America is a nation of consumers. All human beings throughout history have consumed, of course — for survival, pleasure or both — but there is a difference between consuming out of necessity or for enjoyment and doing so as an obsessive indulgence. One look at American economic excessiveness and exploitation proves this point. We spend more than the rest of the world, eat more than the rest of the world and have destroyed our society, bodies and souls in the process. Indeed, the consequences of our vices have not stayed within our borders; we have ecologically and economically devastated the planet through our constant conspicuous consumption.
Consuming is who we are — and the most American of the Americans among us are the ones who define themselves by their consumerism.
“Trash Humpers” is the American consumerist ethos taken to its most grotesque conclusion. It channels our consumerist impulses and makes them literal — the titular protagonists actually hump the refuse left over by our abundant consumption — before adding a social statement by having the trash humping consumers flout social conventions and thereby liberate themselves. The consumerist impulses that most of our society uses to attain status (or finds stifling), the Trash Humpers use as a vehicle for antisocial transgressions.
In other words: This is a monster movie, but instead of creating fictional characters, it simply holds a mirror up to America.
As far as a plot goes, “Trash Humpers” doesn’t really have one. There are four homeless old people in Nashville, Tennessee who go around humping trash cans and trash bags, committing acts of petty vandalism, peeping into windows and otherwise making mischief: Hervé (Korine himself), Momma (Korine’s wife Rachel), Buddy (Brian Kotzur) and Travis (Travis Nicholson). Sometimes they meet equally bizarre people who live at the fringes of society; sometimes they traipse about on their own.
In the true spirit of Marshall McLuhan, this is a work of art in which the medium is the message. That medium, here, is grimy, jumpy VHS tape, which makes the movie feel like a random cassette found under a rock or in a basement rather than an official production. Its setting furthers that bleak aesthetic, with Korine choosing dirty alleyways, sketchy parks, polluted waters under crumbling bridges, sleazy motel rooms and cheap houses as his main locations. The aesthetic of “Trash Humpers” isn’t just lo-fi because Korine films on VHS; it is lo-fi because that is the world the characters inhabit.
All of this was intentional. As Korine put it in an interview with Hammer To Nail:
“I thought it’d be interesting to make something that resembled a found VHS tape—its logic worked as if it were found footage, or the structure of it,” Korine explained. “I guess there’s something about VHS that I hadn’t seen. I have memories of getting my first VHS camera and reusing the same tapes over and over again. You’d see certain images randomly bubble up to the surface. I thought there was something interesting in that.”
He has mentioned in another interview that he finds great beauty in the ugliness of the movie’s settings, in the “elaborate series of park garages and back alleyways, and beautiful lamp posts that light up the gutter.” He also saw it in the decrepit societal rejects who he would regularly catch peeping through windows or otherwise breaking the law.
Perhaps the essential message of Korine’s film is best summed up by a character (later murdered) who adores the main quartet and proclaims his love by saying:
“But we laugh, and we stroke/And we talk witty, and we joke/With the air of entitled elites/But in the shadows their lurks/These mountains of dirt/And the godawful stench of our feet/”
There is more to that poem, but I wouldn’t dare spoil it.
To be clear: I am recommending this strictly as an arthouse movie, one that can only be enjoyed by those who can acclimate to the extremely unusual filmmaking style and appreciate the paradoxical beauty of the characters’ and settings’ ugliness. If that sort of thing sounds interesting to you, “Trash Humpers” is worth a watch.