11/30 - Pink Flamingos - Laug

Pink Flamingos, Black Comedy, and the Carnivalesque

Why do cult films reach their obsessive almost religious status? Is it in their obscenity, immersive milieu, campy beauty? In most cases it certainly is not their narrative, or cinematic qualities, specifically with low budget films like Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Room, Troll 2, or Sleepaway Camp. I think that cult films, specifically black comedies, present a world that doesn’t get produced, and with those who it resonates, it resonates for the first time.

http://salesonfilm.tumblr.com/post/100567133222 

Divine’s grotesque obscenity captures this quality that certainly fits in the zeitgeist of the 70’s counterculture. Her performance as Babs Johnson in Pink Flamingos, in which she literally eats shit, marks a turning point in not only her career but what it reflects about society’s reactions.

The film centers on a family, self proclaimed as “The Filthiest People Alive” who live in a pink trailer in Maryland. Over the course of the film they kidnap women, impregnate them, and sell their babies to lesbians in order to sponsor heroin dealers targeting inner city schools. This scenario is perhaps the hellish nightmare of evangelical creationists that persists 40 years after the film’s release. In a direct address and exploitation of their conservative ideology, the film perhaps resonates not with heroin dealing human traffickers, but those who are suspected to be these criminals (low income earners, drag queens, people who eat shit).

It is gross, blatant, and exaggerated, featuring the best “worst” aspects of American culture in the 70s. Black comedy in cult films retains its entertaining qualities through this very notion, by going against the grain and subverting any fabric of structure that has been or will be set up in its audiences world. This is most evident in Babs Johnson's comedic climactic monologue when taken out of context:

“I love the taste of it. The taste of hot, freshly killed blood. Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder!... Filth are my politics! Filth is my life! Take whatever you like.” (John Waters' Pink Flamingos).

In academic terms, this oddly comedic subversion is a reflection of some of the ideas I read in an essay series for a class last year called the Carnivalesque by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin suggests that there is an underlying freedom in subversion of traditional ideals by the humor and chaos of darkly morose, real, unhumorous things. He says “In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act… The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival” (Bakhtin). In many ways, Pink Flamingos, and other Black Comedy cult films exist as carnival acts. They exist in tandem with the active participants who are willing to subject themselves to have the rules of their worlds torn apart for entertainment, and perhaps in that subversion, they can find freedom in a grown woman dressed as a baby with an egg addiction.

http://divineofficial.com/post/99646077530/edith-massey-as-edie-the-egg-lady-and-divine 

Works Cited

-Baxhtin, Mikhail and Emerson, Caryl. "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics." Poetics Today: 560. Print.
-John Waters' Pink Flamingos. Dir. John Waters. Perf. Divine, Edith Massey. Saliva Films, 1973. Film.