Writer/director Harmony Korine is a petulant brat, a deeply self-absorbed narcissist who has spent one million dollars of somebody else's money to imprint the various images swimming around in his head onto celluloid. He's an asshole, but artists have to be assholes if they are ever going to be truly great. They have to, on some level, regard everybody else's needs as being secondary to their own. They have to do it for themselves, not for audiences and not to give their investors a return on their money, but just to pleasure themselves. However, it needs to be said that not all assholes are created equal. I've said before that I've since retired the idea, long held in my youth, that ambition in and unto itself is a virtue. My recent coverage of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival has erased that conception for good. Not all risks pay off and a conventional crowd-pleaser is oftentimes preferable to one that breaks away from convention. Though Gummo is widely available through chain rental stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and has developed a bit of a cult following, it never quite caught on with film audiences. This is probably a good thing, however. Korine has created a template that is easy to mimic but difficult to duplicate. (Just think of the damage that Kevin Smith and David Lynch have caused to independent film.) I can easily see the shock visuals, loose narrative, and overall "impulsivity" being badly misused in less capable hands.

The title of "Greatest Film Debut Since Citizen Kane" has been thrown around so often that it barely has any impact anymore, but Gummo actually warrants such praise. The film shows what Orson Welles was getting at when he referred to RKO studios as "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had." It's just that good. Part and parcel to the film's success is the fact that Korine shot on celluloid with a professional cinematographer (Jean-Yves Escoffier) who has made sure that the film looks really fucking good. The aesthetic excellence of Gummo suggests a lunatic that has taken control of the asylum, a notion that is exhilarating in and unto itself, but even more importantly it indicates that the film is "alternative" by circumstance and not by choice. Aestheticism is a value statement; if you make something beautiful you are holding it up as an ideal. When the film was released I remember one critic writing that it was the cinematic equivalent of that kid in the back of the class who got attention by eating boogers and turning his eyelids inside out. I don't feel this is an accurate description of the film at all. A true asshole, I believe that Korine has disregarded the audience's reaction entirely.

Korine has values. That they run counter to those of the mainstream is valuable in that it facilitates the identity formation of the film's cultists, which is one of the principal pleasures of movie love. If you embrace Gummo as your own, you are, on some level, differentiated from the mass majority of filmgoers that do not. But the film is not iconoclastic for its own sake--when it breaks norms of style and content, it's not simply to piss people off but because doing so figures into Korine's overall directorial vision. Ultimately, I believe that this is what distinguishes Korine from wannabe shock artists like Giuseppe Andrews, whose vulgar magnum opus Period Piece effectively appropriates the sad spiritual bankruptcy and hilarious randomness of Gummo but has none of that film's conviction. I like seeing boundaries being broken; it's exciting and certainly this contributes greatly to Gummo's appeal. But as I say time and time again, a rolling stone gathers no moss and anarchy is not a philosophically coherent moral system. Saying "don't listen to me" is a tautology like "This sentence is a lie." If it's true it's false and if it's false it's true.

"October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year," wrote Janet Maslin in her infamous 1997 non-review for the New York Times. It's tempting to do a Crispin Glover and call her a Nazi for writing that. Consider that one of her favorite films of that year was Titanic, the most expensive film ever made up to that time and one of the highest-grossing, as it appealed to both the older women that make up the middlebrow audience and the teenagers that make up the summer movie audience, in equal measure. Perhaps not coincidentally, the German film studio UFA released a version of Titanic in 1943, when it was being controlled by Joseph Goebbels. The German film was intended as anti-British propaganda, but several elements were transported into the more broadly anti-rich James Cameron film. Maslin never really makes a case against Gummo and her review basically just rehashes the plot, but she does complain that the film is "indulgent" and harps on the dead cats and the cockroaches, summarizing I think, the feelings of most critics who have seen the movie. Interesting enough, these attacks call to mind the narration of Fritz Hippler's 1940 film The Eternal Jew:

The rootless Jew has no feeling for the purity and cleanliness of the German idea of art. What he calls "art" must titillate his degenerate nerves. A smell of foulness and disease must pervade it. It must be unnatural, grotesque, perverted or pathological. These fevered fantasies of incurably sick minds were once extolled by Jewish art critics as supreme artistic creation.

It's tempting to say all that shit about Maslin, but we ought to be careful about praising the rebel for being a rebel, not to mention employing ad hominem attacks to put down critics we disagree with. That doesn't get us anywhere now, does it? But I think this connection is useful in recasting the discussion from one of conventional vs. unconventional and toward one of Apollonian vs. Dionysian. It isn't just the lawlessness that's exciting; it's that Korine is indulging in his own perversions and obsessions. Indulgence works for Korine, it keeps him honest and aware of when something is no longer good or interesting.

While I wouldn't go as far as to say that Korine is indulgent because he is a Jew, I think that a lot of the funky flavor of Gummo is rooted in a distinctly Jewish sensibility. The great thing that the surrealists taught us was that cultural stratification exists on a sort of Mobius strip. The lowbrow and the highbrow are oftentimes virtually indistinguishable from one another in that they are distanced from the middlebrow in the same way. It's both amazing and wonderful that Gummo can be dismissed as disgusting and pretentious in the same breath. Vaudeville was a major influence in the film. The title comes from the "forgotten Marx brother." One of the characters is named Tummler, which is Yiddish for "agitator" and was the comedian in vaudeville that would warm up the audience. Tummler himself does a kind of Jimmy Durante routine in the film and tells a number of really lame one-liners and jokes (i.e. "I'm going to the insane asylum. I'm gonna get me a raving beauty"). The film has the stupidity of vaudeville to it, but with the beautiful cinematography, deliberate lack of structure, and playful mixing of film stocks and styles Korine transforms the stupidity into a work of "degenerate art."

Having just recently survived my lion's share of very bad art, it's unspeakably refreshing to see a film that blurs fiction and non-fiction not to make some smarmy post-modern joke (i.e. the awful Strange Culture) or to dramatically inflate thin sitcom material (i.e. the awful Low and Behold) but rather to realize some sort of ecstatic truth about the subject matter. Korine moves beyond the simple shock value of employing actors with mental disabilities. His use of them is related to shock value, I guess, but it doesn't stop there with the effect; he inhabits and explores the attitude behind employing mentally disabled actors for shock value. It's all about indulging his own obsessions and not communicating to the audience. Korine alternates between giving his handicapped actors written material and having them improvise. Sometimes they seem to have been asked to do a bit of both. Obviously, they are unable to either act or improvise and we see the technique. It's disorienting to watch, not because he is humiliating his actors per se, but simply because he is exposing their lack of cognitive functioning and forcing us to acknowledge that, from our privileged status, these people might as well be Martians. Korine's cruel message is that the mainstreaming of the mentally disabled is anthropomorphization at its most grotesque. These people belong under a circus tent, not breathing the same oxygen as me and you.

While Korine's conceit is undeniably misanthropic, there's an honesty to it that seems to be getting at something substantial. It doesn't make much sense to me to attach a value judgment to an attitude. If you're classist, the healthiest thing you could do is acknowledge it. I suppose it goes back to my beliefs about the nature of truth. The way that I see it, all impressions of a subject are truthful impressions and if we were to establish the Absolute Truth about a subject, it would be accommodating of everybody's impression of the subject. People don't really change. What we tend to regard as changing is really just growing more sophisticated and complex. Regardless of how much knowledge you accrue, your past opinions and feelings are never altered. Your perception of a subject at age 4 is not going to be made false at age 36, it's just going to be focused and refined. And so if you regard impoverished mentally retarded people as Martians (to not do so, I think, would be to say that you identify with them and understand why they behave the way they do, and for me at least this would be dishonest), you should understand that the attitude will be retained regardless of how much you learn.

Let me confess something to you. While I have routinely hailed Harmony Korine's Gummo as being the best film of the 1990s and one of my top ten favorites of all time (hell, I even used Bunny Boy as my blogspot avatar and only recently replaced him with the Lisping Cowboy), part of me secretly feared that I had somewhat outgrown it. It has only been fairly recently that I saw some of the films that inspired it (like Even Dwarfs Start Small and Pixote) and I remember watching the film at the end of every summer before entering another year of high school, suggesting to me that perhaps the attraction was localized in uniquely teenaged ideations of isolation and existential confusion. Incredibly enough, the film has stuck. It's as good as it ever was, cementing my dogmatic notion that if you love a film once, you are pretty much always going to love it.

Gummo is the film that made me want to be a social worker. It made poverty look exotic and exciting, and I decided that if I only have one life to live I want to spend it in that environment. Exploring a filthy hovel literally sounded as exciting to me as exploring the ice moon of Jupiter. In an incredibly stupid move that I regret to this day, I put this in my application essay explaining why I wanted to be a social worker. I actually stressed that it wasn't about helping people; I mean, if that's your reason for doing it, I figure that you are going to set yourself up for disappointment. This was not what the social work department was looking to hear and they delicately suggested to me in their rejection letter that maybe I should look into anthropology or sociology. Receiving this letter set me back three years as I drifted myself toward a degree in Broadcast Journalism before deciding that doing anything other than social work would be a waste of my life. I went toward getting a second degree in Family Consumer and Human Development. Unbeknownst to me, one could gain social work licensure if you had a bachelor's degree in one of the "behavioral sciences." It has only been very recently that I've really begun working in this field.

I suppose that they were being risk adverse in assuming that I wouldn't ever grow or develop and come up with a better reason to be a social worker than "I want to be an astronaut on planet Earth." But while I maintain that people don't change with age, I do think that they grow more focused. That potentially ugly and socially unacceptable (particularly for an aspiring social worker) impression of impoverished retards having as much to do with actual human beings as chickens and squids is the beginning of moral development and not the end. Following two solid years of instruction, a few scholarly texts I read on the side, and a little bit of time in the field, that impression hasn't changed but I've gained more insight into why I feel this way. What's more, I can now see how I can feel that way and still do good work in this profession.

Gummo seriously pissed off liberals, but as I have previously suggest it probably would have pissed off the Nazi eugenicists even more. There is a twin motif running through the film. Identical twins appear in archival footage. There are two brothers who are washing each other's backs in the bathtub. Dot and Helen, the heroines in one thread of the film, dress alike and both have bleached blonde hair. At one point they lounge on the laps of two near-identical obese women. Then there's the skinhead brothers, again dressed the same and with the same shaved head, who work out and then fistfight for the camera. The idea I think is actually to downplay biological predestination, to emphasize just how random and meaningless twinning really is. And perhaps to show, like in Diane Arbus's work with twins, that sometimes order in a disordered world is its own anomaly.

This aspect of the film reflects a philosophical position that my training has done a lot to cultivate. Humanity is not innate. It is not passed on by genes, but is socialized into us. I know that it's a tacky show, but the only bit of reality TV that I really like is "Nanny 911," and one of the things that you learn from watching that is that if a child gets their every wish fulfilled and receives little discipline, they not only will grow into adults that are extremely unpleasant to be around, they'll be very unhappy. The implication seems to be that kids can't raise themselves, which means that we aren't going to survive by our instincts alone, which means that man has base animal needs and then sophisticated psychological ones and we're just barely surviving if we haven't met our psychological needs. This is pretty basic stuff, I guess. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? That's very Psych 101, that knowledge is imparted in any halfway decent high school curriculum. But it's never sunk in for me until recently.

To illustrate further, here is something else I've thinking about recently. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis observes that if we were to have sex whenever we felt the need the planet would become badly overpopulated. Holy shit, think about the ramifications of that, evolutionarily speaking! Nature gave human beings a sex drive because nature was not expecting us to live as long as we did. Nature was expecting us to compete for resources and continue to evolve generation by generation. The human mind, human psychology and human civilization changed all that. The development of civilization has outpaced biological development through evolution by a huge margin. We're improved food, shelter, medicine, morality even. In the civilized age, survival is no longer the principal aim of the species.

Knowing this, I don't feel guilty about experiencing those preliminary feelings of coldness and befuddlement toward the people in this film. Through neglect, abuse, economic depression, et cetera, they have not developed beyond their base animal nature. My impression hasn't changed, just the conclusions I drew from it. I moved away from having a fashionably nihilistic attitude toward it to a rather bleeding-heart, paternalistic one, I guess. Importantly, Gummo doesn't suggest that they can't be helped into the process of becoming human. It's just showing us that they aren't human. They either haven't sought or received the help they need.

I guess that I've finally become genuinely idealistic. I don't feel that I could have gotten there if I hadn't acknowledged, explored, and finally accepted my prejudices. The problem I have with a lot of film criticism is that it doesn't take evaluation into account and it doesn't take evaluation into account because that would necessitate identifying and defending your core values--your definitive or near-definitive idea of what's good, what's bad, what's right, and what's wrong. Doing this is socially dangerous; it's safer to hide behind "analysis" and/or political correctness and not expose any part of yourself that might offend your audience, in effect not offering anything of substance. That's the perennial issue for me. I can't stand films about film itself or "media representations" of women and minorities or "deconstruction" of the genre. That circle jerk bullshit pisses me off. The way I see it, art ceases to have much utility unless it reflects or re-contextualizes the world around us so that we can make some kind of sense of it.

I was watching "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" the other night and the case was about a father who was molesting and raping his daughters until they got their period at age 14. The father was this "Master of the Universe"-type stockbroker. Really good-looking and macho. He does not fit the typical description of an father-daughter incest perpetrator. Father-daughter incest is all about a non-rejecting partner. The father's wife is either emotionally or physically distant and so he turns his attention to his daughter. Generally speaking, guys who fuck their daughters are losers. If you want to attach an image to it, it's a nebbish wormy guy in thick glasses or a drunken redneck in a wife-beater; it's not a New York stockbroker! It turned out that I was right and the episode revealed itself to be about implanted memories. But I got to thinking afterwards of the John Huston character in Chinatown, who raped his daughter and is getting rich by raping the land. This is clever writing and does give the film a real emotional wallop, but it needs to be said that guys like this don't fit the pathology of incest perpetrators. What's his reason for raping his daughter? Why is he attracted to her? It's because he's "evil." The incest in that film exists to comment on the political corruption. Chinatown doesn't really have anything useful to say about incest itself.

In a sense, Chinatown's use of incestuous themes is considerably more exploitative than anything in Gummo. Korine claims that he doesn't do any research for these movies, but if that's true he seems to be particularly intuitive about this material. Ken Park, which he scripted, is a particularly accurate depiction of the personalities and patterns of behavior in incestuous relationships. There's only a segment of Gummo dealing with incest. A tape recording of a young girl discussing the night her father raped her is played alongside Super 8 footage of a pre-teen girl (the same one we are meant to believe) playing in the mud. She has a matter-of-fact affect in describing what happened, raising the intonation of her voice to emphasize that her father wasn't going to hurt her, he was going to make her feel good, and saying that she trusted him because, after all, he was her father. The lack of outrage on the part of the victim and the clear rationale on the part of the perpetrator (he takes on the role of the teacher and this presumably provides him with a much-needed purpose and direction) is truthful to the reality of incest in a way that the soap operatics of Roman Polanski and Robert Towne's Chinatown were not.

Of course, art cannot simply document reality; it has to form and comment on it. What Korine is saying is simply, "Look how weird and downright alien these people are." I've already defended this perspective on the grounds of ethics, but look also at how it stems organically from the subject matter. The use of the tape recorder mummifies the already detached testimony of the rape victim and the association between the testimony and the Super 8 footage is rather weak, providing yet another layer of distance. We think that's her because simply because the two recordings are played at the same time; there is nothing in the recording itself to indicate that this is the girl. Through the filmmaking, Korine is simply accentuating the aspects of this subject that he finds intriguing and in the process realizes a truth about the subject itself.

I actually don't really like writing about "Top Ten" films because a lot of the time they've been swimming inside for so long that by the time I type out my feelings in Microsoft Word, the ideas feel stale. I never feel that I've done them justice. If I had the option, I would record a feature-length audio commentary instead. But I feel particularly defensive about Gummo. The critics not only didn't get it, it seems like they aren't even really trying. What's the appropriate way to depict poverty, mental retardation, and incest on-screen and why? What are your feelings about these subjects? If you have a visceral reaction to disgust, is that to say that visceral reactions are artificial responses to a stimulus? You know, I don't think the discussion has ever gotten to that point. Gummo is the rare adolescent angst movie that doesn't just encapsulate a moment in time, but actually improves with age. I don't even find it particularly confrontational any more. That's your baggage.