Midnight Film Analysis

A2. Midnight movies and trash
Midnight or camp movies are movies exhibited at cinemas or air at the television screens after midnight. The reason for their late night screening is that midnight movies have sexual, violent content. According to Chute, even going in this event could be regarded as taboo, due to the fact that, midnight movies "appeal primarily to feelings of awkwardness and alienation” (p, 11). Their popularity is due to their "embrace (of) all those flagrant films, from splatter flicks to hardcore porn, whose crucial social function is to overstep the limits of established taste” (p,11). In addition, midnight cinema is closely connected with the camp style “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”

Divine uses females clothing and beauty products in order to look like a woman; because in Pink Flamingos “(g)ender is made visible through the appropriation of highly gendered conventions for fashion and beauty” (Medock 213). In the film, Divine’s original gender is not revealed she is a female, a friend, and a mother, for this reason, the film “is thought to promote transgressive politics through the emergence of a humorous and provocative trash cinema which questions society’s gender roles” (Nunes 2).. According to Butler, There is no original sexual identity that men and women ought to perform: “we perform masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality according to a script already written as the cultural conventions of our society” (1993btlr 3). Furthermore, femininity and masculinity are associated with “certain bodies, dress codes, and behaviors”, but those are only “performances” learned from society and the reason they appear natural is because they have been repeated frequently, so they came to be seen as the norm. The aspect of gender performance is more apparent in drag shows because drug cannot be assigned to a “singular identity”, by displaying transgressive identities drag “reflects on the imitative structure of gender ” disclaiming and mocking heterosexuality´s views of “naturalness and originality” Butler, Bodies that Matter, 1993). The movie pink

In order to highlight her diva- like traits, she uses wigs, jewelry, tight clothing and makeup. One of her most characteristic traits are her eyebrows, Divine needed to shave half of her head in order to make space for the make-up artist to draw her iconic eyebrows. But all those female traits she adopts are exaggerated to the extent that she looks like as a trashy cheap version of a woman. For example, she wears “a series of brightly colored, revealing outfits in order to draw attention and display her body” (Medock 210). Unlike Jane Mansfield that had a nice figure and could rock a tight dress, Divine is “an obese drag queen with huge breasts that dresses in a way that only highlights her fat body” (Hallam). For the purpose of mocking Mansfield’s bimbo performance, Waters uses the same soundtrack and appropriates a scene in Mansfield’s movie. In comparing the two scenes; Mansfield exudes an ideal femininity as she seen walking confidently on the streets and dressed elegantly. On the other hand “Divine’s overweight body and her discomfort as she keeps on holding her pair of Capri pants to prevent them from slipping turn her performance into a parodic, trashy version of female glamorous role models:”(Hallam). In addition, Pink Flamingos was filmed in public or houses rather than a studio, “instead of the stylized reactions seen in the Mansfield film where men are amazed by her beauty, Waters shows