Pink Flamingos · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two pink plastic birds planted in the dirt outside a real trailer in the Maryland woods. The stock is 16mm, the light is whatever the day was giving, and the exteriors are blown out to a flat glare that makes the trees look cheap too. Nobody in this film thinks the flamingos are a joke. They are the good taste of the house, and they get defended by murder.

Hold that image. Everything Pink Flamingos did is inside it: an object the culture has ranked as worthless, loved without irony, and armed.

Gilles Deleuze has a name for cinema that runs on appetite instead of decision. He calls it the impulse-image, and files it under naturalism, after Zola: a film where a perfectly ordinary setting turns out to be thin skin over something else. His word for the ordinary setting is the derived milieu, and Waters gives us two, opposed as design arguments. Vincent Peranio built the Marbles' house as thrift-store maximalism, a bourgeois interior pushed until it hallucinates. Divine's trailer is a real trailer, cramped, flamingos out front. Underneath both sits what Deleuze calls the originary world, the raw thing the setting is actually made of once the manners come off. In most naturalist cinema that world is a swamp or a slum. Here it is the taste hierarchy itself, seen from underneath, where the only currency is filth and the only question is who has more of it.

People in an originary world have no interiors. The film is blunt about this: no arc, no change, no psychology. Characters announce what they are and then demonstrate it, repeatedly. What they have instead of psychology is the fetish, the part-object carrying all the desire in the movie. Edie's eggs. Edith Massey, cast for her presence rather than any skill, playing a woman whose entire existence has narrowed to the egg man's visits. In Deleuze's naturalism the part-object usually marks degradation. Waters makes it the most tender thing on screen, and the tenderness isn't a casting accident. It's the argument.

Here is where Waters invents something. Naturalism, for Deleuze, always slopes down: the line of slope, entropy, appetite burning its host toward exhaustion and death. Pink Flamingos slopes up. Filth is a vocation with rankings, publicity, challengers, and a title to defend. The cutting admits it. What organizes the film is not rhythm but escalation, each tableau obliged to exceed the last, the editing's only job being to deliver them in ascending order. Waters took the most fatalistic mode in cinema and ran it as a success story about achievement culture.

That episodic assembly has its own name in the taxonomy. Scenes are laid end to end as discrete exhibits, joined by narration rather than by cause, and the birthday party makes the principle literal by stringing performances together for a seated audience. This is the attraction-image: Eisenstein's montage of attractions, staging lifted from the fairground, each unit a calculated shock rather than a step in a plot. Eisenstein wanted the collisions to produce a thesis. Waters keeps the fairground and throws out the dialectic. No synthesis. Just the next act.

The bodies work the same way. Staging is proscenium. Performers arrange themselves facing the camera and deliver, over-articulated, aimed past the lens at an imagined crowd. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation the gest, and Divine's is one of the great ones. Her register is assembled out of studio glamour, the wide-screen gestures of a Taylor or a Mansfield, performed inside a trailer by a movie that cost ten thousand dollars. The distance between the gesture and the room is the content. Van Smith's makeup finishes the thought: shave the hairline far back, open the forehead, arc the brows enormous. That face is engineered to read from the back of a theatre. It's a face for people who can't afford close-ups.

Then there's the voice. Waters narrates in a carnival-barker register, a tabloid voice-of-God supplying what the scenes cannot, and it's the most stabilizing element in the film. Deleuze would call this a speech-act rather than dialogue: speech that doesn't converse but legends, that manufactures the story it claims to report. Divine's manifesto to the assembled reporters, "filth are my politics, filth is my life," is played dead straight, and that conviction is what keeps the film from collapsing into a gag. Deleuze's term for this is fabulation, people caught in the act of legending themselves, which is how a minority invents an image of itself where none is available. 1972, a few years after Stonewall, and Divine is not asking to be tolerated. She is claiming a title and inviting contest.

Which brings the film to its strangest move, and its most serious one. The narration's cadence comes straight from Mondo Cane, which taught exploitation filmmakers how an announcer's evidentiary voice could certify plainly staged atrocity as documentary fact. So the frame is a machine for lying. And then the last shot is true. Unbroken, frontal, one take, with the narration explicitly certifying that nothing was faked. Bazin argued that certain events lose their reality the instant you cut them, that when the truth of a thing depends on seeing it whole, montage is forbidden. Blood Feast had already converted that principle into an exploitation rule: hold the atrocity in one wide so the audience can verify nothing was cut around. Waters takes the most respectable argument in film realism and spends it on the least respectable image in cinema. Deleuze's powers of the false names exactly this instability, truth and falsity made undecidable and then put to work. The barker forges; the long take notarizes. The film asks not to be believed but to be verified.

The other debts run just as deep. Freaks cast real sideshow performers, framed them frontally in flat wides, and closed on a clan initiating an outsider by ritual, which is the shape of the Marbles' trial and Divine's coronation. Flaming Creatures shot expired 16mm in available light until overexposure became the glamour, and made stars of friends. Scorpio Rising fired the composer and handed the whole music department to a jukebox, which is why "Surfin' Bird" arrives without warning and leaves the same way. Baby Jane supplied the two-woman humiliation duel and the logic of makeup as character.

Forward, the reach is absurd relative to the means. Ben Barenholtz put the film on the midnight circuit and turned that circuit into an economy, one he'd later use for Eraserhead. Divine's face is redrawn nightly in drag bars and got laundered into Disney as Ursula. Jackass inherited the unfaked-single-take principle intact.

So the significance isn't the shock, which dates. It's the proof: a movie could enter the culture permanently with no studio, no crew, no money, no critical endorsement, and a hostile press. Audiences canonized it by showing up every week for years; the institutions caught up half a century later. Waters' real bet was that taste is enforced rather than discovered. Watch it again and the question stops being whether you can stand it. It becomes: who taught you what filth is, and what did they want from you?