy or if most of us were all experiencing this for the first time together. They consumed it as a spectacle; I processed it as information. Just before the credits roll, Divine infamously chows down on a local dog’s doodoo in one continuous, swift shot. The crowd popcorned with murmurs and yelps as the narrator reports the dirty deed but all I thought was “Oh, I remember this part.” Were there processing errors in my own brain? Do I possess a disingenuous apathy? Am I so desensitized to filth and horror that I can’t even groan at mother-son incest? Or has my chronic connection to the internet desensitized me to everything short of zooerasty?

With a small team of local Baltimore talent and a budget of $12,000 (about $90,000 USD in 2024), John Waters made what many have called “hideous,” “disgusting,” “obscene,” and any other synonym for downright dirty. The now classic film was Waters’ third feature ever and first installment in his infamous “Trash Trilogy,” a collection of films starring Divine that exercise the auteur’s bounds of filth and depravity. “An exercise in poor taste,” as every poster proclaims, Pink Flamingos is a culmination of every taboo headline Waters consumed in the Life and Times he read in his youth, and the b-movie screenings he attended during his only semester at NYU. “I learned about homosexuality, I learned about drug addiction, abstract art, beatniks and hippies—everything,” Waters says of the weekly Life Magazine he flipped through as a child. From an early age, Waters was drawn to stories of murder and car accidents, rooting for Cinderella’s evil step-family rather than the distressed damsel. Overexposure to a freakish eye brought Waters to his purpose of enlivening the depraved. 

While I was accustomed to images of Dorothy Dandridge shaking her head or a classic “As if!” gif, I would also watch fatal car crashes and beheadings before content moderators saved (and shattered) 2010s Facebook. I know exactly how a body collapses when a gunshot enters it and how Hollywood actors clearly don’t do enough research to portray the action properly. To this day, I find myself endlessly scrolling through auto accident Instagram accounts, studying the footage and hypothesizing the fates of the survivors (if there are any). It isn’t morose to me, just as the murder of the corrupted law enforcements in Pink Flamingos was more justified than brutal (though the consumption of their limbs was a touch far). The intent of the film is clear—to shock.

But even beyond internet videos, film has progressed past this level of shock. 

Unsimulated Sex? Seen it (Nymphomaniac).
Poop in mouth? Try the whole butt. (The Human Centipede)
Foot play? You mean the Twitter admission fee?
Incest? Game of Thrones fans eat that up.
There wasn’t even any bathtub semen slurping. (Yawn.) 
But that is not to discount the work of John Waters. Entirely the opposite.

My critique comes not from a place of righteousness, but a keen understanding of the synthesis of his referential work and a fascination less with what happens and more why it does. To me, this film is nothing more than a case study on a hick-ish family of a local celebrity whose legacy was challenged by two posers with a misplaced God complex. When a worried Edie (Edith Massey) whines about her fear of an egg scarcity, Babs assures her mother that she will never be out of eggs. Cookie (Cookie Mueller) “couldn’t sleep anywhere” other than right next to Babs. Babs’ party guests turn into defendant vigilantes against the police force that the Marbles stuck on Babs after witnessing the crude celebration firsthand. Babs serves as a sort of house mother, though more depraved and far less forgivable. There is a demented care from Babs to her delinquent family, similar to the kin of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Pearl’s Mother in Pearl. Pink Flamingos is a story full of love, in its most malformed form, crafted and birthed from the kind of guy who does poppers while dancing to the Monster Mash (true story). 

I often get lost in the recontextualization of media’s past into today’s landscape. I begin to truly conceptualize works like Pink Flamingos as “masterpieces” when I take a step back and view it within the time of their initial release, imagining what reactions the first audience had with this new kind of media. I imagine the euphoric transcendence that came from hearing Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ at Studio 54 in 1977. I picture the energized lines around the block when Star Wars premiered that same year. I try to understand a world where straight edge America found Betty Freidan’s observations in ‘The Feminine Mystique’ too radical. What that crowd in the University of Baltimore auditorium must have experienced at the 1972 premiere of Pink Flamingos is unfathomable in our modern media soaked society.

Like the work of Tennesee Williams or François Truffaut, Pink Flamingos is what pierced, tattooed film school kids of today attempt to mimic, but can never achieve. It is coarse and rugged, completely perverted, but true in spirit. “If they ever copied me they tried too hard and I don’t even like those movies. They just try to be gross without being funny,” says Waters of copycat impressionists. The film has notes of classic Hollywood fluff and ultra-modern absurdism, with key lines like “guilty on all ten counts of first degree stupidity” and “This must be where they touch their uninspired organs together.” The script reaches so far past absurd—it enters Shakespearan— especially when Raymond proclaims his love to Connie while sucking on her third and fourth little piggy, “And l, Connie, also love you… more than anything that l could ever imagine. More than my hair color! More than the sound of babies crying… Of dogs dying. Even more than the thought of original sin itself. Oh, l am yours, Connie, eternally united to you… through an invisible cord of finely woven filth… that even God himself could never, ever break.”

So much of the film has informed the DNA of queer media to this day. Divine is a drag queen prototype of sorts. Waters has famously said, “Before Divine, drag queens were not hip. They were trying to be their mothers or Miss America.” While all drag may not derive from her, there are echoes of the icon in every queen today. These days, a trailer set ablaze or a pop star in drag is a clear salute to Waters and his impact. Everyone from Taylor Swift to Arctic Monkeys to Alvin and the Chipmunks knows and adores the work of John Waters and his iconography. Alongside Star Wars Episode V: Return of the Jedi and Wall-E, Pink Flamingos was inducted into the 2021 Library of Congress Registry, who deemed it a “landmark in queer cinema;” which is ironic, given that Interview Magazine, founded by Waters’ queer contemporary, Andy Warhol, called the feature upon its release, “the sickest movie ever made.” Luckily, no filmmaker to follow Waters will ever be allowed to rape and murder a chicken, not in today’s climate.

But for me? That shiteating Babs Johnson does not shock me. I watched 2 Girls 1 Cup when I was 9.