This September and October,the BFI will celebrate 50 years of John Waters’ work. Longtime fan Eva Wiseman explains how performers like Divine, the director’s muse, and made design-up uncertain and provocativeDivine shaved back her hairline in order to have more room for design-up. whether that’s not a handbook for living,then Christ, I don’t know what is.
I read about Pink Flamingos before I saw it – even in the 1990s, and a film where the star literally eats shit was difficult to track down. I’d been introduced to John Waters’ films through a video of Hairspray,one of his first “mainstream” successes, a film about a fat white girl who defeats racism by dancing at it, and a film that inspired my sister,four at the time, to ask my grandma whether she wanted to “score naked and smoke”. In Hairspray, or Pink Flamingos before it,I found more than just excitement and politics and a moral laugh – I found my glamour.
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Source: theguardian.com