When KIDS was released in 1995, there was a lot of “controversy” surrounding its explicit content involving teens, sex, drugs, and violence. I remember all of the hype clearly; I was 16 at the time. The film’s writer, Harmony Korine, was 22; however, he was only about 19 when he penned the screenplay [wikipedia claims “18” Korine has guessed “20”]. I watched KIDS and thought that it was a solid film, but it didn’t have some dramatic impact on my life like the nightly news warned that it might. Then again, any lack of shock value for me may be a testament to the reality that had been infused within it. The themes, essence, and tone were familiar; if not in cinema then to the world I had experienced outside of it. There was an uncommon level of honesty embedded in the script.

While KIDS jump-started the careers of first-time actors like Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny, Korine didn’t quite live up to the “promise” that many had expected of him. That’s not to say that he didn’t continue to produce amazing pieces of work or to advance creatively in his career, it’s just that he never seemed harnessed into the limitations and ideas that had been placed on him by others. One way to put it would be that the “promise” that the golden boy had placed on him wasn’t a promise that he had ever “made” himself. In ways, his story is Pecker-esque and, as quickly as upper-class socialites might take in a troubled youth for their own self-righteous ego boost, they will toss his ass out and turn their backs on him once he lives up to his inherent nature by smashing their Fabergé eggs, getting their daughters drunk, and stealing their Escalades.

Whether or not the mainstream media had already lost interest, Korine didn’t truly grab my attention until he was able to gain control of his own projects for himself. Harmony shook a lot of people after his directorial debut with the beautifully unsettling, GUMMO. Although mainstream demographics are often open to the idea of offensive and/or crude material, it’s generally limited to contexts that they can easily process or recognize. This was 1997, so think marketable Hollywood “bad boys” like Eminem, Marilyn Manson, etc. While KIDS presented graphic ideas and concepts, GUMMO was so realistic and raw that it managed to drag viewers into the grime with it. One could easily feel a certain subconscious level of guilt for observing the voyeuristic footage and not having anyone to report the indecencies to. This isn’t what America wanted; simple shock value they understand and this wasn’t it. I feel that a lot of people ironically determined that Korine was a one-note with nothing more to offer than vulgarity, while not realizing that what they were actually responding to was the fact that he had taken a drastic turn away from what they had expected of him. One man who responded emphatically to the work was German master of film, Werner Herzog. After seeing GUMMO, Herzog labeled Korine as “a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position.” He followed that up by adding, “It’s not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?” You’re not likely to find a more accurate breakdown of the filmmaker anywhere.

While many filmmakers and critics focus on how content fits into their preconceived notions of pre-manufactured film structure, Korine has always seemed much more focused on re-examining the filmmaking process altogether and exploring what its capabilities are as a tool and an art form. In 1998, a book of his random musings, fragmented thoughts, and suicide letters titled Crack Up at the Race Riots was published, challenging the idea of what determines a legitimate piece of literature. In 1999 the film, Julien Donkey Boy pushed the envelope further with an even looser structure, hidden cameras, and minimal scripting. Unfortunately, its association with the recently birthed Danish film movement, Dogme 95, tended to overshadow what the film was able to accomplish on its own merits. For the all-but-abandoned Fight Harm project, he ran around picking fights an getting his ass kicked while David Blaine filmed him, but, for the most part, Korine didn’t return to film until Mister Lonely in 2007. This was arguably his most accessible work and, although I still found it incredible, it seemed to float by without much widespread detection. With his latest project, Trash Humpers, Korine proves that he still has no intention of playing it safe or sticking with any semblance of what could even be considered a “familiar” format. Believe it or not, this may actually be the most inaccessible piece of film that the native Tennessean has ever presented.

TRASH HUMPERS

It’s borderline pointless to even try and review this “film” and, since I hadn’t originally planned to, I’ll try to just hover around its basic essence. One word that I’ve seen thrown around in reviews quite a bit is “nightmare.” I can understand what the reviewers had intended by using that term, because there is a grimy dreamlike quality created by filtering the footage through a weathered VHS style aesthetic. But while I can, in some ways, confirm the claim of it being “nightmarish” as strikingly accurate, it can also be completely discounted, just based on the sheer subjectivity of the term itself. Everyone has their own version of hell, just like everyone has their own idea of beauty.

As with most of Korine‘s work, the director doesn’t hold much value in “directing” or controlling what the viewer will take away from the work. He makes “feature presentations,” simply presenting material to be interpreted and/or experienced organically by the viewer. He doesn’t seem overly interested in breaking his work down much more than that, despite that everyone else seems to find it necessary. This may be because Harmony‘s work is based more on feeling than created for analysis. When people are desperately trying to understand something so badly and feel the need to be considered “in the know,” getting that clarification is treated like something of necessity and urgency.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQYSRXT3CiU[/youtube]

I saw Trash Humpers in Seattle during the second of two showings that featured Korine in attendance. As you will further discover in our accompanying article, Harmony‘s Q&A for the second one took place prior to the screening of the film. To alleviate any potential concerns for audience members who might feel that the Q&A would be rendered useless without viewing the film first, the director began by asking, “Any of you seen the trailer?” He followed that up by assuring us, “Yeah, so it’s that same shit. You know what I mean? You saw the trailer, you know what it is.” On the most basic level, his statement is technically true. For those who don’t know, Trash Humpers is comprised of a bunch of footage collected over a 2-week period by Harmony, his wife Rachel, and a couple of other associates/accomplices, as they lived the lives of destructive, elderly social deviants. Korine has stated that the footage is presented in the order that it was recorded and that the actors stayed in character throughout the duration of the filming, while sleeping in locations such as behind strip malls and underneath bridges. There is no defined storyline or any official “meaning” presented in the movie. There is, however, plenty of footage involving firecrackers, loins being writhed against dumpsters, and various property being mercilessly smashed to shit.

For those who remember that scene from GUMMO where skateboard legend, Mark Gonzales was wrestling chairs in the kitchen, Trash Humpers is often like an extended version of that. As a young child, I spent uncomfortable nights at friends’ houses that felt, if not resembled things, reminiscent of that scene. As a teenager, I bought weed from residences that also generated similar vibes. On one occasion when I was about 19, I found myself on a hard-living woman’s couch in the unfamiliar town of Lake Stevens, Wa. We’d just gotten paid that day for helping a friend’s stepdad work on a property he was fixing up, so we found a local who led us to this woman’s ground-floor apartment to hook up a sack. She ordered her young kids — at least one of them a toddler — to go outside, before smoking up and making subtle advances toward us. In the early evening, this middle-aged mother of several with erratic energy wanted to keep getting the party going, as if her children ceased to exist the moment she clicked that padlock behind them. We just wanted to leave. Later that week, I found myself on an even sketchier mission in a town an hour away. This time I was strapped into the backseat of a car cruising at 3 am as I listened to a random spunion deliver a heartfelt confession about his deep life-altering connection to the music and lyrics of Insane Clown Posse. I’ve met more people than I could count who, while clearly on speed, felt the unprompted urge to divulge to me how they “used to do meth.” I’ve been in endless situations where I’m not surrounded by anyone or anything that I’m familiar with, without any clear way to remove myself. Trash Humpers may not have any clear discernible storyline, but it manages to tap into, replicate, and sustain this unmistakable discomfort. That effect is only amplified by the lack of any clear path or rhythm allowing one to anticipate what direction it might veer into from one moment to the next.

Unless you are a self-mutilating crackhead swinger satanist with a stash of grenades and nugget tweens locked in your basement, you are likely to find yourself in a situation that’s at least a little out of your comfort zone, at one point or another. If you want to buy weed from strangers, there’s a good chance that you’ll eventually wind up in a tweaker den with a closet full of stolen car stereos. If you want to get some pills, you might have to get them from the chick a decade or two older than you, who swiped them from her dying grandma and whose boyfriend aggressively glares at you like you are trying to fuck her, while their toddler is drinking Natty Ice in the corner. “You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.” You may find yourself blowing lines in a house and look up to discover some wingnut playing with an assault rifle or swinging a katana blade. No matter how questionable what you’re doing is, there is usually a place that can, simultaneously, make you feel both less and more sketchy just by being there. Certain places that I’ve lived have even provided that environment for others. Trash Humpers manages to bottle that feeling of uneasiness and the grating paranoia of a first-time double spy, but it also reintroduces the beautiful simplicities that accompany the sound of broken glass, sun-damaged garage sale wares, and unchecked aggression. You might find yourself questioning if you should even be judging if the judgment of others is questionable. Perhaps, the only question you might have is why YOU aren’t out breaking more shit. This isn’t exactly a cerebral film, but it’s hard to believe that you won’t feel anything.

Korine has been quoted repeatedly as saying that his intention for Trash Humpers was that it would come across like some sort of “found object” or “artifact,” something that you could find “in a ditch” or floating down a river in a plastic bag. About 8 years ago, I was at an estate sale in Rancho Cordova, Ca and we came across a ton of VHS tapes with cow mutilation footage on them. The woman who had owned the home was some sort of conspiracy theorist with a hefty paranoia of alien abduction. Even more interesting than the shit we found was the speculative history of its previous owner that I was forced to create on my own. The environments that are explored in Trash Humpers range from parking lots and basements to unkempt dying lawns and rooftops at night. Korine has stated that, aside from weathered/poorly-tracked VHS cassette tapes, the aesthetic was partially inspired by the beauty of streetlights — an aesthetic that I also romanticize and connect to. I’ve lived in a battered 1980 Datsun 510, smashed bottles, and have slept in rest stops and parking lots. I drank Hypnotiq while a dead possum (with a row of dead feeding babies attached) got its own backwoods Viking funeral in a pile of yard waste. I’ve blown snus with flannel-clad locals in a Eureka bar that was straight out of the Lobo on Roseanne and gone to bars in the inner city of Atlanta to watch rap battles. I’ve drank 40-ounce off-brand malt liquor in the streets of strange suburban neighborhoods in foreign states and thrown shopping carts off of anything that I could find which was high enough to throw shit off of. Some of my memories are clearer than others, but the feelings are still the easiest thing to access. I can’t remember everything that happened in Trash Humpers either, but these are the types of personal memory flashes and feelings that are roused up when I think about the film. Perhaps the greatest thing that the project could achieve would be to simply acknowledge the validity in the random pieces of debris left behind in the form of anonymous photographs, home videos, and vandalized wheelchairs, along with the indescribable and ghostlike emotional residue that can be tied to them.

“Is the film worth seeing?” I don’t know the answer to that. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for and how open you are to dealing with what you might get instead. As people, we often sing along to songs like ridiculous fools, not even knowing the real lyrics or what these songs are supposed to be about. The power of music is that it can help to create and/or facilitate emotions in the listener. Movies are the same, but there seems to be some level of narration or direction that people expect when they’re watching a film. They want a build-up to what’s coming; a cohesive path and order laid out before them. Trash Humpers doesn’t provide that; it just drops you dead in the middle and swims around in any direction that it chooses whenever it chooses. Maybe something explodes… maybe something gets dry humped. Maybe someone gets fatally cracked in their skull and maybe nobody gives much of a reaction before moving on to something else. Maybe the footage just buoys out and does little more than exist. Perhaps it says something about humanity and the simple pleasures in the comradery of destruction… but really, who gives a shit? The real question is, “Do you want to see some random grainy video of people smashing shit and acting like mongrels for 90 minutes?” It turns out that I do (not really a surprise). So like Harmony said, it’s pretty much just like the trailer and, like I wrote earlier, there’s really no point in reviewing it. It’s easier to describe what it’s not than what it is, because what it is is whatever you feel from it. It’s an experiment in generating an emotional reaction or feeling, which is all that any real art is at its core anyway. You basically have to just decide to watch it or decide not to. It sounds like a cop-out, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

There was a situation once where I was in the passenger seat of a car traveling around a mountain road when I saw a dead horse lying in the middle of the other lane. Its organs were strewn out along the dirt and asphalt in plain view. We had been smoking and I was way too faded to process something like that. It made a blunt and definite impact, but I don’t know how I could possibly ever “review” something like that. This film is a simple gift that a man from Nashville made for himself and anyone who wants to see it. I think that’s pretty much the extent of it and, if you do see Trash Humpers and feel the need to understand what it was “all about” or decipher the real “meaning” behind it, you’re probably missing the entire point.

The following video contains the audio track from an “interview” that aired on May 11. 2010 on the KXLU radio in Los Angeles. The program, Center Stage, is hosted by a man named Mark Gordon, but this video wasn’t posted by him or the station. The party responsible for uploading the video to YouTube is none other than the film distributor, Drag City Records, which might be surprising, considering that it does little to shine a “positive” light on the project. It is, however, a good example of how little importance Harmony Korine places on marketing himself or trying to explain where he’s coming from with the project.