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If you know nothing else about Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which screened at the New York Festival on Thursday night just four months after the VHS cameras started to roll, you’ve probably heard it described, either positively or negatively, as “not really a movie.” As Korine himself put it before the screening, “I don’t know what it is. It was made to be more like something that was unearthed, or buried — something that was in a ditch, maybe. Like a VHS tape that was in a ditch. Or an attic. Or a drawer.”
It’s fitting that as Korine rambled, the words that came out of his mouth to define what he made became increasingly intimate in their connotation. In the span of a handful of sentence fragments, Trash Humpers went from something dumped like corpse, to something stored in a home, first hidden away in an attic, and then kept close at hand in a drawer. And this is exactly what Trash Humpers does in practice: in a series of vignettes, videotaped from an insider’s perspective, Korine introduces us to a world of inexplicable horror, and then slowly domesticates it. There may not be an traditional narrative intended, but if you make any effort at all to tie together the threads that Korine has laid out, it would be impossible to not see a beginning, middle and end to this 78 minute artbomb, a progression from dangerous grotesquerie to something more personal and almost — almost — sweet and nice.
The “Humpers,” as Korine refers to them, are four unnamed characters (the closest thing to a lead is played by Korine’s wife Rachel, and Korine plays another himself) masked under exaggerated old-person makeup, who literally have sex with curb-side trash cans. Sometimes they lift the lid to see what’s in the can before they begin to hump, other times they settle for fellating tree branches or humping trunks. They also smash TVs, eat pancakes with dishwashing liquid instead of syrup, hang out with overweight singing hookers, teach a child with an uncanny resemblance to Drew Carey how to insert a razor blade into an apple, and — whether accidentally or on purpose, indisputably gleefully — kill their friends. Much of this plays out to a soundtrack of the Humpers’ theme song, an a cappella rap of sorts that goes, “Make it make it make it don’t fake it, make it make it make it don’t take it.” With this refrain, and the countless acts of dumbass violence punctuated with the Humpers spontaneously busting out into victory dance, Trash Humpers takes on the quality of a cracked musical.
Amidst all this braindead destruction and debauchery (much of which is hilariously, for lack of a better term, fucked-up), there are brief flashes of clarity: a Humper associate, dressed in a French Maid costume, recites a rousing poetic battle cry about how the culture of consumption and waste has made them what they are. Korine, in character, drives through the Nashville neighborhood where the film is set (and where, in real life, the filmmaker lives), talking to the camera about “smelling the pain”of his normal neighbors, trapped in their everyday lives. The trash humpers, he says, “choose to live like free people.” That said, they’re free people in a kind of war. “It’s just one long game. And I expect we’ll win it. I expect that all these people will be dead and buried long before I catch my second wind.” The Korine character’s survivalist bravado is given truly poignant counterpoint a bit later, when the old woman played by Rachel Korine, whiskey bottle in hand, asks God for guidance. The film ends (suddenly, it seems — as unpleasant as some of Korine’s material is, he is not forcing his audience through an endless endurance exercise) on an oddly tender, maternal note, which is itself undercut by all we’ve seen before.
Never has the bizarre beauty of degraded low-grade video been exploited to this extent in anything like a traditional feature film. The artifacts left by the breakdown of the medium on which Trash Humpers was shot don’t feel like mistakes, but like a kind of ghostly graffiti. The images themselves, with their odd texture and indefinable color spectrum — is that grey? Green? Pink? A combination of the three that seems like an invention, since no one’s ever celebrated video this shitty to this exalted extent? –– take on a quality similar to the blurred photorealism of Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings. There’s a sequence in Trash Humpers in which Korine flms the other Humpers asleep on a kitchen floor, and the way the VHS reacts to the low light, their faces seem to melt like decomposed corpses. There eventually are enough actual corpses in the film that this doesn’t seem accidental.
And that kind of thing is the niggling problem withTrash Humpers. It’s transcendantly funny, haunting, and sickly beautiful, but if we are to take Korine’s stated intentions at face value, then it’s a failure. Trash Humpers is never convincing as a found object; the hand of the artist is just too visible. It’s just too good to be trash.
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I agree with you. The film feels like it has a beginning, middle and an end and I like the way you are able to sum it up that feeling. I also agree that the “hand of the the artist” is visible even though Mr. Korine wants to convince his audience that he just sort of put it together and filmed things the way you see it. It seems that there is more at work then simple shenanigans. But calling it a failure seems a little harsh because it is so enjoyable and it still appears to be haphazard in its assembly and, um, mise en scene.
It sounds like he is mining Gummo territory, just pushing it further. I like the idea of him and his wife in old m/u playing the part of humpers.
Funny.
Jerrry
“Korine introduces us to a world of inexplicable horror, and then slowly domesticates it.”
And this is valuable because…? Not that I agree with your thesis—suddenly introducing an infant is not a “progression” imo—but let’s say I did. Apart from simple reversal, what’s incisive or interesting about the domestification of the horrific and grotesque? Does this work have something to say about the world you and I live in? If so, what is it? “Abject morons are people too?” Or does the one bit of dialogue by the maid transform the whole thing into a portrait of our “culture of consumption and waste”? (Look, they love the things we throw away so much they want to fuck ‘em!)
I can vaguely comprehend appreciating TRASH HUMPERS strictly as an aesthetic object, for what you term its “bizarre beauty” (although I also think that certain folks have a knee-jerk compulsion to find beauty in ostentatious ugliness, which means that the first film to resurrect shitty-looking VHS was bound to be praised as high art). But I’m seeking out reviews trying to understand what its fans are finding to admire in its content, and coming up woefully empty.
D’angelo: does every film need to “say [something] about the world you and I live in”? I don’t think its its primary text, but at least Trash Humpers gestures towards dealing with the frustration of the non-working poor, who may be insane but at least are of present mind enough to understand the difference between them and the actual working class.
Also, I honestly think the degraded VHS is beautiful. I can’t prove that to you beyond what I’ve written, you’ll just have to take my word.
I want to understand what people enjoyed about this film. I agree that there is a beauty to the VHS transfer quality, but that’s old hat in the age of YouTube, which, incidentally, is a far more appropriate medium for the film. If all the parts with talking in badly affected pseudo-southern accents were edited out, I probably would have enjoyed it. As it stands however, I felt that this film was banal and wildly self-indulgent. The political “indictment” leveled at the working class by the guy in the dress, if that’s at the core of what this film was getting at, was every stoned high-school dropout’s rationalization for basically being confused, bored and ambitionless. Documentaries of real suburban/rural nonworking poor are far more shocking and, let’s face it, compelling than what Korine did in this movie. I think it’s really arrogant to make something this shallow, heavy-handed, and lazy and show it to a paying audience. But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, since I admire his other work.
Domesticating of horror is important to the message of Trash Humpers because it puts the anti-social events of the previous 70 minutes into a specific context, more akin to horror films than the “raw” or “real” portraits of societal decay its detractor seems to fault it for not being.
Consider the main characters in Trash Humpers to be similar to the mutants in The Hills Have Eyes or the family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: in all three films, you have a tight knit band of freaks who exist on the absolute fringe. Little information (if any) is given regarding how they came to be, as it would only detract from the unknowable quality, which creates fear, as this is a logical reaction to what we do not understand. Do the Trash Humpers eat? Change clothes? We see them sleeping in various different places, but never do we sense that they have a ‘home base.’ Consider for a minute that everything you rely on and probably take for granted - your apartment keys, your internet connection, the closet full of clothes you probably have - would disappear. Could you survive with ‘nothing’? I doubt many of us could. The Trash Humpers are fearless; with nothing left to lose, they are completely free to act exclusively in the pursuit of their own entertainment, sexual fulfillment and violent desires. We should all be so lucky as to arrive at a point in our lives.
If you want something that ’says something about the world you and I live in’ in a way that you do not need to ask somebody else what it is, then go watch Precious! I am sure the messages about the poor and needy are very clearly explained in that after school special and will leave no ambiguity in your mind. Perhaps your problem with Trash Humpers is that you do not recognize the world in which it takes place. A world deep in the south, with (as you no doubt noticed during the film!) hardly a single passerby or hint of pedestrian traffic. The film might as well take place after the apocalypse. If you have ever watched a zombie film and felt that it made a statement about ‘over consumption being our downfall’ or some such, then you might be on the right track to eventually re-evaluate Trash Humpers. If you want instantly recognizable ’social realism’ and easy messages about ‘our’ world, I am sure Ramin Bahrani has a new movie coming out soon.
“A combination of the three that seems like an invention, since no one’s ever celebrated video this shitty to this exalted extent?”
I haven’t seen it yet but for what it’s worth; Bruce Nauman is one of many prominent video-artists that have previously embraced the quality of VHS. The content I saw in the trailer immediately reminded me of his “Clown Torture” series, which depicts costumed clowns acting out various, hysterical actions: http://www.mediamatic.net/page/81517/en
I think there are alot of parallels; voyeurism, costumes, Id.
Also, this sounds like everything I’d been hoping for. I wish I had this idea first.
If you even have to search for a relevant meeting, which you don’t, to me the film is more about Korine’s lines in the car when he is talking about his second wind and so on. It’s about living your life outside of what is expected of you, like all vandalism to be against the norm, and doing whatever you want. I like to think of the Trash Humpers as being retired.
oh please. i live in a mid western city and there’s plenty of “zombies” as Alex calls them here. screw social realism and avant garbage. when is one of these artsy filmmakers going to be able to deal with the emptiness that goes on where they live. in the art world. in sophisticates who keep trying to funnel us social realizations from elsewhere. the truth is the south and movies about it are in vogue. so is vintage clothing, degraded video and a whole slew of other aethetic choices that are on display in this film. this is like disneyland for fuck ups. it’s escapism that looks neat if you’re up on the button’s it pushing. just like mr lonely was a shallow, self justyfying wacky film about a subject that should be seriously troubling for the filmmaker. fraudelence.if a filmmaker could deal with the ethical considerations or the way the strategms of the actual artists make us feel…what always having to be in on the joke means for our souls…our’s…the people on this site not in the deep south….the so called sophisticates then it would probably be a horror film of different kind and actually not just interesting theoretically
and as far as doing whatever you want. that’s bullshit. i ‘m immediately wary of any artist who goes around peddling that garbage. not saying that’s what the movie is about but see if agnes b and all the art galleries like it if you made a movie that was boring by their standards and didn’t have all those wonderful abstractions about the south and trogldytes. see if you get to direct all the commercials you like. “having nothing left to lose”doesn’t exist…you always have something to lose…if you don’t everything becomes uninteresting.
It has been slightly entertaining to watch this filmmaker in his earlier twenties. Over and over he has not been able to articulate what he has done when interviewed. It is slightly less entertaining when you watch the same filmmaker getting close to forty and still not be able to articulate what he has done. My question being is there anything more to this guy other than he has the immediate means to fund work with Agnes B’s financial backing. He has taken what anyone could do with a camcorder and converted it to 35mm and submitted it to larger film festivals. Is it possible that everyone is mistaking his fresh approach to film for poor craftsmanship. Mr. Lonely being the most refined film he has done so far still didn’t seem like near an example of a film masters technical ability. Would there have ever been anything to this filmmaker if Herzog didn’t like Gummo,and he didn’t write the screenplay to Kids which seemed like something any misguided fifteen-year-old could have written. Please don’t get the idea that I am bashing Korine’s work, I am just not close to convinced that he know the film cannon well enough to have validity in attacking it. If he had a body of work that pointed to the contrary then it would be easy to prove that assumption wrong but he doesn’t.
It has been slightly entertaining to watch this filmmaker in his earlier twenties. Over and over he has not been able to articulate what he has done when interviewed. It is slightly less entertaining when you watch the same filmmaker getting close to forty and still not be able to articulate what he has done. My question being is there anything more to this guy other than he has the immediate means to fund work with Agnes B’s financial backing. He has taken what anyone could do with a camcorder and converted it to 35mm and submitted it to larger film festivals. Is it possible that everyone is mistaking his fresh approach to film for poor craftsmanship. Mr. Lonely being the most refined film he has done so far still didn’t seem like near an example of a film master’s technical ability. Would there have ever been anything to this filmmaker if Herzog didn’t like Gummo,and he didn’t write the screenplay to Kids which seemed like something any misguided fifteen-year-old could have written. Please don’t get the idea that I am bashing Korine’s work, I am just not close to convinced that he knows the film cannon well enough to have validity in attacking it. If he had a body of work that pointed to the contrary then it would be easy to prove that assumption wrong but he doesn’t.
I like his first two films and actually thought Julian Donkey Boy was quite a leap forward from Gummo but the shock of the new wears off and although they both had some moments in light of his last film I’m pretty disspointed. I really expected more from Mr. Lonely. I thought the idea of it was pretty bold and could have been extremely difficult and personal..deeper and more mature but mostlty I found it pretty shallow and silly. I don’t really know if I want to see a slight variation or even an improvement on gummo either. I mean they’re already using this guy to make commercials so it kind of kills the stylistics for me anyway It would be great to see this guy reign in his avant impulses and really work to make something with a little more substance