In the movie, Edward Furlong plays a naive young Baltimore shutterbug nicknamed Pecker. His casual shots of family and friends suddenly are given 'art' status by a Manhattan gallery maven played by Lili Taylor. The movie lampoons Pecker's rise and fall from fame. He likes both Baltimore and New York and makes fun of how they interact on a sociological level, at least in a trendy art world sense. I couldn't stand to be in either one or the other all the time.
Pecker is a heightened reality, of course.
People get more joy out of things in my movies than they do out of real life. At 52, Waters uses words such as joy with more abandon than he once did. It's not a bad life. He once was angry. That was what the big influence was for Pink Flamingos, although it might be hard to see today.