Defining Favourites: Pink Flamingos (1972)

John Waters's transgressive cult classic is the definition of homegrown filth.

Photo: Warner Bros.

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another — akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by John Waters
Screenplay by John Waters
Produced by John Waters
Starring Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Danny Mills, Edith Massey
Premiere Date: March 17, 1972
Running Time: 92 minutes

How exactly do you classify a film like Pink Flamingos? This is a movie that defies any sort of classifiable definition of “fine art,” considering the fact it is a movie that prides itself on bad taste. If there were any other film that perhaps best summed up the way that John Waters saw art, then Pink Flamingos would be his magnum opus. It’s a movie that exists to send a shock down your spine, for you’re watching people who dare to cross that boundary of what we consider taboo. Everything about this film would be disgusting to at least someone in the world, but John Waters knows that you’re not going to want to look away. In fact, you’ll only ever find that a taste for trash is something that needs to be fulfilled in some way or another, so that alone might be where Pink Flamingos can satisfy such cravings.

In Pink Flamingos, you can only expect that you’ll see many things on the screen that many would tell you to avert your eyes from. Some of these range from being incredibly outrageous, others are incredibly horrifying. But that’s also where John Waters finds he’s able to make a stronger case for the existence of Pink Flamingos. It’s a movie all about the people who are left to exist on the fringes of American society, finding a way of life through embracing everything that would be considered taboo to the public. In a sense, this might be what makes Pink Flamingos into the perfect portrait of queer life as any American film within the 1970s could show. Pink Flamingos dares defy what we consider acceptable, especially when the many acts we’re seeing, ranging from the grotesque to the perverse are shown without any filter.