"Pink Flamingos" is the greatest film ever made

Steve Pulaski's Foreword: While I don't believe I ever openly stated this in a blog or a review, I detest labels like "the greatest film of all time" or "the best film of all time." It's a nonsensical, needless debate over who can yell the loudest, for it exists of nothing more than people trying to answer an objective question with solely subjective answers because no other type of answer exists. As of 2014, Citizen Kane holds the top spot on the American Film Institute's list of greatest motion pictures, but what is the American Film Institute? A committee of people who worked to compile a list of the greatest motion pictures and elected one-hundred to fill the list. Despite the committee being renowned and cherished, it's all still an opinion and nothing more. 

I refrain from digging too much deeper into this subject because I want to discuss it on a forthcoming episode of "The Front Row Steve Podcast," the podcast I do for The Baconation. Currently, however, I was forced to answer what I felt was the greatest film of all time in my mass media and society class, a three-week long course I'm taking over my winter break from college. It's the sole writing assignment of the class and couldn't be any longer than five-hundred words. While I love film and everything about it, I hated that I was going to need to give a response to such a question.

While I took the assignment seriously, acknowledging the rubric and adhering to the professor's guidelines, I wanted to have fun with this assignment. I could've chosen any film under the sun, but I wanted to pick one that was going to stun people and make for an incredibly intriguing read; I wanted a challenge or, employing a better term, a writing exercise. I chose John Waters' controversial Pink Flamingos, and anyone who has witnessed (not watched) that film knows just how outlandish of a choice that film is for an assignment like this. Transgressive, tasteless, trashy, and filled with more sexual fetishes and taboos than a website dedicated to those things, Pink Flamingos, to me, is just as good as any pick for this particular assignment. My goal was to justify it and try to make my own case, while referencing three other film critics, as to why the film deserves the dubious title.

I await a response from my professor; rarely have I wanted one so badly.

[....]

Being a film critic, I have always found the title and discussion of “the greatest film of all time” to be a worthless convention that does nothing more than waste the time of its participants. It’s a title rooted in objectivity, and the only response that could ever be provided is entirely subjective. Having said that, film is an art form that is always changing in terms of what is acceptable and unique. Being that film has always been an experimental medium, expanding the boundaries and possibilities of what can be filmed and depicted, a film that does nothing but live up to the sheer idealism and possibilities of the medium is John Waters’ Pink Flamingos.

Starring beloved cross-dresser Divine, Pink Flamingos concerns a competition between two deeply depraved families competing to be “the filthiest people alive.” Divine stars as a criminal working under the name “Babs Johnson,” living with her own misfit family, competing with a couple who run an “adoption clinic,” which, in reality, is an underground baby ring where babies are sold to lesbian couples. The film features a wide variety of perverse, sexually explicit acts that caused a whirlwind of controversy and still have the ability to provoke sickness in the modern day. Film critic Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly comments how Waters was ahead of his time, saying, “the film has lost none of its danger, its wit, or its psychotic exuberance. Part of the shock now is realizing just how much of punk culture John Waters invented. The synthetic hair color, the rage, the '60s trash-rock nihilism — he was there years ahead of London and C.B.G.B.'s.”

Every perversion imaginable lies within the screenplay of Pink Flamingos, from incest, to drug use, to sexual fetishes, to pure, unadulterated indecency in a profoundly shocking and fearless manner. However, when one looks past its shocking content, they have the ability to see a truly depraved masterpiece of trash and social commentary. Journalist Beth Accomando of KPBS remarks how the film, “was an all out satiric assault on the middle class values that Waters saw as oppressive and hypocritical. But what made Waters unique was the joyous quality of his work, [and his] revelry at smashing establishment values and championing social misfits made his film irresistible to all but the most puritanical.”

Shock only goes so far, but when Waters revealed the film concerned the drudgery and predictability of seventies suburbia, Pink Flamingos suddenly became something people couldn’t ignore – a biting piece of social commentary. The fact that Waters basically took the Hays Code of the 1930’s and ripped it to pieces, doing practically everything that seemed indecent and unclean on film, and proceeding to add themes to the mix, makes this film worthy of the “greatest” label. Film is about taking risks, revolutionizing, and exercising transgression, which is what Waters fearlessly did. Summarizing the film most effectively is film critic Cole Smithey, saying, “I thought it was shocking, nauseating, hilarious, and the scariest thing I'd ever seen.”