Pink Flamingos – directed by John Waters. Farce. Competition for the title of Filthiest In The World leads to crimes and misdemeanors. 93 minutes Color 1979.
★★★★★
Faultless fault – that is the Waters style, here and elsewhere. The professionalism of his pictures establishes its rock-hard foundation on the amateurism which Waters insists upon and which determines their tone, style, execution.
Since amateurism never changes from age to age, since from the beginning of time to the end of the world, it is always the same, his pictures partake of a perfect human eternality. Humans being amateurs always look like this, do this, give this impression. This is not to say his films are deathless, for they die the deaths of a thousand embarrassments, humiliations, and shames as they stumble through to their denouements, but they do partake of a certain immortality – if immortality can be in any way defined by the term “a certain”, which suggests that their immortality is not absolute – when the one thing immortality always is is absolute, since in dying it never dies. So let us say it: John Wates Pink Flamingos is immortal – as immortal as a tomb mistaken as a sanctuary.
This deliberate amateurism places his films beyond defamation and beyond criticism. For they are themselves defamatory. Defamation breathes in them. And as to criticism, who would rise to the bait? Five stars are always to be scattered upon their prone forms. The acting style is as follows: every actor shouts his lines at every other actor always and always on the same identical level of SHOUT. One cannot criticize this. There is no performance level to address. One can merely report.
In the sense that the individual speeches go on too long and repeat, all one can say is that the actors and the writer are supposed neither to know any better nor do any better. That is the treatment.
As to Divine, criticism – in the sense of particular sensitivity to the rubric of acting on the part of a critic to the part the actor plays – this would be senseless. For Divine has stepped aside from gender. Divine is a creature of no gender at all, neither male nor female, and so is responsible to no particular sexual style or urge. She is Liberty Hall. She is human in every particular, because in none. There is nothing to be said in her favor; there is nothing to be said against her. Indeed, the only thing to be said about her is to notice the only trait which seems natural to her, amid so many that are not– her eye make-up, her flamboyancy – natural to anyone – is her human kindness. She is Pleasure Island. But the trip she is does not turn her into a braying jackass. Indeed, her kindness is so generous, so forceful, so unavoidable, that it seems to make her a star.
“Seems to?”
No.
Does make her a star, and a deserving one she is, too.