[imagesource: ROXY Cinema]
In 1972, director John Waters and drag queen Divine (rest her soul), made Pink Flamingos.
The film, which is hailed as an iconic underground classic, would only make it to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in 1989 when a brave distributor decided to risk it all and submit it, hoping it may receive an official rating allowing distribution in shops.
The BBFC agreed, provided the film was edited to remove certain scenes.
Here’s the BBC, querying whether this is “the most outrageous film ever made”, and some wonderful phrases regarding those deleted scenes:
“Firstly,” notes the BBFC’s website, “cuts were made to remove the sight of chickens being roughly handled […] it went on to detail other scenes including one “in which a man flexes his anus in close up, making it look as if the anus is ‘singing’”.
In the end, all of the film’s most important sequences had to be left on the cutting room floor.
The official trailer for Pink Flamingos didn’t feature any footage from the film:
If you haven’t figured it out by now, Pink Flamingos isn’t easy watching. None of Waters’ (below) films are.
I once made the mistake of watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, and Waters’ Female Trouble in one evening, and I will probably never watch either of those films ever again.
Back to Pink Flamingos:
It’s great fun, and oddly endearing, but it’s almost impossible to watch without clamping your hands over your eyes for 20 per cent of the running time.
And that’s just the effect that its writer-director wanted it to have. “To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about,” says Waters in one of his memoirs, Shock Value. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”
The plot, according to BBFC “is unusual but fairly straightforward”, which is easily the understatement of the century.
Harris Glenn Milstead, better known by the stage name Divine, stars as a woman who is also called Divine, a vision in a tight sparkly dress, with a back-combed coiffure, and iconic eye make-up that reaches all the way up her forehead.
Having been condemned in the press as “the filthiest person alive”, Divine has adopted the alias Babs Johnson, and fled to a derelict mobile home in the woods with her hillbilly son (Danny Mills), her son’s voyeuristic girlfriend (Mary Vivian Pearce), and her mother (Edith Massey), who is described by Waters in Shock Value as “a 250-pound senior citizen who sits in a playpen dressed in a girdle and bra and worships eggs”.
These are the film’s heroes.
Divine as Babs, on politics:
As an aside, and while we’re on the topic of politics, in a series of tweets fired off last year, Donald Trump attacked Baltimore representative Elijah Cummings, describing his district as “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States”.
Waters didn’t take kindly to these remarks, clapping back with “give me the rats and roaches of Baltimore any day over the lies and racism of your Washington, Mr Trump. Come on over to that neighbourhood and see if you have the nerve to say it in person!”
Trump didn’t rise to the occasion. His bone spurs were probably acting up again.
But I digress.
Edie wants Eggs, eggs, eggs:
Both John Waters and Divine are icons in the queer community, making outsider art that appealed to those forced to live on the fringes of society in the late 70s.
It is also the ultimate cult movie, in that it was always bound to have a select but devoted circle of admirers. “This isn’t a failed film that gained a camp following and then became popular,” says John Mercer, the author of Gay Pornography.
“It isn’t like Showgirls or Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. It was made by someone who was an outsider, it was about outsiders, and it was shown at the margins of cinematic distribution and exhibition. It’s the paradigmatic example of cult cinema.”
You can read more about this beautiful dumpster fire of a film, here.
Watch it at your own risk.
[source:bbc]
