For over five decades, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos has held a notorious throne as the “grossest movie ever made.” It is a film that attacks the senses: the visuals are shocking (a notorious dog-poop scene, a cannibalistic chicken dinner, a forced fellatio finale), the soundtrack is a lo-fi assault of doo-wop and grunts, and the dialogue is a rapid-fire symphony of profanity, camp, and Baltimore-specific slang.
But for a significant portion of the audience—the hearing impaired, non-native English speakers, or simply viewers who can’t decipher Divine’s shrieks through a mouthful of feces—the subtitles of Pink Flamingos become the primary text. And that text is a masterpiece of its own kind. Creating subtitles for a standard Hollywood film is a straightforward process. Creating subtitles for Pink Flamingos is an act of forensic linguistics. pink flamingos subtitles
For a Deaf viewer, the subtitle [Divine laughs maniacally] is just as important as the image of her smiling. For a non-English speaker, reading “I hope your next baby is born without a face” is a moment of pure, unmediated Waters. The subtitles strip away the lo-fi aesthetic and reveal the script underneath: a sharp, satirical, and deeply funny attack on American middle-class morality. For over five decades, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos
Take the infamous line delivered by Cookie (Divine’s real-life mother, Edith Massey, playing a deranged woman obsessed with eggs). She shrieks, “I’m a real chicken-breasted, bowlegged, egg-suckin’ motherfucker!” The subtitle is usually accurate. But when the characters launch into a chorus of sexually explicit insults involving farm animals, the subtitles face a choice: do you write the full anatomical term, or do you use the slang that Waters intended? Creating subtitles for a standard Hollywood film is