Gummo

Remember when you were in grade school and the weird kids down the block were doing something that looked, well, interesting, and your mom told you to stay away? Did you? Did you ever wonder what it was they were up to down there, behind the garage, in the basement of someone's house, over by the bowling alley?

Rent Gummo and find out. Mama wasn't as stupid as you thought.

After every scene you have to ask "what in the flying f--- am I watching?" It IS unique art though and deserves some stars for that. Absurd to the nth degree with no particular plot or story line. Much of it could be described as hilariously entertaining in the same disturbing way that watching two dogs fight over a chicken bone could be. I laughed my a-- off through most of it, but near the end it got sad. You start to feel guilty for mocking these miserable people. But, mostly you come away asking "why do people reproduce?" and wonder how much better this planet would be without us abysmal creatures running around wrecking the place.

Well...

I spent a small part of my childhood not too far away from Xenia, Ohio and a large part of it in the South. I can't say I ever found myself in such a screwed up place as this one, but I know one thing -- if I did I would certainly want to go back and document it! Then I'd be perfectly happy if another tornado came by and leveled the whole place.

Watching this movie was like looking at those years through some really distorted mirror and finding recognizeable nuances of personality in it. And I can't say much of that was appealing. Neither was this movie, which is not to say the characters weren't compelling, because some of them certainly were. Give me an impenetrable glass bubble and a camera and I'll take my place in this grotesque circus. I like to watch, but I don't want to get dirty. Everyone in this movie was dirty...

That spaghetti scene and "I want a moustache dammit!" were worth the price of admission. I do have one suggestion, however -- it either should have been more contemporary or more distant. At first it wasn't clear if the action was taking place shortly after the tornado or long after it. But when the albino woman mentioned Pamela Anderson, that nailed down a time period for me. It would have been more effective as a period piece (sometime in the 70s) where the audience looks back on a really messed up town; or it could have been filled with more contemporary references which places a really messed up town not too far away from where you and I live.

Gummo is a film of substance, a rare thing in this time of Estee Lauder actresses and pec enhanced tree trunks stumbling around the kindergarten dialogue. Reality TV before it became anachronistic. A film that demands a second viewing to truly understand the director's vision is a rare thing; my initial impression was of a mockery of Red Necked America, but now after several viewings I understand it as a celebration of the sidelined aspect of American culture. Unafraid to pull its punches, unafraid to deal with the shocking, the jarring, the discomforting; it is a film that is mostly about killing cats and sniffing glue. Possibly a freak show, but one done in the style of the old freak shows - the freaks call the shots and they revel in their opportunities. A piece best enjoyed at 5 am on a Sunday morning after burning the midnight oil, when your nerves are raw and you need something with bite to cut through the fog. Nobody has created such vivid set pieces and each time you review the film there is a new mullet to admire, a chair to be beaten, a Down's Syndrome prostitute to mull over. Prepare to be shocked and provoked whilst being entertained; when the film finishes you are compelled to take stock of what you have seen and in my eyes that is what films are for. A hearty thumbs up.

Harmony Korine did this when he was 24 years old and everything else aside I like it a lot that a young person gets to tell us what it can be to be young. Irrespective of whether or not a young man has yet found something important to say at 24, I don't like it that professional directors' careers start well into their thirties. There's a big age gap there that is only talked about in hindsight, after the fact. Perspectives and values change as we grow older, whether or not a young man will mature to the point of recognizing the follies and dreams of his youth or he'll embrace the anger and grow up to be GG Allin, and whether or not settling down to a regular life is a personal betrayal of a former self, I think something like Gummo needs to be made and more of it.

This is punk filmmaking at its scummiest, the vibe of antisocial angst despair and anger is pure necro punk rock like GG Allin throwing feces at his audience and smashing beer cans open on his head, it's about being violent and eccentric right now as a means of killing time and making something out of tearing down something else. Yet it's also oddly poetic for the same reason. It's not poetic because a kid will eat spaghetti and chocolate in the bathtub or because a kid with bunny ears rides his bike around a post-apocalyptic landscape of trailerpark white trash, but more because it assumes important things can be said through all this. When Korine speaks of life and death, whether or not life is worth living, when he attakcs society as complacent and apathetic, the results feel immature to me: this is reaction from a vantage point of being too young to start caring, an act of vandalism from the safe point of having your own thing wrecked. But it's good to have these things captured on film then thrown away for anyone who might wanna find them.

I read a bit about Trash Humpers and it seems Harmony Korine doesn't feel there's anything to grow out of. Watching him in his Letterman interviews gives me a clue to all this: the guy is awkward but he's cute awkward, the kind of awkward women want to hold in their arms. I know a skater guy like this, he's 30 years old but looks 25, has his face pierced and hair colored blue or magenta for as long as I've known him, and is endearingly weird. He's never had a shortage of girlfriends. He reminds me of Gummo where despair and malaise plays like a sort of lifestyle. Real awkward people, people who really can't get anywhere in life, don't make movies. I'd like to see their Gummos, this is a bit too cute.