His name, or so Waters insists without irony, is drawn from his habit of pecking at his food, and to look at Furlong's utter scrawniness is to believe it. Pecker is a photographer. When he's not burying cold cuts in mayo on his day job, he's wandering the city with an old-fashioned camera, snapping pictures of his neighbors, his family, his life, his city. This, Pecker is saying, is working-class Baltimore, from his father's faltering bar to the gay club where his sister works to a lesbian strip bar that's moved into the neighborhood to his grandmother's religious delusions to his mother's secondhand store with its collection of shabby '50s merchandise. She sees with quotation marks.
Art is irony, irony is art.
Back in Baltimore, there is pain, for through his photos the world laughs at the tiny dramas of Hampden reality as lived by people who talk funny and go downy ocean every summer, hon. And so it is that Pecker must choose. The movie, then, works more as an essay than as a story. Frequently funny, just as frequently repulsive, it's filmed in Waters's trademark deadpan style that some adore and some loathe. The movie just happens to be in a film grammar that's undeceptively simple, though I think at one point the camera actually moves a bit.