Episode 37: Pink Flamingos
Justin:
About fifteen minutes into my viewing of PINK FLAMINGOS, I wrote down in my notes, “This feels like a horror movie.” I imagine I got there because of the grainy images, the backwoods family (including an elderly woman in a crib for some reason), and a growing sense that terrifying things were on the way.
I wasn’t wrong.
Now, the horror genre often presents us with incredibly deep subtext, allowing our fear to be the backdrop for a much more impactful message. When we discussed George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD on this show last October, the theme of our nation’s allegiance to consumerism was front and center, causing the film to be more than just stomachs being opened up and intestines being ripped out. And that’s just one example. Racial inequality is another theme that very often pops up in the nooks and crannies of great horror works, from Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to Jordan Peele’s GET OUT.
PINK FLAMINGOS is not actually a horror movie, but I considered that comparison quite a bit while I watched it, the whole time trying to figure out if there was more to the depravity that I was witnessing. And in the nauseating end, I was left thinking that even if there really was more to this tale than what meets the partially-covered eye, it didn’t really matter. John Waters certainly may have meant to be saying more here, but because of the truly extreme lengths he goes to, I couldn’t help but feel the film is just filthy for the sake of being filthy. And while Waters earns a bizarre kind of respectability for having the cajones to never stop one-upping himself, I find it hard to believe that a casual filmgoer could stumble upon this movie and ninety minutes later arrive at any other conclusion besides, “Jesus Christ that was really fucking gross.”
I’m all for people liking what they like - hell, I spent several minutes discussing the merits of the FAST AND THE FURIOUS franchise at the beginning of this show. It’s just tough for me to see a definitive positivity in something that legitimately made me want to throw up and forced me into an immediate palette cleanser… but not even the heroics of Dominic Toretto could get the bad taste out of my mouth that I got from watching PINK FLAMINGOS. And I guess that means now I know how Divine felt filming that infamous scene at the end of what I’ll forever consider the most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen.
