Reviews of Gummo
Displaying all 5 reviews
Dan Bayer
6Mar12
Written on the occasion of the semi-final round of the Critical 20 game in the forums. Go here to comment on this and other reviews
I tried. I really, really tried. I tried to view Harmony Korine’s Gummo as a film, separate from my previous experiences with it. I tried to be analytical. I tried to be impartial. I wrestled and wrestled with myself, but in the end, I just couldn’t do it. Part of this is because Gummo is, by design, almost impervious to criticism. It exists in its own world and clearly does not give a flying fart what you think of it, or why. Traditional means of film criticism fail utterly at trying to capture the essence of Gummo, or even at pointing out just what in the film is done well or done poorly. In the end, the fact that this a singularly repugnant piece of “art” simply overwhelms any reasonable thing one might try to say about it.
Allow me to explain.
I first saw Gummo about five years ago, after taking my first film studies course in college. My reaction to it was almost violently negative. I hated it. I despised its existence. I hulred invective at the friend who forced me to sit through it. I could not see what, if any, value the film held either as cinema or, especially, as social document. Wasn’t most of this covered with more flair in Larry Clark’s Kids, which Korine had a hand in writing? Hasn’t elliptical slice-of-life drama been done before, and better, by any number of filmmakers? Was this not just some punk high schooler’s vague idea of what “avant garde” cinema should be? And what, if anything, was the point of it all?
When I sat down to view Gummo in the context of this project, I did my best to put my previous feelings about the film aside; I simply didn’t think it fair, and wanted to give Gummo a fair chance as a film, a piece of art to hold up to criticism. But, as anyone who has tried to re-evaluate a film they previously loved or loathed is bound to tell you, this is extremely difficult. First impressions are especially difficult to overcome, even moreso when they’re strong. It’s more difficult to see the flaws in something you love, or at least care about them in any meaningful way, and also more difficult to see or at least appreciate the great parts in something you hate.
Not that this happened right away. At first, I was able to keep my feelings in check. Whispered voiceover about the town of Xenia, OH (where the film ostensibly takes place) scoring home video-style images? A bit self-indulgent perhaps, but okay, fine. Kid in a pair of rabbit ears pissing off a bridge onto the traffic below? Interesting image, even if it doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say. But then came the cat killing. And Chloe Sevigny and her kid sister bouncing on a bed wearing nothing but short-shorts and duct tape over their nipples. And a gay black midget who refuses to kiss a very, very drunk/high white (straight?) man, played by Korine himself. I had to turn it off, walk away, and come back later. I just couldn’t take it. Not because the material was offensive (it takes more than that to offend me), but because it was trying so hard to appear offensive, or subversive, in some way, that it was exhausting.
To be clear, I don’t think Korine or the film is looking down on the citizens of Xenia. The almost documentary-style cinemagoraphy and overall feel of the film seems to want to simply present them as is, without any commentary. We do not know if they lived any better before the tornado which hit the town twenty years ago, or indeed how it really affected them. The camera itself rarely looks down on the characters, instead mostly opting to shoot them head-on or from a slight low angle, as a documentarian’s camera would.
There is no real story to Gummo, which lends quite a bit to the documentary feel, but what most contributes to that is the interview-style segments spread throughout the film. There’s never the sense of the person behind the camera (except for some scenes clearly meant to evoke home video footage), but rather the characters themselves seem to simply be talking about their lives and what they believe in ways that mimic real people being filmed for a documentary. This has a somewhat distancing effect, to the point where, not even half-way through the film, I threw my hands up and angrily screamed out “WHY SHOULD I CARE?!?!?!?!?!” I did not feel involved with any of these people, many of whom we see for only a few short moments. Those who we spend longer with are such nothing characters – there was nothing to latch onto, nothing truly endearing, nothing truly repellent – that they begged the question of why someone would choose to film them. Why would anyone feel compelled to watch them? Why should we care about what they do and say? The film presents no compelling argument for this, just a bunch of odd, supposedly shocking scenes which are only tangentially connected. There are a few scenes where we follow two boys riding their bikes that feel positively revelatory in the context of the rest of the film. Through the camera movement we can feel the freedom that can come from feeling the open air rush past you; that feeling that comes from being young and without a care in the world. To say these are the best sequences of the film is an understatement; they are so far above anything else here that they could have come from another film entirely. There’s an energy that comes with the movement here that would have benefitted the rest of the film greatly, a spirit that the rest of the film thinks it has but doesn’t quite attain.
Gummo often feels dirty, but only because the town of Xenia is so run-down, its denizens so carefree about the way they present themselves. These are people who seemingly do not care how they look or what you think of them, and are frankly proud of that. Nothing aginst them; they have every right to feel that way, and who are we to judge? The film emulates this, which would be fine, except that in doing so it feels like an only half-defiant middle finger to the audience. Gummo could care less what you think of it, simply because it is so proud of itself for being very much what it is. Unfortunately, what it is isn’t nearly as clever, or as radical, or as unconventional, or as salacious as it believes itself to be. It isn’t so much an assault on all that is tasteful as it is an approximation of said assault. All the elements are there, but the images are presented in such a way that all they provoke is a shoulder shrug and a “So?” This is what I find so disgusting about Gummo: It throws all this stuff at you, all this cat killing and pissing off of bridges and bathing in dirty water and pimping out a mentally disabled woman and BOOBIES! jumping in slow-motion in a naked, vain attempt to say “LOOK AT ME!” in the way that high school punks (probably not unlike those shown in the film) get multiple piercings, mohawks, and face tattoos. It wants so badly to shock you but couldn’t care less if it actually did, because it’s really only doing these things to please itself. Some people might say that it’s great that a film doesn’t care about its audience, that the filmmaker is so brave to take that stance. In some cases I wouldn’t be against it. But in the case of Gummo, it comes off as repellent. I can only hope that I never have to give this turd of a film even a second’s thought ever again.
- Currently 1.0/5 Stars.
valolopez
5Mar10
Gummo; disturbing, depressing, and sometimes confusing but at the end of it , makes you wonder what is the main difference between what we are as a society and what we think we are. It is definetly a wide open and sincere critic towards the american way of life and mainly it’s pop culture through the eyes of a director who is not afraid of exploring everything we pretend does not exist; human darkest, deepest, ugliest emotions, situations in life we choose not to talk about but, above all, that part of us we deny and despise. In one word: provocative.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
drmalphas
16Jan10
Gummo is the first and (besides Julien Donkey-Boy) only of its kind. It’s a film about a certain sub-group of people that many have derogatory names for (poor white trash, hick, etc.). It’s also about drug abuse, violence, profanity, mental retardation, suicide, grief, poverty, middle America, the south, homophobia, prostitution, sexual abuse, mental illness, animal cruelty, euthanasia and racism. It tackles all these issues in a series of vignettes that follow the townspeople (some more than others). The title “Gummo” I believe comes from Gummo Marx of the Marx Bros. They worked in vaudeville, and the film has many references to vaudeville, including tap-dancing. Vaudeville is known for its series of one-act performers (jugglers, dancers, acrobats, minstrels) and it highlights the absurd in the film. It’s also tainted by racism with the black minstrel shows. The main thread of characters are Tummler and Solomon, who ride around the neighborhood killing cats in various ways to sell to a local restaurant. I believe that the cats are a metaphor for the people of Xenia, Ohio. It seems utterly pointless to find meaning in their suffering and their lives. God seems to be doing to the residents what the two boys do to the cats. Though the movie addresses several issues like nihilism, it doesn’t give you a direct meaning or message as to what its about, which is one of its strengths. It doesn’t insult your intelligence, and it challenges you to make your own meaning out of what you have seen by delving into the surreal and the hyper-real. Harmony Korine once said that he wants to paint a “portrait of the American landscape.” I believe he did that best with Gummo. Its a portrait of the poor, the ignorant, hopeless and the hopeless. They are just products of the society they were born into. But it’s not all gloom and doom, because there are some moments that seem rather comical, such as the scene where the guy who lost in arm-wrestling fights with a chair. At the beginning of the film, it is told that a tornado hit Xenia, Ohio some time ago. The order the vignettes appear in seem to be scattered in a way, as if a tornado tore apart the narrative. The scene with Solomon in the bathtub and on the wall is a piece of bacon held up by scotch tape. What is the point of that? What is the point of anything? In the final scenes there is so much compassion for the characters while Roy Orbison sings “Crying.” In one of the final shots, the boy with the pink bunny ears comes running up to the camera holding a dead cat and puts it up to the camera. I believe that he is a sort of embodiment of the people. When he shows you the dead cat, it’s almost as if he’s saying HERE IS THE PROBLEM. DEAL WITH IT.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
behzadhakki
28Oct09
Werner Herzog: What I like about Gummo are the details that one might not notice at first. There’s the scene where the kid in the bathtub drops his chocolate bar into the dirty water and just behind him there’s a piece of fried bacon stuck to the wall with Scotch tape. This is the entertainment of the future.
Korine: It’s the greatest entertainment. Seriously, all I want to see is pieces of fried bacon taped on walls, because most films just don’t do that.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Jordan Lord
25Aug09
Within the first five minutes of Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the viewer is treated to a barrage of distorted images of Middle American grotesquerie, accompanied by a child’s unsettlingly literary voiceover, in which he speaks of dismembered limbs, dead babies, and looking up a girl’s skirt, as she was carried into the sky by a tornado. Abruptly, the film shifts to the lucid, documentary-like footage of a skeletal young boy dressed in only a pair of shorts, sneakers, and pink rabbit ears. Bunny Boy proceeds to shiver, pee onto a freeway, smoke a cigarette, and generally pose for the camera.
This is just one of many scenes in which the film’s catalogue of hyper-freakish, marginalized denizens seem to be aware of being recorded, despite playing characters in an ostensibly narrative film. Korine particularly evokes the hyper-consciousness of these scenes by setting up camera angles more resonant of editorial fashion photography than of traditional cinematography. This technique becomes less surprising when taking into account the costumes designed by alternative fashion darling, Chloe Sevigny, also one of the film’s few professional actors. Immediately following the hard/delicate aesthetics of the Bunny Boy sequence, Korine forces us to watch an anonymous character drown a cat. By this point, the only thing the viewer can be certain of is Korine’s insistent position at the helm of the film, ostensibly following his singular stylistic sensibilities to form a collage encompassing faux-objective documentary of a seldom depicted American demographic, nihilistic hipsterism and its matching aesthetic, and an ultimately obfuscated examination of depiction itself.
On one level, Gummo exists solely on the plane of language, mixing prose-poetics with meticulous attention to dialect. Half of Korine’s dialogue feels intentionally over-scripted, something like putting William H. Gass’ postmodern lyricism into the mouths of the mentally deficient, delinquent, and/or sociopathic children of a semi-fictional Xenia, Ohio. The other half feels entirely unscripted, forged out of painfully real silences, slurs, and non-sequiturs. It is clear from the onset that every character in the film cannot be understood outside of the universe and context of Xenia, and Korine revels in creating a diegesis, where communication is, at once, crude, shocking, stunted, childish, baroque, nonsensical, and painfully specific to a people. It is clear that language is a defining feature of these characters’ essence. This was made equally clear in Korine’s script for Kids, which possessed enough characteristic vulgarity to merit an NC-17 rating on its own. While the things that Gummo’s characters say are often as riddled with amorality and coarseness when coming out of the mouths of children, in Kids, their urban rhetoric had a specific origin in over-exposure to media and gang culture. Whereas in Gummo, the language of Xenia has no precedence beyond a wildly conflated hyperbole of every middle-American stereotype from Faulkner to Cops.
Beyond the language, the defining quality for the inhabitants of Xenia is their utter awareness of image and self-representation. From Bunny Boy and his unstated fashion statement to the main protagonists/cat-killers, Solomon and Darby, there is the persistent concern of being seen, whether by others or by the camera. Solomon tapes spoons together in place of weights to buff up his non-existent physique and seems to take care to dishevel his now-iconic haircut which graces the cover of all promotional materials for the film. This is placed in sharp contrast with the almost comically exaggerated and occasionally sickening squalor of his environment. His home is marked by mile-high piles of trash, and his bath fills with some of the blackest water ever witnessed on screen. This bathroom also features a piece of bacon tacked to the wall, the single detail that elevated this film to a masterwork in Werner Herzog’s eyes. And while seemingly precious, the bacon on the wall seems to affirm one of the most bizarre and unexpected motifs in a film that unfailingly defies comprehension- despite the viewer’s inevitable perception of these people as repulsive and perhaps subhuman, the one thing that clearly unites ‘us’ with ‘them’ is our obsession with aesthetics themselves.
Perhaps, Korine finds the children of Xenia to be worthy subjects precisely because they have developed in a concurrent but so jarringly different manner to the children of the indie-mainstream. They know that they are being seen, whether by the camera or other people, and thus construct a culture. In depicting the bunny ears of Bunny Boy, the taped nipples and shaved eyebrows of Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and her sister, and the greasy coifs of Solomon and Darby, Korine depicts the same image-obsessed youth that we see everyday (now) in the hipsters of Williamsburg and the scenesters of the suburbs. Yet the genius of Korine’s statement is in denying the context or safety net of the recognizable and plunging the viewer headlong into a diegesis as distorted as the language and the varying filmstock. While on the one hand an intricately realized phantasmagoria of a filmic world, Gummo is equally a condemning interrogation of counter-culture, by constructing a codified style out of filth, absurdity, and the most proudly un-stylish part of the country.
What remains confounding throughout is that although the viewer is often led into the uncomfortable situation of being caught between exploitation and document of these individuals, Korine maintains a place of empathy with these characters. The waters are as murky as Solomon’s bathwater, as Korine places mental retardation alongside unmitigated bigotry alongside bunny ears and cat-killing. The problem begins by mixing serious actresses like Chloe Sevigny, equally known as an It-Girl at the time, with real people and inhabitants of Middle America, who although perhaps not mentally retarded or sociopathic like their characters, do possess appearances that relegate them to the fringes. I am not sure of the degree to which the bigotry that Korine documents represents the sentiments of the non-actors that are presented in home-movie-like footage. However, he presents the intended reality of these moments against the self-reflexive scenes of Chloe Sevigny in progressive thrift-store fashion and Bunny-Boy with his androgynous build. How are we to interpret this dialectic? Korine instills a folk-beauty to the images of Dot and her sisters dancing topless to a pop song and Bunny Boy being shot down by two child-Cowboys. However, images of a prostitute with Downs Syndrome and mulleted racists espousing their beliefs are not instilled with the same self-conscious, albeit punctured, glamour. It’s not possible for them to have the same aesthetic quality, and this is a problem in a film that insists on style as a main subject.
The problem becomes further complicated when considering its equal assumption of reality. Particularly in independent cinema, there is no greater currency than verisimilitude, and Gummo has no shortage of seemingly real moments. However, how is one to reconcile the documentary and stylistic functions of the film?
On the one hand, the seemingly haphazard cross-editing of different parts of the collage could lead one to assume that Korine is self-indulgently playing with his audience and merely pushing limits for its own sake. However, the precision and skill with which each part of the film is executed and the confidence displayed in creating a diegesis, which intends to repel its audience left me with the certainty that there is a cohesive method at work in Korine’s film. I have to believe that Korine believes his film means something beyond the strength of the images and words. I also have to assume that he did not stop at complicating the problem of self-representation. Korine could be going straight for the problems of America and the Cinema with his sympathetic freakshow. Regardless, he does not give the viewer a perceivable guide. He allows or rather insists that the film be experienced, first, on the level of sensation. Otherwise, there would not be images of cats being shot with BB guns and girls ripping tape off of their breasts.
But Korine also presents a film as complicated by the problems it addresses as the problems themselves. He leaves us with many more questions than answers and along the way brings up new problems. What are the rights of the filmmaker to exploit his subjects? Does a filmmaker have responsibility to reality when dealing with problems as large as reconciling multiple American identities? Was there such a reality to begin with? There is perhaps the unsatisfying reality that however Korine tries to create meaning by assembling these people into a film, ultimately it boils down to a set of constructions created by an artist that separates the artist from his subject and allows both creator and viewer to align themselves in superiority to the freak subjects. Because the film is certainly an experiment in sensational filmmaking, the casual viewer has no reason to look further than the raw feelings of shock, humor, disgust, and tenderness that the film variably invokes.
Further, by taking on the subject of a marginalized populace, Korine ostensibly inherits the burden of making a sociopolitical statement. But when considering the actual film, such a statement appears impossible, as the lines of documentary vs. narrative are so irreducibly conflated. By gathering together so many threads, one could posit that the film renders itself unreadable. But is this acceptable? By the time that Bunny Boy inexplicably makes out with Dot and her sister and finally runs toward the camera to stare down the audience, one must beg the question of whether Korine truly has an interpretation of his obscured narrative. Does he abuse his power as director and string the viewer along only to come to a conclusion of meaninglessness? If it is that in the end, he is as nihilistic as the cat-killers themselves then I accept the widely accepted critical opinions that Korine made a pretentious, self-congratulatory, and overly grim directorial debut. However, if there is some way of uniting all of the excitingly assured and labyrinthine strains of style and form, then he may have made the most interesting, arresting, and challenging film of his time. Either way, Korine’s voice announced itself as nearly impossible to ignore.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.