The best movie to watch first for a John Waters virgin, according to John Waters
John Waters has certainly never made a film to please the masses. Where’s the fun in that? When he began making films in the 1960s, he wanted to frighten hippies and show conservatives a world of pure subversiveness, which, it’s safe to say, he certainly achieved.
The filmmaker soon found a dedicated fanbase in the form of those with a love for cinema’s weirdest, queerest, and most transgressive offerings, and even when he started to receive more funding, he never compromised this idiosyncratic – and wholly outrageous – approach to cinema.
Waters has had his moments of commercial success, like when he made Hairspray, spawning a hit musical and a subsequent movie adaptation of said musical decades later. Or how about Cry-Baby, which gave Johnny Depp one of his first major heartthrob roles?
Before this period of increased visibility in the mainstream, everyone’s favourite filth elder had little more than a camera and a few friends. That’s all he needed to make some shocking slices of pure cinematic sleaze, however, beginning with Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, a notoriously hard-to-find short film which features an interracial wedding carried out by a KKK member.
In his cinematic infancy, Waters reenacted the JFK assassination with Divine as Jackie Kennedy, while another film saw him dramatise the life and suicide of Art Linkletter’s 20-year-old daughter just one year after she killed herself in The Diane Linkletter Story. He didn’t hold back.
Waters’ work has never been all that morally clear, and that soon came to a head in 1972 when he released Pink Flamingos, his most famous – or infamous – piece of work. It’s this film that Waters believes should be everyone’s starting point in his body of work, with the director telling Letterboxd, “You’re either gonna come to see all the rest of them or run from the theatre and never go back.”
The film follows Divine, using the name Babs Johnson, a criminal living in a run-down caravan who claims to be the filthiest person alive. She’s got competition, though, coming in the form of an eccentric couple who run a lesbian baby ring.
That might not seem that bad, but over the course of the film’s runtime, we see a sex scene involving chickens being crushed, flashers, real fellatio between Divine and her on-screen (adult) son, Crackers, a prolapsed anus, gore, castration, and, of course, Divine placing real, freshly-laid dog shit in his mouth. It’s grotesque.
Pink Flamingos is an exercise in bad taste, and whether you can stomach it or not, it has left an undeniable impact on cinema. Waters was so courageous in his attempt to push his film as far as possible, and you’ve got to admire the dedication that every cast and crew member brought to the movie.
“If you have never seen any of my movies and you come to Pink Flamingos, that’s a litmus test,” the filmmaker said, concluding, “I’ve met people that their first date was Pink Flamingos and they got married. I’ve also met other people [whose] first date was Pink Flamingos, and it was like Robert De Niro bringing Cybill Shepherd to the porn movie in Taxi Driver.”
