Gummo

GUMMO (1997)

The fact of the matter is, and I didn't think this until about three months after I saw it, Kids was the Reefer Madness of the '90s. Like everyone else, I went and was kind of shocked and bludgeoned by it; but afterwards realized that, despite all the ugliness and the documentary style photography, Kids was just an old fashioned exploitation movie; purporting to tell and show all "as it really is" while following a very rigid structure. What with its dual protagonists, the good hearted secondary character who shows himself to be just as bad as everyone else, and all its cheap irony, Kids proved itself as formulaic and panderous as a lot of typical Hollywood product. So when I heard that the 19 year old screenwriter, Harmony Korine, had managed to nab a directing deal for himself, I sort of shuddered at the possibility.

A couple of years later, Gummo comes out, and reports of people walking out of the theater and booing become widespread. It opened and closed quickly in San Francisco with less than stellar word of mouth. I didn't work that hard to go see it, and it left town. When super roomie Weeb brought it home, I hunkered down and watched it with her. You see, in my heart of hearts, I had to admit that I admired any one with the moxie to call a film "Gummo."

Gummo, for those of you that don't know, was one of the Marx Brothers. The oldest, I think. So Gummo is supposed to invoke a sense of anarchic comedy (which the Marx Bros. are pretty much the patron saints of). Also important to point out is that Gummo is the only one of the Marx Brothers that never appeared on film; he had retired and becomes the Bros.'s agent by the time they moved from stage to screen. So the title Gummo is essentially a promise and a challenge to show us something on film that no one has ever seen before.

My favorite character; one of my favorite scenes That promise is as close as one can come to summarizing the movie; the back of the video box talks about the movie taking place in a town that was destroyed by a tornado and never recovered but that's really only part of the beautiful opening monologue ("Xenia Ohio. A few years ago a tornado hit this place. It killed people left and right ... Houses were split open and you could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees ... I saw a girl fly through the sky and I looked up her skirt....") and a metaphor for the chaos of the world of the film AND an excuse for Korine to present scenes, like scattered debris, in helter-skelter fashion. It's pretty much a day in the life, albeit a surreal one, for mainly lower-class kids in a lower class town. There are a few separate storylines that run through the piece; two funny looking kids (named Tummler and Solomon) kill and sell cats to the butcher to pay for their glue-sniffing habit; a kid in shorts and bunny ears runs through the town being alternately attacked or embraced; two insanely blonde girls hang out, talk about boys, and watch over their cat and little sister. Lot of cat torture in this movie, by the way; in fact, I think the final image is the bunny boy holding up a dead cat to the camera. A better and more dutiful writer than I will have to tackle the specific philosophical gauntlet a modern filmmaker presents by showing dead animals on camera, but I think Korine is also trying to draw a parallel between all the abandoned wandering children and the stray cats.

Tummler and Solomon: Little more than strays themselves There are scenes in this movie that I truly loved; my favorite of which involves a group of rowdies in a kitchen who, tiring of arm-wrestling each other, decide to wrestle the furniture. The vision of a giant shirtless biker type wrestling a kitchen chair is one of those things that is so perfect in intention and execution as to inspire joy. I'm also fond of the scene in which a drunken Korine comes on to a male dwarf, and I love every scene with the bunny boy. A scene in which a boy goes into his demolished basement and works out to Madonna's "Like A Prayer" is also perfect; as real and surreal as anyone could hope to catch. The movie is filled with laughs and epiphanies as much as it is abuse and pain.

But if Korine presents Gummo as an artistic statement, I don't think I should have to apologize for finding it disappointing on artistic grounds. The destruction of cinema is an important thing, I guess, but I have no doubt that Korine is pretty aware that no matter how gruesomely specific he makes the act, the general deed was committed years before he was born. I'm far from an expert, for example, but even I could tell that Korine cribs a lot of his attitude from Godard's Week-End which was released 30 years before Gummo and probably a decade before Korine was born. All the effusiveness that certain filmmakers express toward Korine's originality sort of screw up the point; it's not that Korine is original, it's that he's carrying on a great tradition, that of the artist who chooses to destroy his artform so it can be reborn.

I also worry that, for someone who gets pinned as the new voice of a generation, Korine may not understand that generation very well. Godard pretty much had the bourgeois pinned, and knew making Week-End a gruelling experience for them was an actual exposure to something (discomfort) they weren't used to. Korine should know that, in the Jerry Springer/Faces of Death era, discomfort in art is something that many consumers are attracted to. It helps us to feel, in this age of media hypersaturation, that we are watching something unique, something "real," and discomfort is a way of authenticating what we are doing as an "experience." I got up from Gummo feeling like I had just run a gauntlet, but I really didn't do anything more than not look away. As a statement, Gummo threatens to go unheard because Korine is caught in the old paradigm of shocking the masses when, in fact, a good chunk of the masses, like mice addicted to the buzzer, actually like that little shock. What will prove to be tough to Korine in the post-Gummo career, and for all of us, in our post-Gummo world, is figuring out how to move beyond merely shocks and a wasteland of rubble, but move to what we might want to build beyond the wasteland.

More about this movie

Still more about this movie

Gus Van Sant going off about Harmony Korine

Werner Herzog interviewing Harmony Korine