Lady Divine (Drag legend Divine) is interviewed about political views in the course of her legendary scandal film from 1972 and answers the interviewer with fervor: “Now kill everyone! Tolerates the first degree murder! Experienced cannibalism! Frezst shit! Dirt is my policy. Dirt is my life.” Welcome to the dirty, dirty and criminal strange world of Pink Flamingos.
The black -humorous film from the Midnight Movies era represented the big breakthrough for cultural director John Waters, who had the limits of what is acceptable like no other, only to skillfully cross them. That is Counter- and high culture trash For people with Arte Magazin subscription, some corners of the world are still traded under the table.
Pink Flamingos: The dirty scandal film by Trash-Pope John Waters
That’s what it is about: The highly criminal divine lives under the pseudonym Babs Johnson with her mother and other delinquents in a caravan at Baltimore guarded by pink plastic flamingos. The fact that a tabloid newspaper calls it the “dirtiest person in the world” is the ultimate knight’s stroke. The greasy couple Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) does not want this to be sitting on and forge perverse plans to pushing divine from the throne of the ultimate disrepility.
A relentless Duel of excessive disinity begins in which neither incest, cannibalism, zoophilia, sexual violence or the consumption of faeces are off the table. The end of the film, including a comment from filmmaker Waters, ends particularly shocking, like a freak show with the (unsimulated!) Dewelabment of dog droppings.
No wonder that Pink Flamingos is traded under some as an endurance test of the preservable, in which many surrender. And hard to believe that Waters later had a relatively successful Hollywood career with films such as Cry-Baby or Hairspray-and even put on guest appearances in the Simpsons or Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip.
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Exploitation on the index: Pink Flamingos is still unauthorized in some places
While Pink Flamingos in the USA and UK appeared on Blu-ray and DVD at the Prestige-Ranions Criterion Collection, it looks dark elsewhere. In the Swiss canton of Zurich, the film was confiscated in the 1970s and is still prohibited on this reason today (via Deutschlandfunk Kultur): “The film, which is advertised as a milestone in film history, must be classified as disgusting and repulsive.”
However, our neighbors are not the only ones who confiscated and/or forbid the film. Even Australia as well as parts of Canada and Norway did not find the exploitation scandal film at all and in New Zealand it has not yet come through the classification. Pink Flamingos is not explicitly forbidden in Germany, but there is also no home cinema publication.
John Waters himself probably expressed it best with his famous quote: “You have to remember that there is something like good bad taste and bad bad taste. To understand bad taste, you have to have very good taste.”