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.