"Crumb" is an amazing documentary about an extraordinary artist. Most great movies are great because they carry kernels of truth: Fellini on sexual desire and repression, The Godfather on the vagaries of morality and business, Casablanca of things bigger than ourselves, the great (anti)war movies on how politicians and generals coldly manipulate young men and ultimately murder them, etc., etc... But the classics are stylized accounts with kernels of truth. "Crumb," in contrast, is truth through and through uncompromisingly laid open. You don't realize how rare truth is until you finally see it.
Crumb's own oeuvre is a study in truth, inhabited by a menagerie of characters that haunt his subconscious: rigid "White Man," farcical hippie guru Mr. Natural, Amazonian Angel McSpade, the subhumans who beat up his brother as adolescents, and his own self-pitying self.
When he became a counter culture hero, Crumb promptly put the would-be worshipers at arm's length with his openly "perverse" sexual comics. He lampooned America and its critics alike, though "lampoon" isn't quite the right word, for his powerful critiques are frequently wordless, midnight black humor, if it's humor at all (see, for example, his History of America at www.zubeworld.com/crumbmuseum/history1.html). He drew what he felt and never sold-out, even turning down a commission to draw a Rolling Stones album cover because he didn't think much of their music. During the filming of the movie, he and his wife are moving to the south of France because America has become just too ugly, commercial and crass.
Interviewed in the film, he and his brothers acknowledge being unpopular wimps, abused by their father and many of their peers. Underlying the truth in his work lay the truth of his life and family, exposed with embarrassing candor. His older brother and mother never leave their small, poor home, though they have nothing in common so they just maintain an uneasy truce. His younger brother lives as a monk, drawing a long linen tape through his body to clean his intestines while sitting on a bed of nails. Neither brother has ever had sex.
Crumb, it's clear, loves them, and it's a painful, poignant love because he's also detached. What can he do after all, except accept them? His work too, is poignantly portrayed: at one point he sits semi-autistic listening to soulful old records (he's a collector), with a slow panning over a collage of haunting illustrations.
Crumb is routinely referred to as a pervert. And of course his family is deeply disturbed. But so is much of America. And so is much of the world. Psychiatrist Alfred Adler observed that "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well." So of course Crumb is not normal. He has allowed us to know him.
Crumb's own oeuvre is a study in truth, inhabited by a menagerie of characters that haunt his subconscious: rigid "White Man," farcical hippie guru Mr. Natural, Amazonian Angel McSpade, the subhumans who beat up his brother as adolescents, and his own self-pitying self.
When he became a counter culture hero, Crumb promptly put the would-be worshipers at arm's length with his openly "perverse" sexual comics. He lampooned America and its critics alike, though "lampoon" isn't quite the right word, for his powerful critiques are frequently wordless, midnight black humor, if it's humor at all (see, for example, his History of America at www.zubeworld.com/crumbmuseum/history1.html). He drew what he felt and never sold-out, even turning down a commission to draw a Rolling Stones album cover because he didn't think much of their music. During the filming of the movie, he and his wife are moving to the south of France because America has become just too ugly, commercial and crass.
Interviewed in the film, he and his brothers acknowledge being unpopular wimps, abused by their father and many of their peers. Underlying the truth in his work lay the truth of his life and family, exposed with embarrassing candor. His older brother and mother never leave their small, poor home, though they have nothing in common so they just maintain an uneasy truce. His younger brother lives as a monk, drawing a long linen tape through his body to clean his intestines while sitting on a bed of nails. Neither brother has ever had sex.
Crumb, it's clear, loves them, and it's a painful, poignant love because he's also detached. What can he do after all, except accept them? His work too, is poignantly portrayed: at one point he sits semi-autistic listening to soulful old records (he's a collector), with a slow panning over a collage of haunting illustrations.
Crumb is routinely referred to as a pervert. And of course his family is deeply disturbed. But so is much of America. And so is much of the world. Psychiatrist Alfred Adler observed that "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well." So of course Crumb is not normal. He has allowed us to know him.