Bad Taste at its most exquisite.
How far can you go in proving your bad taste? Is there a limit, a so-called worst thing that you can ever do? I’d like to believe that the watershed of vicious acts is broken and outdone by each subsequent generation. Or it just takes one cunningly terrible mind. Hold on a second, this isn’t about evil or villainy or acts of unspeakable terror. It’s simpler than that. Something that anyone can do if they have the stomach for it. And if you can’t hack it, then watch someone else do it. That’s the thing about cheap thrills, they’re contagious.
The image of Divine has been chasing me for a year, all over the place have I seen pictures of her in a red dress that’s more an upside-down lamp than a dress, aiming a gun at something.
“You’ve been convicted of asshole-ism”, since I saw that line of dialogue, I just wanted to see what sort of off-handed film would spawn a character and dialogue like that. On this serene Tuesday, probably the last Tuesday of this month if that happens to have any significance at all, while spring flowers bloomed outside and sang their wake-up call, I sat inside, in a hell of my own, with a tub of ice-cream and watched Pink Flamingos (1972). If that’s an indicator for the bizarre time you’re going to be in for, my ice-cream didn’t last long. Not that I ate it, I just couldn’t stomach the thought of eating while watching this, and that terrible fact dawned on me around 20 minutes into the film, right about the time when I was really beginning to enjoy this ice-cream.
It claims itself to be an “exercise in bad taste” and while that is true, watching it propelled me up to arbitrary taste ladder for though my skin crawled and blood thickened at the sheer frenzy of exploitation, the un-ending transgression of all that is clean, hygienic and healthy, I appreciated the film. It was fucking bold. Especially for its time. Just stop to wonder what sort of hell would break loose on the streets of American had this film not been banned. A livid mob of clean-cut family people would descend on the film and burn down the theatre while castrating John Waters. But I’m glad such events didn’t transpire and he lived to make many more wonderful films, while still having his balls intact.
Ah, tangents, tangents, when will this end? How long will you be able to stay on track before your thoughts get derailed again?
Where was I? Aha, yes, the rambunctious presence of this film! Two families are trying to prove themselves as the filthiest people alive, committing truly horrible acts from the gross-out to the ones that’d land you in the electric chair or the wrong end of a firing squad. Of course, Divine and her family wins out in the end, because she’s the filth queen. Her blood is some rusted brown colour infused with shit and mud and where ever she steps, the ground become infertile for centuries. But her presence in this film is marvellously charming, she lives, breathes and sings filth, transgression, subversion and an uncontrollable urge to be everything that heads upstairs tell not to be.
What else would you expect from a film about the filthiest bunch alive. You’ve got rape, murder, abortion, cannibalism, eating real shit, sticking steaks up your ass, guzzling puke, man do I really need to go on, just pick your poison. You could almost see this film as a sick test, it pushes your nerves to their very limits and see how flexible they really are. How long until you turn your face away and try to erase the weird images burned into your retina. What strikes me as strange is that I’ve seen films more grotesque than this, by orders of astronomical magnitude, yet still the dog-shit eating scene got me, my head recoiled so fast away from the screen that I thought it was going to fly off. Maybe that has something to do with my own personal trauma with dogshit, always managing to step in it and then having to clean the underside of my shoes because they aren’t washing-machine friendly.
The filth of this film seeps all the way down onto its filmic skeleton, the stock itself, this grainy, muddy looking film which looks like someone dropped the film spool into a muddy puddle and wiped it clean with some sandpaper. Some scenes are cut together in such a jangled fashion that you wouldn’t be blamed for believing the film was cut together with a chainsaw and glued back with craft glue. But none of this inhibited the grisly charm of the film. If anything, it made it more palatable. I mean, would you rather be forced to eat shit off a pristine marbled plate or straight off the pavement?
The way the actors play their characters grow out of control in their antics sometimes, flailing around in sexual and emotional anger, veins throbbing in their heads and blood boiling as their scream thy loudest scream. Some characters, especially Edie, the mother of our Divine main character, is spoken to as if she were a mental patient, and the dialogue is a bit too dramatic for what it is, but when you pay £5 a ticket to see such a thing, you just let it do whatever its sickly mutated thing that it calls a heart desires just as long as it doesn’t involve you. It’s like watching a death-match between two gorillas on acid, armed with chainsaws. As long as they’re fighting inside a cage and a buzzing chainsaw doesn’t come flying in your direction, you sit there in the those of some indescribable kick that you’ve never witnessed before. Not the bang this analogy over your skull, but the cinema screen is that cage.
I feel like I’ve exhausted all I can think about wanting to say for this film. The only time anyone would be able to convince me to watch it again is if there was a lot of alcohol hooked to an IV drip heading straight into my veins involved. I’m not so sure if I’d be able to endure this experience sober again. This uproarious and irrepressible film is something that I believe you all should probably watch at least once, even if it just for 10 minutes, get an idea of the aesthetic and see how long you can last. In any case, it’ll make a brilliant drinking game.
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