![]() Korine watches and listens to the rhythms and speech of the mentally retarded with profound care their open faces, too aware that Jesus may love them more than anyone else, map this fact, allowing them to find solace and communicate more directly than almost anyone else. They use the word 'nigger', are ignorant, violent and remarkably fragile while seeming endlessly resilient. People are fat and hateful, bone-thin and heartbreakingly tender. In Gummo's world - how different it is from our own is part of the responsibility of watching it - boys wear oversize Converse sneakers, ride bikes, huff stuff to check out and laugh, and determine that a dying body smells like baked ham girls perk up their nipples with tape, are felt up by obliging motorists, deal with lumps in their 'titties', paint their nails. There are many terrific beauties in Gummo, a movie that follows two cat-killing boys, the escapades of three girls, the wandering path of a bunny boy, and the complicated motions and emotions of two mentally retarded girls, while at the same time getting high on seemingly documentary hits of the casually grimy hypnotic substance called contemporary life in suburban America. With Gummo, Korine reminds us - how pathetic that we need reminding - that hate and anger are just some of many emotions and it is important to engage them all. The idea of inhabiting your own skin, thinking the thoughts you think or don't think should, at times, freak you out, embarrass you it should make you laugh to keep from depressing the hell out of you. He isn't afraid to make anyone, including himself, see that any alterity, weirdness, and difference - not that he gives a damn for these matters as subjects - is self-generated and should make you squirm. Korine blows away any such baby notions, caring only how they appear in the world, how they are observed as some of the many ways beauty embodies itself. Beauty - a new way of seeing and thinking - has become too often merely palatable independent movie-making (whatever that means anymore), a kind of pabulum-feeding of supposed 'alterity', 'weirdness', or 'difference'. ![]() Sadly too many have forgotten that an aesthetic project can attempt moral consequences and challenges, for the artist as well as for the audience. ![]() The tornado is uninterested in plot: its path can only be plotted after the fact, much too late, and anyone busy plotting will miss its beauty and terror. Gummo is a movie structured by the tornado: it touches down with unexpected thoroughness, wreaking havoc or placing its characters in a moment of grace, and then lifts back up only to touch down again. There is none of the attenuated sense of cleansing that accompanies, say, abstract thoughts about the aftermath of floods or fires. The same questions buzz through the viewer's mind, for the same and different reasons. Where are we? What is this? they ask themselves, never in words but in living life, or choosing perhaps not to. The effect of the twister on the town inhabitants is to leave them sorting out, in writer Anne Carson's words, 'the psychic misdemeanour we call history'. In Gummo, the tornado touches down, and, no, we are not in Kansas anymore but in Xenia, Ohio. Harmony Korine's movie, Gummo (1997), is a rambunctious meditation on what it means to find aesthetic inspiration in the work of Larry Clark, Jimmy Durante and Richard Prince, the films of Méliès, Godard, Warhol and Dennis Hopper, as well as heavy metal, punk, and the crooning the heart makes when breaking (as caught by Roy Orbison singing 'Crying').
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