Gummo

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🎙️ EPISODE 456: 04.29.22 W冢h †hê VïÐêð Vêr§ïðñ BELOW Gummo, the first film by Harmony Korine, is also his best. Mister Lonely might be my personal favorite and I will almost certainly return to it more often than Gummo for a variety of obvious reasons, but Gummo stands alone AT THE END OF THE DAY. It is an achievement in originality that is virtually unparalleled. If, in the context of a thing, anything (but in this case, let's say: any art form), a person (artist) strikes out to do something wholly original, that is not necessarily unique. On some level, that is happening ALL THE TIME. The failures (to be original) outnumber the successes at least 10,000 to 1. You don't have to be original to be good. That isn't the point I'm trying to make. Gummo is both good and original, but it's so jaw-droppingly successful at the latter that the former is a moot point.

Your opinion, your enjoyment or lack thereof is rendered insignificant. It has to be recognized for the ground it breaks and in the way which it breaks it. Period. If we're going to critique art, any art, and can't acknowledge this, then what's the fucking point. This film holds a 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

From its assembly from various film stocks to its horrific subject matter, there's a multitude of ways in which the film finds it's originality. And none of it's unintentional. "We tried very hard not to reference other films," Korine stated. "We wanted Gummo to set its own standard." The movie is so disheveled-looking aesthetically that's easy to toss off its success on these fronts as an accident. But that line of thinking undermines the auteur/auteur theory. This being Korine's first film, the audience and critic alike can travel down one of two paths when considering his career: He's either a provocative clown or he's a genius who is also provocative. I posit that he's a genius, but not necessarily because of his undeniable originality. Because he does one important thing EXTREMELY well and it isn't unique nor is it cloaked in any desire to be offensive: he can write. At the heart of each of his best works is a fantastic screenplay.

Cats are viciously abused in Gummo; they're drowned and fed glass. This is just the beginning and pales in comparison to the human atrocities either hinted at or fully explored throughout the film. I can't really blame anyone for turning it off or not tuning in to begin with. But if you stick with it, the payoff is in the words. Korine has spent nearly his entire career hiding some of the best screenwriting behind and inside of some of the most confrontational material one can imagine. And this is why his movies are GREAT. Visually, on the surface, the point of this is to make you feel sick, repulsed. It's confrontational in a way that forces you to decide: do you follow it wherever it's heading, or do you turn away? You can't reckon with these people being real and that's the REAL confrontation. Not what you're literally seeing. Jacob Reynolds is only eating spaghetti and a crunch bar in the dirtiest bathtub imaginable with a piece of bacon taped on the wall because Korine wrote it that way. These cat-killing characters are also accidentally zen ("life is great; without it you'd be dead") because Korine wrote it that way. Like any good piece of poetry, a phrase can exist apart from the whole whilst exemplifying the sum total of the work. "My father was mugged on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day," a character muses. These ten words are a stand-in for all of the vicious racism and violence we encounter onscreen, and it's also a really successful and darkly funny sentence.

Xenia, Ohio. Xenia, Ohio. A few years ago, a tornado hit this place. It killed the people, left and right. Dogs died. Cats died. Houses were split open, and you could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees. People's legs and neck bones were sticking out. Oliver found a leg on his roof. A lot of people's fathers died, and were killed by the great tornado. I saw a girl fly through the sky, and I looked up her skirt. Her skull was smashed. And some kids died. My neighbor was killed in that house. He used to ride bikes and three-wheelers. They never found his head. I always thought that was funny. People died in Xenia. Before dad died, he had a bad case of the diabetes. -Solomon's introduction from Gummo

While the writing was the thing that clicked for me watching Gummo in terms of assessing Korine's body of work overall, there's more happening here beyond that which makes it great. The acting by way of hired hands and non-actor locals alike is startlingly good. Much of the main action is quite visually appealing in a traditional sense thanks to the late great cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier. And Korine has an uncanny feel for expertly deploying music (both pop and obscure) as strategic juxtaposition, to heighten scenes in a way that never comes off as pandering.

It's an astounding film on so many levels, a true classic and one of the best directorial debuts ever. The best recommendation I can make is this: if you dare to watch it, and willfully submit to taking it all in, you'll never forget it.

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⫷ EPISODE 455 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 457 ⫸

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Gummo is a 1997 American experimental drama film written and directed by Harmony Korine, starring Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Jacob Sewell, and Chloë Sevigny. The film is set (but was not filmed) in Xenia, Ohio, a Midwestern American town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other inhabitants of the town.It was released on May 22, 2007.