Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Pink Flamingos
1972 · John Waters · Pink Flamingos on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera hold a static wide shot, then zoom for emphasis. (camera)
Waters shoots most scenes frontally from a fixed position, breaking the stillness only with a zoom when a moment needs pointing at.
Payoff: The plainness of the camera is doing a job: it insists you're watching something real, not staged for you.
Watch the two households argue through their furniture. (setting)
Divine's trailer is cramped and real, decorated with plastic lawn flamingos, while the Marbles' house is a thrift-store maximalism of clashing color and grotesque taste.
Payoff: Each home is making a competing argument about what counts as good taste before anyone says a word. In the reading: derived-milieu. Deleuze calls an ordinary setting that turns out to be thin skin over something rawer a derived milieu, and both houses are exactly that.
Listen for Waters narrating like a carnival barker. (sound)
There is no score at all, only needle-drops of cheap old records and Waters's own tabloid voice-of-God narration supplying whatever the scenes leave out.
Payoff: The narration frames everything that follows as reportage, whether or not you believe it.
Watch Divine strike poses built from old Hollywood glamour. (performance)
The wide-screen gestures of a studio-era star are pushed to a pitch of aggression no actual studio would have allowed, delivered straight to camera rather than to a scene partner.
Payoff: The performance is a claim to a kind of stardom nobody was going to hand her, so she takes it.
Notice each new scene trying to outdo the last one. (structure)
The film is assembled as a series of discrete tableaus laid end to end, connected by narration rather than by cause, each one required to exceed what came before it.
Payoff: There's no plot pulling you forward, only the promise that the next thing will go further. In the reading: attraction-image. Deleuze borrows this from Eisenstein's montage of attractions, units built to shock rather than to advance a story, and that is exactly this film's structure.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who this film insists gets to decide what counts as filth.