Gummo: Wake Up & Smell the Bacon On the Wall

I distinctly remember how powerful my first exposure to the work of Harmony Korine and Larry Clarks was with Kids. I felt like I had seen something radically new. I was left in shock and awe as to how something so intense and gritty could get produced and distributed. The potency of the explicit images of sex and drugs with actors at such a young age made for strange mixture of intrigue and disgust. The cinematography really stood out as this sort of non-flinching gaze, a portrait of what we as a society would rather choose to ignore of a uncivilized youth culture. The focus on the grotesque or the things that most of try to avoid is what connect Korine's work.

I was in New York a few years after this and got to see an exhibition of the Larry Clark's photography. It was every bit as explicit and the images had the same raw power. They had this sort of eerie resonance so that after leaving the gallery I couldn't shake them. This was the same sort of effect Kids and later Gummo would have on me. Clark deserves much of the credit for their work together. This is evident through looking at Clarks body of work prior to Korine and after understanding a bit of their history. I've read that Korine left his father, a documentary filmmaker, to live with his grandmother in NY. After a year of school/screenwriting, Korine dropped out and bumped into Clark in the skater scene. Clark had done a series of shockingly honest portraits of he and his friends in the eighties and had established his own style by this point. It's said that he approached Korine and asked him to wright the script for Kids and get his friends to play most of the parts. Korine and Clark eventually had a disagreement which ended their collaboration. Korine had a dry spell and there are reports that he was trying to team up with his friend David Blaine to make a movie that would consist of him going up to people and picking fights with them. Evidently he only lasted a few rounds and ended up in the hospital. This is just the tip of the iceberg into the strange world of Korine. To venture further into the rabbit hole have a look at the links at the bottom of this post.

Gummo doesn't seem so strange in the context of the filmmakers body of work. In fact, it is dense with interesting characters and situations, again very new to movie going audiences. This was Korine's intent. In an interview he said that he just wanted to make movies that he hadn't seen. He dreams up little moments, strange images and when he has enough he can make a movie.

Gummo holds that same power over its audience as Kids does. Long after they've left the theater they can't shake the story. There is the obvious shocking revulsion of certain parts of the story but I think its the layering of all these strange details that make the world seem so distinctly foreign. For all the films peculiarity it seems to be constructed by a number of classical techniques. The recurring motifs connect the seemingly disparate scenes. The gangster-like ritual of hunting for cats, the turf war, the struggle of children growing up without parents, trying to find their own identity and understand sexuality. There are a number of little moments in the film that I really like but there are also others that seem heavy handed, especially when the dialogue seems coached or forced. This is the case with the scene where Korine plays a character desperate for a black dwarfs affection. His persona and style don't seem to fit the rest of the characters that seem to have all been extras on the set of Deliverance. One of my favorite moments in class has been waiting for the collective puke noises of the audience during the bathroom scene. I was reading an article about Werner Herzog's first viewing of the film. I think his quote sums it up nicely, "When I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair. [Korine's] a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position. It's not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?"

watch the clip: Harmony on Kids

Larry Clark (photographer/cinematographer)

view more Larry Clark Photographs

Harmony on Gummo

you have to read the comments on this post

Korine on Lonely Heart