A late friend and colleague once said of the whispered narration from the protagonist in Harmony Korine’s Gummo, “It’s the kind of voice-over that you’d expect to hear in a film directed by Terrence Malick, if Terrence Malick had a psychological breakdown.” That sentiment seems about right for the movie, which met a good deal of controversy following its August 1997 premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. Korine’s feature directorial debut was rolled out quietly by its distributor, the now-defunct Fine Line Features, just two months later, and its DVD, released under Warner Bros Home Entertainment’s “Archive Collection,” is now a tough find for collectors of physical media. Given its fairly graphic content, which contributed to one of the longer R-rating reasons in the history of the MPA, that also seems fairly understandable.
After all, this was the first film in which Korine was involved as a guiding voice since 1995’s even more controversial Kids, an examination of the crossroads between skateboard culture and sex in early 1990s Manhattan, from director Larry Clark. That was a tough, reflective and troubling work, avoiding the NC-17 rating by the skin of its teeth, and somehow Gummo feels even more taboo, both in the content meant to shock audiences and in its plot, which reminded more of a stream of consciousness: In the wake of a disastrous tornado, the teenaged residents of the small Ohioan town of Xenia deal with the trials and tribulations of their own bizarre and destructive behavior.
Korine’s screenplay is entirely loose, divorced of any notable structure, yet a cohesive portrait of life in this town and in the wake of this disaster does emerge. It isn’t pretty. The film’s wild production history wasn’t either, with the filmmaker and his producers finding some of the poorest neighborhoods in Nashville, Tennessee in which to film, often under threat of inclement weather and unsanitary conditions within the various households used as sets. One such story claims that the crew flatly refused to work in the conditions presented to them, forcing Korine to order hazmat suits for them to wear during the shooting process.
Toxic as such behavior almost undoubtedly is – and it should be discouraged, whatever the end result – the feeling of griminess and danger permeates the rest of Korine’s film, which begins with that narration from Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), the teenage boy whose bath accompanied by a spaghetti dinner is likely the most recognizable image to anyone familiar with the movie without having seen it. The viewers must work to get to that moment in the film, though, which comes after much of the boy’s story has gone from bad to worse. Intervening in the violent murder of a housecat by his friend Tummler (Nick Sutton), we learn the cat belongs to a trio of absent-minded sisters (played by Chloë Sevigny, Carisa Glucksman and Darby Dougherty).
Tummler, by the way, is “downright evil,” according to Solomon, and we see that later on, when the boys sojourn to the house of Jarrod Wiggley (Daniel Martin), an older teenager who has been poisoning the neighborhood cats, and encounter Jarrod’s elderly, catatonic grandmother. The outcome of that trip rather sums up the film’s thesis statement: Much like the kids in Kids saw their entire moral compass and sexual development stunted by a lack of proper direction, the teenagers here are shells of their former selves, courtesy of the tornado that ripped through their home. Consider Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), a mute adolescent decked out in rabbit ears and tennis shoes in the rain, and his run-in with a pair of foul-mouthed, unbelievably racist hooligans who verbally abuse him and then “shoot” him with cap guns.
Consider, also, the other vignettes in the movie: The director himself shows up as an intoxicated man who asks for a little too much affection from a gay sex worker with dwarfism. Solomon and Tummler encounter a disabled girl being used for sexual favors on behalf of her brother. A pair of skinheads – brothers, maybe, or good friends – box each other in a kitchen, with the violence turned up to the maximum. The sisters encounter a child-molesting creep who lures them into his car under false pretenses.
Finally, we reach the scene that will, perhaps, linger the longest in the minds of the film’s prospective viewers – an extended bath session for Solomon, played by Reynolds with a naturalism so disarming one could be forgiven for thinking the actor really does act this way in life, who eats through at least half a spaghetti dinner on a tray, until his mother (the late Linda Manz) brings a chocolate bar for his dessert. The scene is mesmerizing, not because it furthers any kind of information we learn about the character, but because the bath water is utterly, pervasively filthy. This child has stewed in the filth of his surroundings, and not even a bath can cleanse him or offer refuge from the refuse.
Gummo is the type of film that inspires the use of the word “pretentious” from those who may not understand that such a word is always literal. Korine is never pretending in building this portrait of a complete societal breakdown on a microcosmic scale. We also never once see any sign of the dictates of Korine’s later, more commercial films, like Spring Breakers or The Beach Bum, except perhaps a general command of camera angle and movement. The result is a tragic satire – blackly funny, often disturbing, unthinkably sad.
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