CHAPTER 12
WHAT IS THE NEO-UNDERGROUND AND WHAT ISN’T: A FIRST CONSIDERATION OF HARMONY KORINE
Benjamin Halligan
THE NEW UNDERGROUND?
A consolidation of the predominant characteristics of recent Hollywood filmmaking occurred in the success of two late 1990s box-office hits: Titanic (1997), the zenith of the film-as-experience strain of ‘high concept’ North American cinema, and American Beauty (1999), acclaimed for the originality of its approach to its material. The films came across as experiences for the taking, labelled as such for the multiplexes, ‘must-see’ talking points. In this respect, the latter was ‘art as entertainment’, the former ‘entertainment as entertainment’; a difference of degree between the two, but the denominator is common and both trailed Academy Awards in their wake.
Walter Benjamin once observed a phenomenon that seems, from this close distance at least, especially applicable to the latter film and the ‘art as entertainment’ sensibility. The application is necessary since Titanic seems to exemplify, and perhaps anticipates, a contemporary trend in North American filmmaking:
We are confronted with the fact… that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication is capable of assimilating, indeed of propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary themes without ever seriously putting into question its own continued existence or that of the class which owns it. In any case this remains true so long as it is supplied by hacks, albeit revolutionary hacks.… I further maintain that an appreciable part of so-called left-wing literature had no other social function than that of continually extracting new effects or sensations from this situation for the public’s entertainment.1
The assimilating nature of American Beauty occurs in the successful translation of the style and preoccupations of an ‘underground’ sensibility into box-office material. The originality of American Beauty was nothing so much as a repackaging of aspects of 1990s ‘independent’ American filmmaking (of the commercial fringe), as exemplified in, say, the work of David Lynch and Abel Ferrara. In this case, the bourgeois apparatus of production was the burgeoning Disney-to-be, DreamWorks SKG. The assimilation was in the nature of the ‘bodysnatchers’: the film became an acceptable version of the same thing.
With respect to the matter of degree (art-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-entertainment), the ‘art’ sensibility manifested itself in American Beauty through incidentals and inessentials, elevated to the level of the all-important. This is true of individual moments (the bag blowing in the wind – itself from Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso (1964)) and also underlies the nature of the narrative as a whole (the generically dysfunctional family unit within the milieu of 1950s-like American suburbia, à la Lynch). The narrative’s experiential aspects, which function to immerse the viewer in the pervading sense of the superficiality of the generic suburbia, gives way to a sense of a critical distance from the film – a distance filled with irony, reflexive pastiche, ‘knowingness’. It creates an environment in which the expected can itself expect to be usurped and the audience is warned not to feel alienated should this occur. Thus it offers a sense of ‘difference’ within the familiar. This critical distance in relation to art as entertainment recalls Brecht’s reading of film in the 1930s: the smokescreen of ‘art’ obscures that which, in this case, posits a very tight spectrum of entirely passive expressions of ‘rebellion’.
The nature of the assimilation (of which the success of the film is a part) indicates the uncertainties of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1990s (an inability to understand or control their audiences or the ‘digital revolution’). Arguably, this had translated into a knee-jerk plundering of left-of-field filmmaking in order to appeal to the more wayward audiences the Hollywood industry felt were endangered. This sense of endangerment had coloured Hollywood strategies since the near breakdown of the 1992 GATT trade talks with Europe, and the shift, in the late 1990s, to the majority of box-office returns from Hollywood films being reaped from outside North America. To be crude about the perceived marketing strategy, since non-Americans were noted to sometimes prefer art-as-entertainment over entertainment-as-entertainment – to desire ‘difference’ – then that element must also be addressed, repackaged and assimilated and so find its position within the products of Hollywood. It becomes a matter of articulating a foreign language within a familiar linguistic system, so that the foreignness becomes ultimately little more than a nuance, a quirk.
When even ‘difference’ becomes a commodity, then a certain equilibrium has been achieved. Like the Czech film industry under Soviet reorganisation in the early 1970s, all dissidence is annihilated; those responsible for it are either silenced or exiled, and the films and their nature either banned, appropriated or regurgitated. The North American film of the late 1990s fell into two camps: firstly, the monumental blockbuster, of which Titanic was the most notable, the heart of a nexus of global products. Secondly, the film of ‘difference’, a type of production that seemed to exist to mop up all audiences who did not buy tickets for the doomed ocean liner. All films in between were pushed towards one of the two poles, so that there was no ‘in between’: a film was either the same or not the same, and not to be the same was to come to still be the same; not being the same had been co-opted. This co-optation came in the way in which those ‘not the same’ products aspired to must-have status: bought up by subsidiaries of major studios, forcefully pushed at festivals. This constitutes the eradication of real difference through the imposition of a linguistic system. A reorganisation by stealth: the Czechs had it relatively easy, artistically speaking.
The wider impulse for (alas, desire for) assimilation can also be seen in the general trends of filmmaking of the formerly ‘underground’ or semi-underground American auteurs in the 1990s. At worse, they recast themselves as hacks, albeit revolutionary hacks (particularly in light of the challenging and newly re-emergent Russian, European and New Asian film scenes of the period). But this shift to the mainstream by the Coens, Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Van Sant, Larry Clark, Lynch and others was tempered by one ‘slight return’: Harmony Korine, who, with his films Gummo (1997) and julien donkey-boy (1999), went defiantly in the other direction.
LOW CONCEPT AND WHITE TRASH: A BACKGROUND CONSIDERATION OF KORINE
Harmony Korine (born California, 1974) is seemingly as idiosyncratic as his films. A former skateboarder, he scripted Larry Clark’s controversial study of wayward youth, Kids (1995), before directing Gummo and julien donkey-boy. Neither film lends itself to a plot synopsis since very little ‘happens’ in a conventional sense and there is little or no story to develop. However, the former concerns a number of dispossessed young people who spend their time in a variety of illegal ways; the latter concerns Julien (Ewan Bremner), a mentally ill young man who works washing floors in a hospital and lives with an eccentric family. Gummo met with widespread criticism upon its release; many felt that Korine exploited those he filmed, offering a questionable voyeuristic experience masquerading as an exposé. David Walsh termed it ‘a libel against mankind’.2
Korine has spoken disparagingly of the influence of the more ‘acceptable’ contemporary American filmmakers (particularly Martin Scorsese), preferring films by Werner Herzog, Buster Keaton, Michael Powell, David Lynch, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and particularly British television director Alan Clark. Such films tend to be distinguished by cinematic ‘statements’ rather than strategies of political engagement. He has also written an experimental novel and created a number of mixed-media installations.
In this context, ‘low-concept’ would be an applicable term. Gummo itself inverts the norm of the nexus of global products: rather than the television spin-off from a film, it comes across as a film spin-off from television (specifically, The Jerry Springer Show; indeed, one of the principal characters of Gummo was taken from the paint-sniffing segment of a drug prevention episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show). It contains within it its own still-born marketing campaign: white trash freak show, heavy metal soundtrack, the piling up of outrage upon outrage. Barely have the words ‘New Line’ and ‘Time Warner’ first appeared on the screen than a torrent of juvenile obscenities fades in on the soundtrack. On the face of it, Gummo seems tailor-made for the bored browser in the video shop: a spectacle that will offend; packaged outrage as entertainment.
This difference can be understood in terms of divergent aspirations. While the semi-underground auteurs of the 1990s looked towards models of (troubled liberal) filmmaking such as neo-noir and the ‘issue’ film, Korine aspires towards one of the idiosyncratic auteurs of the New German Cinema: Herzog. Korine claimed to have fallen under the influence of Herzog as a Californian teenager. According to the director, Herzog represented an absolute foreignness to him (specifically in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)), a kind of cinematic ‘abduction by UFO’ experience, wrecking any evolving sense of what a film should or should not be. His influence was felt in Gummo and Herzog himself was present in julien donkey-boy. No spirit of Scorsese for Korine, no Coppola compositions or Penn timeliness. Rather, he looks to some of the most idiosyncratic areas of film history – the monumental statements of Herzog and the New German Cinema: unwieldy metaphors, ambiguous relevance, insane propositions. Korine’s model was the lack of a model particular to Herzog’s unique vision.
Herzog’s 1970s–1980s work was characterised by metaphors that refused to reveal the actualité of which they spoke: the vague sense of man against nature, or God, as a parable for civilisation and capitalisation (Fitzcarraldo (1982)), of revolution as a pointless and doomed activity (Even Dwarfs Started Small), of characters newly adrift in an alien landscape (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974); Stroszek (1977)). For the auteurs of the New German Cinema, ‘meaning’ could not be found in the recent history of West Germany, and so meaning must be resisted in art that invariably reflects that recent history; a mimetic approach. The New German Cinema itself was characterised by such a problematic relationship to the problematic history of film in Germany. Herzog rejected conventional senses of history in his films, Fassbinder embraced it and its contradictions, Wenders sought the present and its contradictions. It is Herzog’s ‘unstuck’ metaphor – the grand gesture as a grand gesture, insanity as proof of living – that informs Korine’s slight return. Herzog returned the compliment too, in a suitably idiosyncratic manner. In discussing Gummo with Korine, he commented:
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.3
To which Korine replied, revelling in his difference (now authenticated by the master of difference):
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.4
The authentification of ‘difference’ for julien donkey-boy came via a Dogme 95 certificate: Korine as a member of the brotherhood of Danish film punks.
Structurally and aesthetically, the films exist beyond any familiar art-house or underground category. They present a foreign language in these respects. In terms of the expected political reading, Korine invites and then rejects a liberal agenda with his sketches of the wretched underbelly of American life. On one level he voices the Neo-Realist’s question in terms of the type of imagery he presents – ‘Why and how has this come to pass?’ However, the crux of his vision lionises the marginal and disregarded icons of late twentieth-century culture, reinventing them into an ironic form of Poetic Realism (finding meaning in the meaningless), vastly at odds with his Neo-Realist elements. His frame of reference recalls the ironies of Jeff Koons’ ‘instant art’ approach to the refuse of consumer culture (i.e. that there is no refuse but, rather, an endless cycle of consumption of defecation). Indeed, Korine was first encountered in the Koons milieu – art and fashion magazines – rather than brought out as a precocious festival cinéphile. Korine constantly hones in on the most superficial aspects of existence.
AGGRESSION, THE GROTESQUE AND ‘GUMMO’
Korine summons up the ambience of Midwest heavy metal lifestyles in Gummo: the ridiculous posturing of the music overlapping with the juvenile chants of the opening credits (‘Peanut-butter-mother-fucker’), reflected in the style of the on-screen credits (1970s album cover gothic). Korine bleeds the sense of authenticity from expressions of ‘difference’ in these, his debut moments. His characters are defined by the commercial categories of ‘difference’ that are on offer; they are products of the cultural assimilation of the left-of-field. In this instance, the whole recalls the ‘Judas Priest suicide’ of the late 1980s – nihilism authenticated by an actual desire for annihilation:
Sparks, Nevada – After James Vance demolished his face with a sawed-off shotgun at a church playground, he rode his bicycle around town shocking people with his grotesque disfigurement. Plastic surgeons had been able to restore his ability to eat and breathe, but were not able to restore his smooth, youthful face. James’s physical deformity stunned the town, but not as much as the message he later delivered: Heavy metal music drove him and his closest friend to strike a suicide pact, one that only James survived. ‘I believe that alcohol and heavy metal music, such as Judas Priest, led us or even “mesmerized” us into believing that the answer to “life was death”,’ James wrote to his best friend’s mother in 1986, quoting some of the album’s lyrics. James, depressed and addicted to pain medications after the shooting, died last year in the psychiatric unit of the Washoe Medical Center from drugs and complications from his numerous surgeries.5
In embracing the inauthentic, difference is not so easily assimilated, since its authenticity becomes more apparent.
Korine allows the nihilistic vision of the Midwest to mesmerise him too – he ‘opens himself up’ to its influences, enters into the milieu, fashions an expression of (rather than from) it. He even engages in some ‘grotesque disfigurement’, since in allowing the film to be submissive to the world it seeks to present, Korine also comes to take his part in the freak show parade of white trash. This cameo has neither the flourish of the Hitchcock ‘signature’, nor of the Welles type, which often worked to ‘centre’ the film around a sense of the presences of the auteur. Korine, as ‘Boy on Couch’, is utterly superfluous. He presents himself as a drooling, drunken supergeek, trying to seduce a world-wise gay black person of restricted growth, ‘Midget’ (Bryant L. Crenshaw). His voice is whispery and cracked, he slurs his way through stories of debasement, of being sexually abused as a child, and douses himself with cheap beer. The sequence jump cuts into, seemingly, alternative takes: the sense of an improvised scene, interchangeable anecdotes. There is no suspension of belief in the sequence. It is not as if Korine is presenting a fictional character that functions in any discernible way. It is not as if Korine is not himself noted. There is, rather, a sense communicated of Korine entering into the situation of the film, that his role is equally behind and in front of the camera since the behind and the front are to be engulfed by the world, that world which becomes the world of the film. In the same exploratory manner, in an interview, he said:
As far as production design went, it was about taking things away to make it cleaner. At times the crew would refuse to film in those conditions. We had to buy them those white suits like people wear in a nuclear fallout. I got angry with them because I thought they were pussies. I mean, all we’re talking about is bugs and a disgusting rotty smell. I couldn’t understand why they had no guts. I was like, ‘Think about what we have access to,’ but I guess most of them didn’t really give a shit. But Jean Yves Escoffier, the cinematographer, was fearless. When the others were wearing their toxic outfits, he and I wore speedos and flip-flops just to piss them off.6
True or otherwise, this represents the notion of a relatively unusual vantage point for the film – more that of the reportage or documentary-maker than underground filmmaker. Such a notion is not directly verified by the aesthetic – an impressionistic-equivalent – but it underlies it.
The aesthetic stylisation cannot be read as a subjective construction. Rather, the stylisation seems, by default, to ‘originate in’ the collective mind state of the protagonists, themselves sometimes little more than colour in the wider milieu of the film. The diegetic reason for or signifier of the nature of the stylisation is unclear. It cannot be accounted for as point-of-view subjective stylisation (in the manner Pasolini termed ‘Free Indirect Subjectivity’), since the undigested mass of characters prevents the viewer from latching onto one of them as a guide through the world of Gummo. Nor do systems of presentation account for the approach, since Korine continually falls foul of the Neo-Realist/ethnographic methodology with his aesthetic ‘lapses’ into bursts of impressionism. As with the continually differing types of image quality, drawn from celluloid and video, the film has no ‘constant’. Rather, the film ‘enters into’ the milieu and reproduces the experience in a mimetic fashion. It does not seek to present an evocation of the world in a classical way.
In terms of the opening, Korine’s technique is to de-establish information rather than present the usual Establishing Shots. The implicit objectivity of the classical approach (which also allows the viewer to find a distance from the world by looking on at it rather than having to look with it) gives way to a classicism that is apparent at base but ‘eroded’ by elements associated with the world of the film: it speaks of the mind state more than it presents it. In this way, Korine allows the characters to talk in voiceover, as if to guide the viewer through the world of the film, but the voiceovers then determine the film’s course. Gummo latches onto minds rather than characters. There are plenty of signifiers of addled mind-states throughout the film (e.g. from glue-sniffing), but when Eddie (Charles Matthew Coatney) talks, his ‘attention disorder… [which] makes it hard to concentrate’, seems to voice the central raison d’être of the films flitting, non-sequitur nature.
In the first instance, Gummo finds itself unable to ‘concentrate’ on any developed, linear narrative construction. Before Korine’s appearance, the film’s structure seems only to be concerned with clocking up sequences of ever greater degradation. It indicates an inability to focus on one plot line, or even to differentiate between ‘actual’ and ‘imagined’ narratives. For instance, two skinheaded brothers, body-building Jehovah Witnesses, who playfully and brutally engage in bare-knuckle boxing in their kitchen, only seem ‘present’ to illustrate a seemingly inconsequential voiceover anecdote which tears the film away from a sense of reality or a unity of time and space in terms of narrative development. This sequence is shot as fly-on-the-wall documentary (albeit, disconcertingly, with a fish-eye lens). There is, therefore, a stylistic ‘lie’ in the way the film does not codify that which seems not to exist. The characters are defiantly real and present in terms of aesthetic presentation. Other moments lapse into the codes of narrative or generic types of film. These include a coming-of-age narrative (signalled by voiceovers); Godard-like performing/improvising for the camera; a Neo-Realist-like investigation of the world of the film; abstract video art; and even, at one point, a cable dating channel (an albino waitress talks about Patrick Swayze as the ideal man and dances around her car).
Such an ‘attention-deficiency’ impressionism underlies the opening assault of the film: degraded video images, rhythmlessly cut together, detail ‘the great tornado’ hitting Xenia, Ohio. Overexposed and differing speeds of film meld with the camcorder-like footage to render the whole stylistically timeless: neither 8mm experimentation from the 1960s nor scratch video from the 1980s. This very precise event, the tornado, is decontextualised from any sense of a recent history. An unintelligible voiceover ‘narrates’ a bizarre commentary, fading into a series of unreal, echoed aural digressions (a ditty with the refrain ‘pussy’). The furious black mass of the tornado itself is briefly glimpsed with a shot of a tattooed crucifix, suggesting the event as a kind of Biblical plague, an act of God. The tornado at the opening of the film recalls The Wizard of Oz (1939), another journey through an alien/familiar landscape. But such suggestions are themselves only momentarily thrown up in the miasma of the rapid bursts of montage, punctuated by glimpses of self-consciously outrageous imagery (a dog impaled on a television aerial, for example). All this, and Supergirl (1984) too, is touched upon in the opening narration:
Xenia, Ohio. Xenia, Ohio. A couple of years ago, a tornado hit this place. It killed the people left and right. Houses were split open, and you could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees. Dogs died. Cats died. I saw a girl fly through the sky… and I looked up her skirt.
The film, as it begins proper (in 35mm definition), contrasts boldly with the frantic montage of the opening sequence: this is the calmness of the aftermath. The prepubescent ‘Bunny Boy’ (Jacob Sewell) kicks his heels on a motorway flyover. Cars and trucks shoot by below, emphasising the nowhere-ness of the location. He is topless, his torso bruised and dirty, teeth cracked, fingers tattooed, shivering in the rain. He smokes like a pro, and pisses and spits on the traffic below, all the time sporting a pair of filthy pink bunny ears. He kicks at the bridge fencing (ripped and there to deter would-be suicides). It is the full gamut of Morrissey behaviour, and the sequence has all the grimy oppressiveness of Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972). But whereas Morrissey’s elegantly wasted low-lifes seemed to follow a certain code of behaviour (as did the protagonists of the Korine-scripted Kids: updated Morrissey, a cut-price hedonistic odyssey of drugs and fucking, AIDS no objection), Gummo’s occupants only drift. Not even a punk ethos (recalled via the iconic casting of Linda Manz, from Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980)) is apparent: the forty speaking parts in the film are united via complacency rather than rebellion, marginalisation rather than drop-out, glue rather than dope. The shammed Satanism of the snatches from Slayer videos adds another level of superficiality. No one does anything for any particular reason. And this pervades the calmness of the opening sequence.
STRUCTURAL ANARCHY: THE FILM STYLE OF ‘GUMMO’
Nor does the imagery offer a sense of narrative (like, say, the Death Row photographs of Oliviero Toscani) or a dynamic or sense of action or narrative (like Nan Goldin’s or Larry Clark’s photographs of comparable characters and situations). Rather, the images are stripped of any sense of a socio-historical resonance and with that goes any sense of an imperative as to why Korine should show us such imagery. At times heads are optically fogged (as if those filmed had not signed release forms) and the eyes are scrubbed out from the Polaroids detailing sex parties. The whole is bathed in a urine yellow (achieved with banks of fluorescent Kino-Flos rather than standard lighting), broken by the fuzzy green globules that bubble to the surface of the distressed video images.
This approach manifests itself rapidly as the film ‘moves on’: cat drowning; teenage prostitution (both parties); a lump found in her breast; cat hunting with pop guns; the protagonists on a couple of ET (1982) BMXs. It is a vision of urban squalor akin to Godard’s Le Weekend (1967): a refusescape, the future as built from the junk of the past. Korine invites the viewer to read the idiosyncratic nuances as absurdist (the clown-like masks; the dialogue), situationist (the tornado as a perception-altering event) and, in a way, experiential in the manner of Titanic: both Gummo and Titanic are spectacles of destruction, served up by major studios. Tummler (Nick Sutton) is introduced with a montage of yellowed photos. He has the look of a potential mass murderer; gaunt, prematurely thinning hair, ‘downright evil’ as Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) approvingly describes him. Dead eyes and Death Row ambience. Tummler and Solomon spend the few dollars they make from selling dead cats (for human consumption) on strawberry milkshakes, glue and sex with a Down’s syndrome prostitute, pimped by her jock brother. Meanwhile, two platinum blonde sisters use gaffer tape to expand their nipples and Bunny Boy re-enacts a Disney cartoon in a junkyard: two small children in cowboy hats, smashing car windows, wielding toy guns, pretend to gun him down and scream ‘fucking rabbit’ as Bunny Boy, unmoved, lies on the filthy ground.
Korine shoots in tableau (the two sisters, jumping up and down on an attic bed, for example) and in a frontal, ‘naive’ way – often characters are introduced in such a fashion: approaching the camera. This composition recalls Pasolini’s Neo-Realism in Accattone (1961), as does the ethnographic aesthetic construction of the film, a constantly changing array of faces, drawn predominantly from non-actors. However, little specific information can be read into the succession of faces; nor does the film document Xenia (it was, in fact, shot in Nashville).
Against this ‘deadened’ and information-free approach, which works to eliminate a sense of experience or depth to the world of the film, Korine fashions the material into moments – beats – that break through the collage, the impressionistic aesthetic and the freeform structure. They glide on the woozy, drugged-up ambience of the aesthetic: are they profound, or merely crass? It is these moments that are left once the film has finished (or, rather, ‘wound down’). The collage approach alternates between image and sound: snatches of dialogue in voiceover – anecdotes, observations, incoherent drones that defy contextualisation in terms of a sense of an evolving narrative or even, sometimes, in terms of just who is speaking. It is a jigsaw: the viewer is invited to examine pieces at random as if in order to visualise the entire picture.
The technique is one long negation: an evolving denial of information for the viewer; methods of filmmaking cut off from their original political agendas. The film is even named as such: Gummo was the Marx brother who ‘didn’t make it’ and was forgotten, negated. As the nature of Korine’s own presence in the film suggests (and, in a more roundabout manner, the opening credits, or the Slayer footage), this negation is connected to the elimination of a vantage point that would allow a distance from the world of the film. In its place, a process of mimesis occurs. Korine ‘writes’ in a language that is not his own, one that is drawn from the space between the classical construction of the world of the film and a subjective-documentary approach to that world. A kind of mimetic visual slang evolves. The vast fragmentations of the film (in terms of narrative and the lack of a constant in the aesthetic) are the fragmentations of this language, the fragmentation of an attention-deficiency impressionism. It is an incomplete linguistic system; a foreignness that cannot be reduced to a nuance or a quirk.
In light of the negations, it is, therefore, this approach that is left: a kind of broken linguistic system of uncertain diegetic origin. It is a linguistic system that, in the manner of attention-deficiency disorder, speaks of a normality but only through disrupting it. This disruption finds filmic equivalents (the lack of narrative progression; the ensemble of characters; the lack of a constant of aesthetic; the collage) and this constitutes the film’s linguistic system. In this way, it is the linguistic system and not the film itself that therefore speaks of the place, a generic ‘Midwest’. The mind state is presented as evidence of the existence of the location rather than the location and milieu as reason for the mind state. In this way, Korine delivers a psycho-geographical portrait: a collective concentration that is disrupted, the inability to pull together fragments into a cohesive whole; that is, the lack of a non-befuddled perception, the lack of any ethical or indeed even motivational codes of behaviour. Korine’s young protagonists may come across as latter-day equivalents of the child anti-hero of Rossellini’s Germania Anno Zero (1947), wandering lost in a devastated landscape, but in reality Korine’s vision details the psychological or spiritual devastation rather than a situation born of social problems.
This accounts for the film’s structurelessness. As with Herzog, Korine works towards a moment, perhaps cathartic, perhaps ‘frozen’, both uppers (irrational, spontaneous acts of violence, seemingly engaged in to verify the existence of those who commit them) and downers (nostalgic-sentimental: the suggestion of a ‘meaning’ in imagery which does not actually manifest itself). Such scenes include the two skinheaded brothers fighting; the grandmother dying once Tummler has switched off her life-support machine; a group of bare-chested, beer-drinking men smashing a kitchen chair after a bout of arm wrestling; a wired Tummler reproducing a humorless stand-up routine; a soapy Soloman eating spaghetti and chocolate in his murky bath. These are the moments that break through the collage, that emerge from the stylistic anarchy. The film eventually lapses into a run of these: the platinum sisters make out with Bunny Boy in an outdoors swimming pool, Soloman and Tummler repeatedly shoot a dead cat, Bunny Boy holds a dead cat up to the camera, an eyebrowless girl sings ‘Yes, Jesus Loves Me’ in bed. The majority of these final scenes occurs in the pouring rain and are accompanied by Roy Orbinson’s song ‘Crying’. Again this underscores the universality of the sentiment, the way in which Korine details non-specific perception. The repeated lyric ‘crying’ connects to the images of water (of the swimming pool, of the pouring rain, of the soaking dead cat): it is the whole milieu that is drenched in a ‘crying’, not the actions of the characters.
While Titanic detailed the destruction of the Titanic, Gummo details the destruction of Gummo. With mimesis, the film allows the perception that it has itself been ‘destroyed’ (and is seen to now exist without ethical consideration and in a motivationless void: the calmness of the aftermath) so as to contaminate all norms of filmmaking. Why is the impulse for this attempt at self-annihilation a necessity? Because all that is not annihilated is being assimilated into the Neo-Underground. Korine negates his film before ‘the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication’ can do so, thus preserving in the face of late 1990s co-optation an innocence through the presentation of a devastated psychology. Gummo is Neo-Realist nuance, set in amber, and therefore distorted to those who peer into it.