Trash Humper Trauma

Last night I watched a film called Trash Humpers, written and directed by Harmony Korine. I'd read an article about Korine in Juxtapoz magazine once, and knew that for better or worse, I was curious about his films and just had to see one eventually. The most commercial one you may have heard of was Kids, written by Korine. It is about sexually active underage teenagers in early 90's New York City giving each other AIDS.

I'm not setting out to write a review of Trash Humpers, but rather just to record, document and examine my own reactions to it. It is easily one of the most disturbing and quietly traumatizing pieces of motion picture you can set your eyes to.

Trash Humpers, for those of you who have not seen it, is about a group of four elderly peeping toms who amble across the quintessential butthole of the American terrain: redneck's houses, train tracks, in dimly lit parking lots, fields near the sides of highways with signs of the recently departed homeless.

A good portion of the movie is easily written off by a discerning, logical viewer. These are actors. The things they do with their bodies (especially near the beginning before they really "inhabit" their characters) are far too youthful and it seems obvious their faces are masks. Eventually, however, something about the aesthetic of the VHS recording, the incessant yammering of the off-screen characters yelling "Git 'er done!," or simply screaming and laughing maniacally, eventually get to you.

There is one truly disturbing image. In a field of grass and strewn litter, we see something vaguely beige. The camera operator starts singing in an eery falsetto, "Oh, Devil, done lopped off his head..." As we move in on the object I began to realize it was a human body. Still, unmoving, not breathing. The prolonged take never gets too close to the body, and is followed by pretty shots of water in the nearby creek and plants in the vicinity, almost as if the camera operator is looking for something beautiful to counteract the horrendous image it just laid eyes upon. I'm not sure as to whether it was faked or was an actual dead body, as their is nothing in the interviews on this movie about it specifically. If it is indeed fake, kudos to Korine, because I am convinced in favor of the latter.

It is a good thing Korine did not leave copies of the film lying around on the street like a "found art object," as he had once thought about doing. If I had found this tape and watched it, I would have told the police there were four very old looking, very depraved lunatics parading through our cities somewhere that we had to stop.

This movie is a lot like Natural Born Killers. Like that under-appreciated Oliver Stone classic, Trash Humpers examines the sociopath, in particular the American sociopath. However, where these films differ is on the grounds of morality: Natural Born Killers expresses one, if a warped one, while Trash Humpers plainly has none at all. There is an amount of sense and order I don't think I will be getting back after viewing this movie. It was because of this, and a sensible need to fall asleep last night, that I went searching for answers.

My first inclination (being a brainwashed follower of the auteur theory) was to direct my attention towards the man in charge, the fellow with this strange and warped vision: Harmony Korine, writer, director, cinematographer, and star of "Trash Humpers." Before I feel asleep, I sought out interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, the kind of stuff I usually use to wrap my head around a film. Since I heard about Korine, I knew his work bent more towards the avante-garde/arthouse inclination. I wondered whether Korine had a fucked up childhood, to make him make movies such as Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, or whether he had a far too crispy-clean early life and was now lashing out against it. I think almost all the things we put passion and soul into come from our childhood. I have no answers in regard to Korine's childhood, though I certainly have ideas, but the interviews proved enlightening and, like the film itself, even a bit disturbing.

Harmony Korine is no dummy. He is a self-proclaimed provocateur. The lack of a moral slant is purposeful. It is clear that he sees the film medium differently than any other traditional storyteller/film-maker. The production involved the actors (which included himself, his wife, and two other actors) to actually live the lives of the people portrayed on screen: for the two weeks of filming they ambled through American suburbs, slept under bridges, and destroyed shit. Korine's process is one of discovery and tied closely to film as an artistic exercise. Things occur on the location that Korine uses, "If it feels right to me. If there is some strong, palpable, raw quality in the moment then I won't question it." To his credit with such disturbingly weird subject material, he intentionally titled the film Trash Humpers because he wanted to "to give people a heads up because I don’t want to damage anyone."

Even with the background knowledge I still had some very strange dreams last night. Some of the vignettes of my mind: Watching Pulp Fiction for the first time in HD Widescreen, showing a previously "unseen" version of the movie revealing that Sam Jackson is actually entirely naked in the car in the opening scene. Being invited over to a house by unsophisticated teenage girls and accidentally peeping in on their grandmother in their underwear, while their obese mothers rushed to embrace me and offer me pie in their grease-stained Mickey Mouse and Eeyore sweaters.

I woke up at 6am, searching through familiar pornography clips, a seemingly horrible idea after watching a movie about sociopaths humping trash cans. I wanted some familiarity and human connection, however unreal it was. At that deep evolutionary level the lure of sex is about pleasure in creation, the antithesis of pleasure in destruction with which I was over-run by this film. Perhaps I really needed someone to hug, but unfortunately as adults we must fight these battles ourselves.

After I fell back asleep I kept thinking I needed to get up, I really should get up. I had a dream of my sister and our father lying on a bed in a hotel room, many stories up. My father was recalling a time (that did not really happen) of when he led me and my sister on a treasure hunt, tricking us into a pristine grove where a showing of My Neighbor Totoro was taking place. He was describing his manic mood at the time and how everything was just clicking, and he was glad it had worked because it had given my sister and I one of our fondest childhood memories. As he was talking, I saw a passenger plane pass by tall skyscrapers, twisting its wings to avoid it in ways I didn't know a plane could actually handle. The next plane wasn't so lucky. It was desperately trying to bank up out of the way of the buildings, but hit it in a dramatic vertical belly-flop, from which the plane began to fall backwards into the street below. Suddenly adrenaline kicked in. "We have to get out of here," I said, knowing the destruction that falling plane could reign on the base of our own hotel tower. That was when I opened my eyes and knew it was time to get out of bed.

Trash Humpers find me desperately clawing to find some sort of moral compass, some sort of meaning behind the madness. That, however, is pure fantasy. There is not much to explain. Korine may have a differing opinion, having said: "With this film I was really interested in making something real with a tangible message." But to me, Trash Humpers comes from that same raw place in which animals inhabit, struggling to survive in the wild, driven by that keen instinct to kill and be superior.

Actually, no, I take that back. The characters in Trash Humpers are not like animals. Because animals, like humans, have very strict rules by which they play in order to stay alive. Even animals only kill out of necessity. An animal thinks of survival every waking moment of its fragile life. It adheres to precedent set by nature, and creates social rules and hierarchies to instill an order so as to continue propagating its species. The characters in Trash Humpers are below animals (if you care to think of it hierarchically like that, as I tend to do). They occupy the same branch of humanity as Stalins or Hitlers. In fact, they aren't even there. They are not seeking power. They wallow in the squalor of vandalism and destruction. They are not hinged to, and care very little about, the societal rules that keep everyone in check from doing something morally reprehensible and punishable by society. They don't even really seem to care if they continue to survive. And although they are horrible, depraved people, there is something awe-inspiring and deeply arresting about their nature.

Because Trash Humpers is also about something very noble: freedom. You wouldn't expect it, I suppose. But these people (like Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers) live out the extreme version of freedom. The death-wish mentality is even expressed by one of the people they encounter, a strange down-and-out trumpet player, in terms of civil liberties: "I have the right to die if I want to." Near the end of the film, the perennial cameraman has the camera directed towards him and gives a meandering speech about how much "free-er than them folks we are" and how he "feels bad for them, going to work everyday." Korine surprised and disturbed me with a few words attributed to him on the Trash Humpers Wikipedia page:
"I have a real deep love and admiration for these characters. Not for what they do, but for the way they do it." [link]
And Korine has wondered "whether this might make mainstream society envious of their social freedom." [link]

Again, perhaps it is futile to try to explain a movie as strange and raw and visceral as this one. However, I'd like to point out once more (to you as well as myself) that this is not about making sense out of the movie, but rather my reaction to it.

In the ever unproductive but stimulating and self-inflating debate that concerns "what is art?," this film has made me examine my morals, question my perception of the world, and made me wonder just who the hell Harmony Korine is. It seems a little ironic that a man named "Harmony" focuses much his creative energy on creating the equivalent of motion pictures to symphonies of discord. Whatever his intentions were with this film, it certainly made me think.

Korine is a self-proclaimed and gleeful provocateur. This film of his sank me deep into questions of moral ambiguity that I am not sure are helpful but I am very glad he stirred in me. And he is a far more courageous film-maker than I ever have the intention of being.