Suggested Viewing from Jim's Real Detroit Column GUMMO

“Peanut butter, peanut butter, Motherf**ker.”

When people first started talking about (without having seen) Harmony Korine’s 1997 feature debut, Gummo, it sure sounded like another first-time filmmaker attempting to scare up an audience by offering shock after outrageous shock. Korine had written Larry Clark’s Kids, and that film certainly had some meat to its story; it also showed that Korine knew how to dream up characters and scenarios that would repulse the average viewer. That alone meant truckloads of college-age videophiles would begin requesting the movie months before it became available. Hell, it did sound like it could be a much-needed white trash epic, since after all, John Waters is old and mellow and can’t make ’em like he used to (a statement proved utterly wrong the very next year when the same fans all wanted to see John Waters’ Pecker). When it did show up, Korine’s little ode to the fictional Xenia, Ohio, proved itself to be much more than just schlock. Gummo doesn’t have much plot and instead relies on episodic anecdotes and vignettes to reveal the social trends of Xenia and its weird assortment of characters that seem to be constantly in search mode for something to relieve their boredom. Glue sniffers Tummler and Solomon (Nick Sutton and Jacob Reynolds) prowl the neighborhood, pellet gun in hand, looking for cats that they can string up and torture, not just for fun, but to sell to the local grocer. Bunny Boy skateboards through town, always wearing his tattered pink bunny ears. Korine himself plays a messed up kid who attempts to seduce a bald black dwarf while talking about his mustachioed mother who gave up sex before she was 30. But for all its weirdness, Gummo is much more, featuring an arty surrealism (that some say is too contrived), that is in part supplied through the use of several different media including super video, super 8 film, and even Polaroids, and in part by the use of renowned cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier. The film alternates between beautifully hypnotic and grittily realistic, but is always absurd. It would be a stretch, but not a big one, to say that Gummo is a lot like a Fellini film (say City of Women) with a bit of Herzog (mutter Even Dwarves Started Small) and a pinch of Diane Arbus tossed in for good measure.

As Thomas Video clerk/martyr Greg Fichter says, “The movie starts out with an antenna-impaled cat and ends with a boy in a bile bath with bacon...enjoy!”

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