Indie films are often criticized for being pretentious, and to be sure quite a few richly deserve that epithet. Yet there is a difference between going out of your way to seem “artsy” and actually having an authentic, offbeat way of using the medium of cinema to tell a compelling story and/or offer insightful social commentary.
One of the reasons I love Harmony Korine is that the six movies he directed for the big screen all attempt to do that. Some are more successful than others, to be sure, but there isn’t a phony or pompous atom in any of them. They are weird films about abnormal people made by a strange man who, it is crystal clear, sees himself as one of them. There is not a hint of condescension and, no matter how depraved his subjects might be, loads of empathy.
He does not make standard Hollywood fare. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that Hollywood refused to bankroll his projects for years; the surprise is that they eventually wound up doing so at all.
Since I am writing about all of Korine’s directed theatrical movies during my vacation, I’m going to start with his directorial debut, the 1997 experimental film “Gummo.” (There will be five other reviews devoted to the other movies Korine directed for the big screen.) Written and directed by Korine, its only notable star is Chloë Sevigny as a character named Dot. Everyone else is an unknown, although Jacob Reynolds and Jacob Sewell make indelible impressions as, respectively, the impoverished, timid and indefinably grotesque Solomon and the perpetually shirtless, bunny ear-wearing delinquent Bunny Boy.
The story isn’t so much as a plot as a dream-like stroll through the aftermath of the story a mainstream movie would focus on (that is, a natural disaster). Set in Xenia, Ohio after a major tornado has devastated the impoverished community, “Gummo” traces the ways its characters cope with their exacerbated hardships by retreating into antisocial, eccentric, and deliberately provocative behavior. This is a non-linear slice of life, not a narrative adventure, and it works because anyone who has lived in low-income areas of America knows that the character depictions ring true.
The tornado did not cause their horrific lives. It merely added a new layer of cement over the roof of the hell they had already inhabited. This is true for the main characters, Solomon (Reynolds) and Tummler (Nick Sutton), who make a living by hunting cats and selling them to a local butcher. It also applies to the albino and the African American little person pimp, among the few of the seemingly sinless on display here. They are joined by sinister types like a child molester, a pair of skinhead brothers, hordes of drunken ne’er-do-wells and the random racists, homophobes, Satanists and other cretins who often populate the deliberately overlooked backwoods of America. Even though most of them are morally reprehensible, we are drawn to their assorted tales because it is compelling to watch people defiantly violate the bounds of what is considered to be acceptable, normal behavior. One does not have to like them, and certainly they should never be emulated. Yet can anyone honestly say they aren’t intrigued when someone with a coloring book draws outside the lines — and, against all the odds, seems to be expressing themselves artistically, even though the act itself appears to the less perceptive as pointless disobedience or mere laziness?
This is a movie about the kinds of people who really exist, even though we prefer not to see them. Because we’d rather not look, they rarely have their stories told in the movies, at least not with this much raw honesty. All of these elements put “Gummo” on the path to greatness, but it officially earns its place among classic cinema by never preaching to the audience. It simply focuses on the souls of its myriad characters and assumes Korine’s larger message will come through on its own.
This is the main artistic focus of “Gummo”: To show people consigned to the fringes of society as they really are. It does not try to evoke sympathy or pass judgment. We are simply watching tormented souls in haunting and evocative scenes that stick in your mind’s eye because of their memorable squalor. This is a universe of dilapidated houses, broken down cars, rusty metal, cluttered rooms, littered streets and unkempt lawns.
Its standout scene is one in which Solomon takes a bath in filthy water, eating spaghetti while his mother shampoos his hair, until the two of them are interrupted by a knock at the door. A pair of twins sells the mother a candy bar by claiming the money will go to a good cause (it won’t), and she feeds it to her child as dessert. While these events happen, our eyes wander to a piece of bacon taped to a wall.
“Seriously, all I want to see is pieces of fried bacon taped on walls, because most films just don’t do that,” German director Werner Herzog later told Korine. Most films don’t look anything like what we see in “Gummo.” This makes it impossible to measure “Gummo” using the traditional quality metrics, and leaves us simply asking whether it works or does not.
It works.