‘Shocking is too easy’

Brace yourself, reader. This is an account of a conversation with the director of the yucky trailer-trash comedy Pink Flamingos. Perhaps you won’t recall the final scene in which the overweight transvestite Divine munches on an actual dog turd. No, it wasn’t faked — this was in 1972 and there was no budget for trickery.

‘Because we were on pot all the time it didn’t seem that strange,’ John Waters recalls. ‘It’s lost today, but it was a political commentary. At the time Deep Throat had just come out; pornography had become legal. What’s left? What can’t you do?’

Waters is celebrated for his pencil moustache and transgressive movies, which shake a (knowingly limp-wristed) fist at the tyranny of good taste. When the Sixties celebrated the heterosexual revolution, his early work went several extra miles further to explore the boundaries of what could be put on film. His exuberant comedies tell of fat girls who wanna dance (Hairspray), suburban murderesses (Serial Mom) and sex addicts (Polyester, A Dirty Shame). And those are just the polite ones you can take home and introduce to Mum and Dad that were made after the film industry suffered him to enter the mainstream.

As a body of work, his filmography represents a phantasmagoric challenge to American moral orthodoxy, and as the culture of free speech gets wrapped up in a new set of rules and regs, Waters’s films still have enough pep to nip at your ankles. He predates Jeff Koons’s porno selfies and Hollywood’s bratty tittering over jism gel. And for that reason alone Waters’s crusade against calcified values merits celebration: he is an all-American pioneer, whose frontier was the very wild west. The whole canon will come out to play again in a splashy retrospective at the BFI Southbank in September, which includes Pink Flamingos, only recently unbanned in the UK.