Trash Humpers

I saw TRASH HUMPERS at a screening in L.A. where Harmony Korine was there to introduce it and also do a Q&A afterwards.

I was wildly disappointed with the lame array of questions that were thrown at him. Probably 90% were brainless, pointless, and uninteresting.

The question I wanted to ask him was "is Trash Humpers in any way a statement or mockery on TRASH ART in general?".

To me, this is how the movie came across. With a name like Trash Humpers, what else can you expect? It is one of the most pointless and trashiest movies I have ever seen - but that is exactly what I came for, and it effectively delivered that.

It's full of humping, cussing, assorted offensive jokes, violence, vandalism, religion bashing, and anything else you'd expect in a trash art film. The difference is that with most trash art, the point is to try to shock you, scar you, or offend you. Trash Humpers, to me, seems more like it's doing these things in such a way that it's all a big joke - to take all of the other movies that have already done it, and re-enact them while giggling.

After all, I feel that movies really are coming to a point where it is nearly impossible to shock people through exploitative sex, violence, etc. So why not find a nice comfortable place where we can live in that kind of world for an hour and a half and not try to shock anyone? We can just float through it and accept this demoralized joke of a world - that's the world that Trash Humpers creates to me.

Unfortunately, when you start mocking your own genre or personal style of art, along with that comes the instinctive drive to take it to a far enough level where you are pushing people away. I felt that with several obnoxious things repeating throughout the film (such as Harmony's character constantly YELLING in your ear through entire scenes from right behind the camera) - he was showing signs of this kind of behavior. This is something I have observed from my own experiences as part of artistic projects, as well as observing friends mocking their own work. I have watched this kind of behavior occur with a lot of people towards the end of their artistic cycle.

Of course, my interpretation of the movie could be completely off from how Harmony sees it. But, it's nice to have different perspectives isn't it? I enjoyed it - especially the fact that I got to see it in a theater with Harmony in attendance. But, I don't know if I'd ever want to watch it again. We'll always have Gummo for those endless viewings...

"Make it, don't take it, make it, don't fake it."

Anyone who has ever played with a 90's camcorder will be familiar with the colours and textures seen from the beginning in this film. This is not some nostalgic sun drenched glo-fi romanticism however, this s**t is dark. And this s**t sticks.

The very first scenes are all just seconds long and in them we are introduced to a number of odd looking characters. They appear to be old but clearly with enough vigour to grind/bang/hump/whatever garbage bins and trash pussy as if they were still in their youthful prime. They certainly seem to have much youthful mischief and we watch in a kind of distanced, disgusted trance as they defecate, smash televisions, let off firecrackers and tap dance.

Are we to judge these people? Are they real or are they actors? What will they do next? Will we stick around long enough to find out or will we leave the theatre? Are we laughing with them or at them or worse, are they laughing at us?

The introduction given at the start mentioned Lynch, Hitchcock and Jackass. In the future I think you need only mention Korine. Whether he is saying something intelligent or something dumb about American outsider society, whether he is merely holding up a mirror to us wherever we are we can not say he isn't an original, an auteur and a provocateur. Should this be a film for film students to study or should it be one that the weirdo's in class try and make you watch? The themes thrown up (maybe that should be shat out) are certainly interesting but why on Earth would you want to deconstruct what is essentially a bunch of drunken old juvenile delinquents laughing and embracing failure, f**king trees and living their version of the American dream?

The most shocking parts of the film are the sounds not the visuals, if anything I found it oddly easy to watch after the initial punches in the eyes, my ears however did just not get accustomed. In one scene a man tells the most offensive 'jokes' to a rapt audience, and there are many clips showing just how noisy America is, even at night. There is a constant buzz of electric lights everywhere, there is the traffic and there are the crickets. Its enough to drive someone insane.

This film is beat poetry. This film is soapy pancakes. This film is noise metal. This film is giving a birthday cake to a constipated man sitting on the toilet. This film is a headache. This film is trapping your d**k in your flies.

Old people or homeless or psychotic people doing weird crap is funny, and Korrine is one of the only people that can get away with the "no plot/day in the life" kind of movie. But I kept wondering if using actual old people would've made it better or worse.

It's worth watching if you like Harmony Korrine or unsettling people just running around for 90 minutes. People looking for symbolism or depth in this movie are ridiculous.

Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers is an ode to cinematic lawlessness and unadulterated mischief. This is the strangest film Korine has ever made, which says a lot seeing as he was the driving force behind Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, two of the most unique films of the nineties decade. What makes it so significant in its perplexing obscurity is that it seems to be devoid of any meaning, where with Korine's two previous films you could totally sense there was something there - regardless of how it was presented or how subtle it appeared to be. Trash Humpers seems to have no meaning at all, and feels like Korine's handwritten insult to the unwritten laws of cinema that have threaded the cloth of conventionality.

The film is shot on a low-quality VHS camera and follows three grotesque subhumans around town, who commit several unthinkable atrocities such as vandalism and public indecency, almost obtaining a strange form of pleasure from it. The three characters also wear petrified masks, resembling elderly people, to hide their identity and further make themselves irredeemably ugly. That's what this picture is in a nutshell - "irredeemably ugly" - as well as repulsive, unappealing, beyond offbeat, and a tough sit, even for its seventy-eight minute runtime.

Korine's goal, if he even has any here, seems to be incorporating so much senseless imagery, unique style, lewd acts, shameless and ugly characters, and no cohesion in an attempt to make the most unwatchable film. And don't forget the touch of old school film editing and taping, which we'll get in to. It's one of the first times I'll call a film "unwatchable" not because of poor content but downright bad content committed by the film's characters. The stuff they are doing, humping mailboxes, running aimlessly screaming, breaking public property, and engaging in murder is unwatchable; the film itself is a mildly-amusing, but trivial novelty.

However, I especially enjoyed the film's shot-on-VHS style, making strong note of the choppiness, the messiness, and the long-forgotten imperfections of VHS-quality tapes in a flawless, digitally-driven world. This gives the film a very lowly look to it, almost appearing like a sick home movie that was released to the public due to a criminal mistake. Some have compared it to Jackass, due to the excessive amount of silliness and pride the characters take in reeking havoc. I simply can't, because Jackass made me smile and laugh, while viewing Trash Humpers left me deeply disturbed and somewhat scarred.

And yet, I emerge more positive than I thought I'd e. The tone of the picture is so eerie and unpleasant, and the effect it has on a viewer is somewhat lasting. I can't give it a completely positive review, for the film doesn't feature many attractive qualities other than its cinematography and is burdened by a longer-than-necessary length (forty-five minutes would've been more ideal). However, it earns a recommendation to the most adventurous and curious cinephiles - a group that might still emerge disgusted and somewhat horrified. It's a hard film to watch, and even harder to like, yet that could be Korine's ultimate goal overall.

Directed by: Harmony Korine.

Here's a film where a bunch of old people literally hump trash and lampposts, masturbate plants, throw firecrackers as they recite verse, tapdance in a parking lot and smash TVs. There is no story. There is no cinematic beauty to speak of, it's shot on ugly VHS and the artifact shows. It is, at first and possibly second and third glance, a pointless film designed to grate.

But what do we learn about ourselves if we shy away from the confrontation? Watching this, a self that criticizes comes to the fore for whom all of this has no point, he might not be altogether wrong, but let's surprise ourselves, pipe that self down and, not giving him final say in our view, see what else may pop up. Let's engage our own limits of sense.

What grates here seems to be this: old people do unnatural things, babies are dragged behind bicycles, elsewhere a kid hammers a baby's head or a man dressed as a french maid lies murdered in a pool of blood in a kitchen floor with a hammer next to him. Korine himself partly labors under the concept of a media satire, giving us bare sketches without the framework of story or visually dressed of the same violent inanity we consume elsewhere, not much interesting in itself.

The beauty comes once you start to see through that uptight self that can only settle for these things as part of a story. The men only wear masks of old people, the baby is a doll, we plainly know that the man in the french maid costume is playing dead and that is maple syrup on the floor. Unlike other films where the illusion sweeps us into belief, here we know it is all make believe, know this as we watch.

So why be struck by a sense of desolation?

It seems only because we are anxiously prepared to engage a world where the objects (a man lying murdered) are enlivened by their significance, supplying that horizon is what we're made to do. But here plainly they don't, there is no murder, no baby being savaged and only the form, the context of their significance. A man lies naked in the mud, the image carries a sense of something wrong. The assumption is why would he do that if something wasn't wrong? But how uptight is that? He's just a dude told to lie there.

Having peeled through this, what's left?

'Make it, don't fake it'. A dude lying there, faking it and yet not. The vivid reality of this being a play. The playing itself. Not just an ode to destruction, there's no value to that, but the joy of tapdancing in a parking lot. No mistake, it's one of the great films on the illusion of story and the real life beyond that, but you'll have to be still until that nagging old self exhausts his critique and you become the wandering eye finding unexpected happenings among unremarkable America.

It pays off with more evident value in Spring Breakers. There the partying figures pushing against the limits of sense become desirable young girls, the landscape is similarly inversed from drab middle America to alluring Florida, the humping becomes twerking, but the journey is the same marvelous one: finding in the standard perception of something being empty of value, a deeper one which is the capacity for immersion.

There are plenty of films about a staid beauty, like Baraka. This is for those who want to get dirty living it through.