The first time I saw John Waters’ film Pink Flamingos – starring Divine as the “filthiest person alive” – I thought two things: I am not alone. And everything I ever wanted to say has now been said.
The image of Divine – a walking, talking assault on every conventional standard of gender, taste, weight and sanity – gobsmacked the then 17-year-old me. As a teen who was busy basing his entire identity on embracing all forms of subversive art, I knew that Divine and Pink Flamingos had gone as far as anything, or anyone, could go. Murder, incest, cannibalism, a “singing anus” – and, of course, Divine scarfing down a freshly produced dog turd – my God, this film had it all. Amazingly, that level of willful depravity, fever-dreamed in the 70s, has never been topped, all these decades down the line.
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about that revelatory time, inspired by the need for relief from the ruinous one we’re in now. In times like this, remembering foundational experiences can ground you anew. And that’s why I consider the 2013 documentary on Divine (titled I Am Divine, with heavy input from John Waters), the most precious streaming gem imaginable. Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, I Am Divine has a sweet tone that may seem incongruous to those who took the whole act literally. From the jump, I recognized the deep sincerity that lay beneath the eagerly sick scenes Waters created for Divine, his ultimate muse. They were ideal partners in crime, consummate contrarians, wielding their extreme worldview as a weapon against anyone who didn’t get it or share it.
The documentary has its own serious point to make. To Waters and Schwarz, the late Divine – who died of an enlarged heart at 42 in 1988 – was far more than the insane persona he incarnated so emphatically. He was a skilled comedic actor capable of playing many different parts – some of them even male! He was just getting to prove it when he died, having appeared several years before in the Alan Rudolph movie Trouble in Mind, as a Sydney Greenstreet-style gangster, and with another male role set for the edgy sitcom Married with Children. More, he had just co-starred in John Waters’ Hairspray, which became his first overground success, a movie that allowed him to play a character as soft and vulnerable as his most defining portraits were cruel and crazed.
His instinct for satire dates back to childhood. In pictures from the time, you can see a glint in his eye that signals an innate awareness of life’s central joke. His mother appears in the film, describing her son – born Glenn Milstead – as a child who was most happy when he could style the hair on dolls and dream alone of stardom. At 10, a doctor told Glenn’s mom that he’s “more feminine than masculine”, a pronouncement which he delivered in the darkest possible tone. At school, he was beat up daily and his life was threatened. Waters befriended him back then but the director says his father “shuddered” when he looked at Glenn, appalled by “that look of nelly-ness”.
Naturally, Waters saw the hidden potential of the kid he dubbed Divine, a name inspired by a character in Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Waters recognized Divine’s repressed well of anger and encouraged him to channel it into the murderous sociopaths he came to play. The tone of their work together defied everything, even within the underground. At a time when the mantras of peace and love ruled youth culture, they inverted that message with an irony that anticipated punk by a decade. And while Divine may have cross-dressed, he defied the common drag scene of the time which prized conventional views of glamour. “They were so serious. I couldn’t get into that,” Divine says in an archival interview featured in the film. “I thought, ‘Why not have fun?’”
His version of it, enabled by Waters, can still make your jaw drop. In their first fully scripted film, Multiple Maniacs, released in early 1970, the characters took credit for the Tate-LaBianca murders before Charles Manson and his gang had even been tried. To inspire that history-making dog-doo scene, Waters asked himself: “What can we do that isn’t against the law – yet?”
The documentary doesn’t skimp on Divine’s personal issues. He was a terrible spendthrift, an epic pothead (“Divine was stoned every day of his life,” Waters says), and he ate to the point of near explosion. “He wanted to eat every single bit of food that was in the entire nation before anybody had a chance to get to it,” the director says.
At the same time, Divine comes off as utterly lovable and open in the vintage interviews. And everyone who speaks in the film, from Warhol icon Holly Woodlawn to later Waters’ co-star Ricki Lake, clearly adored him. Still, it’s the footage of Divine’s performances – from shock queen Dawn Davenport to the sincerely pathetic Francine Fishpaw – that prove both his talent as a comedic actor and his singularity as a symbol.
“Divine stood for all outsiders,” Waters says. “He took what everyone hated, exaggerated it and turned it into a style.”
I Am Divine can be streamed on Netflix in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK
