Pink Flamingos

This article is about the film. For the bird, see Flamingo. For the lawn ornament, see Plastic flamingo.

Pink Flamingos
A drag queen wearing a red dress, stands center stage, holding a gun. The title is above her, with the tagline "An exercise in poor taste"
Theatrical release poster
Directed byJohn Waters
Written byJohn Waters
Produced byJohn Waters
Starring
CinematographyJohn Waters
Edited byJohn Waters
Production
company
Distributed byNew Line Cinema
Release date
Running time
92 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$12,000[1]
Box office$1.9 million or $7 million[2]

Pink Flamingos is a 1972 American black comedy film[a] by John Waters.[3] It is part of what Waters has labelled the "Trash Trilogy", which also includes Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977).[3] The film stars the countercultural drag queen Divine as a criminal living under the name of Babs Johnson, who is proud to be "the filthiest person alive". While living in a trailer with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), and companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), Divine is confronted by the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole), a pair of criminals envious of her reputation who try to outdo her in filth. The characters engage in several grotesque, bizarre, and explicitly crude situations, and upon the film's re-release in 1997 it was rated NC-17 by the MPAA "for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail". It was filmed in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, where Waters and most of the cast and crew grew up.

Displaying the tagline "An exercise in poor taste", Pink Flamingos is notorious for its "outrageousness", nudity, profanity, and "pursuit of frivolity, scatology, sensationology [sic] and skewed epistemology".[4] It features a "number of increasingly revolting scenes" that center on exhibitionism, voyeurism, sodomy, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, animal cruelty, cannibalism, zoophilia, castration, foot fetishism, and concludes, to the accompaniment of "How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?", with Divine's consumption of dog feces – "The real thing!" narrator Waters assures us. The film is considered a preliminary exponent of abject art.[5][6]

The film, at first semi-clandestine, has received a warm reception from film critics and, despite being banned in several countries, became a cult film in subsequent decades. In 2021, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[7]

  1. ^ "How John Waters and Mink Stole made notorious cult film Pink Flamingos". TheGuardian.com. March 17, 2020.
  2. ^ Donahue, Suzanne Mary (1987). American film distribution : the changing marketplace. UMI Research Press. p. 296. ISBN 9780835717762. Please note figures are for rentals in US and Canada
  3. ^ a b Levy, Emanuel (July 14, 2015). Gay Directors, Gay Films?. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231152778.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference advocate was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Kutzbach, Konstanze; Mueller, Monika (July 27, 2007). The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Rodopi. ISBN 978-9042022645.
  6. ^ What Culture#16 Archived July 20, 2018, at the Wayback Machine; Pink Flamingos
  7. ^ Tartaglione, Nancy (December 14, 2021). "National Film Registry Adds Return Of The Jedi, Fellowship Of The Ring, Strangers On A Train, Sounder, WALL-E & More". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved December 14, 2021.


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