The film John Waters described as depicting the “pornography of power”
Whether you’re a fan of John Waters‘ subversive movies or repulsed by his penchant for filth, you can’t deny the director’s impressive dedication to authenticity. Standing in stark opposition to Hollywood, Waters emerged in 1964 with a grainy short film, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, made on a budget of $30. The movie, which depicted an interracial marriage ordained by a Klu Klux Klan member, was the first sign that Waters’ career would be anything but ordinary.
After releasing a few more short films, such as 1968’s Eat Your Makeup, which recreated the assassination of JFK, Waters made his first feature, Mondo Trasho, in 1969. The movie contains chicken beheadings, foot amputations and a bizarre cast of characters played by Waters’ regular collaborators, the Dreamlanders. Yet, 1972’s Pink Flamingos remains the director’s most notorious work, cementing him as one of cinema’s most boundary-pushing filmmakers.
The movie stars Divine as Babs Johnson, a criminal known as “the filthiest person alive”. Yet, a rivalry over being ‘the filthiest’ emerges between the eccentric protagonist and the Marbles, a couple who run an underground baby ring for lesbians. Pink Flamingos can be summarised in words such as camp, shocking and stomach-turning, yet Waters’ bold sense of humour is always apparent.
Talking to David Letterman, he once explained: “I find humour in all the things that are terrible about America, and things that people have anxiety about, but the first step of getting rid of anxiety is to laugh at it.” Waters’ films directly attack convention, purposely making audiences uncomfortable by forcing them to challenge their belief systems.
Thus, it’s no surprise that Waters adores Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, best known for creating the infamous 1975 movie Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. In a video for Big Think, Waters described Pasolini as his own kind of “Catholic saint”, adding: “I want my gravestone to look like his. I pray to Pasolini”.
Waters called Salo, known for its extreme depiction of violence and torture, a “beautiful movie”. He explained: “I don’t think Salo is obscene. I think it can use obscenity in a way to make a point about fascism, I mean about fantasies, about power; that’s a movie about the pornography of power, really”.
“I think it uses the extreme sexual subject matter in a very intellectual way,” he continued, hinting at how Pasolini used explicit and intense scenes of exploitation to highlight the abuses of power and corruption that defined Fascist Italy. Waters highlighted scenes such as “that last shot of the two soldiers dancing in that beautiful set” as particularly potent before asserting that Pasolini, who was “murdered by a hustler almost right after he made that movie”, actually “died for our sins”.
Salo is one of the most controversial movies of all time, and its confronting approach to depicting the horrors of capitalism, authoritarianism, and fascism remains one of the most compelling works of cinema.
