I like to think that we here at Seeing Things Secondhand generally edge away from the Randian. The Nietzschean we will go hang out with sometimes as long as we have a chaperone, but Rand, not so much. On the other hand, if there’s anyone we can bend our conventions for, surely it is John Waters. The hero of Pink Flamingos, the Barbaraganger to a Barbie doll, is Babs Johnson. In the Dreamlander style, she is a woman of strong principles. What Babs and Waters share is a total disregard for convention. Niceties and traditions are for the staid. Waters is the daemon of Baltimore, but the ethos of so many of his characters, and the principle of so many of his films, is more New Hampshire in flavor: “Live free or die.”

Before Diogenes of Sinope carved out the role for himself as history’s first recorded troll, he committed a significant crime. By his own admission, he and his father, wealthy and established citizens of Sinope, did some fraudulent work on the local currency. Thus Diogenes, who went on to call himself a citizen of the world, could never return to his hometown. It was after all this that the well-born Diogenes became purposefully poor, living in his barrel and consorting with the local dogs and peeing on rich guys and jacking off in public places and so on. From this model was “Babs Johnson” cast. Or maybe it’s closer to the model of Patty Hearst. In either case, crime is not an infraction against law so much as it is a rejection of social order itself. The criminal has a nobility of her own, as we all know, but Divine pushes that nobility to its greatest extent. “We rob banks” may symbolize the frustration that regular people of the Depression felt in the face of economic vulnerability and institutional obtuseness. Then again, Bonnie and Clyde weren’t robbing banks in order to become popular heroes. The protagonist of Pink Flamingos seeks no plaudits for living life in her disgusting fashion. She does this for love of the game, for the principle that polite society is its own version of eating steaming dog crap off the pavement.

Curiously, I don’t think that there’d be a way to view Babs as a hero if she weren’t placed in opposition to some erstwhile villains who aim to take her trashy title away from her. The principled person does not need the inspiration of others to achieve their aims. Napoleon needed no coaxing to attempt to become the Alexander of the 19th Century. Socrates needed no special prompts to become the gadfly. And Divine did not need the praise of some alt-paper to become the world’s filthiest person alive. Unlike the “great men” of history, she intends to do so quietly. Napoleon would have wanted to conquer Europe no matter what, but whether or not he would have enjoyed it so much if no one knew about it I think we can answer. She does it all on her own, and her principles can brook no pretenders. It requires the presence of the Marbles to push her into action so that she can be all she was meant to be: the Napoleon of grime.