Gummo: It Feels Like Home

Even as they speak of cruel acts they’ve committed, they never exude malice, just a sense of pragmatism and an urgency for release. Violence and elation intermingle during a home-wrecking arm-wrestling match between drunken pals. Openhearted vulnerability emerges, for some, as they bask in the afterglow of a brain-numbing substance. Tenderness lies in affectionate caresses before a transactional sexual encounter, in a mother’s homemade meal, or in a transgender person’s efforts (however ruthless) to support their ailing grandmother.

What could be more defiant than portraying such pariahs not as reprehensible monsters but rather in all their beautiful fragility, among the rubble of their brutal environment, to hopefully complicate the feelings of any viewer who might be eager to write them off as scum? That’s why the transgressive potency of Gummo won’t fade, unlike that of other “shocking” American independent titles. Korine’s debut will remain controversial—and singular—because it portrays individuals whom most people, amid the righteous moralizing of the modern cultural landscape, would rather infantilize or demonize than see on-screen like this.

In confronting the apparatus of cinema with faces and places previously unreached by its immortalizing power, Korine engages in a kind of proto-social-media exercise. Life today crosses our sights through a feed of unrelated clips often recorded firsthand, an endless parade of incidents and personal anecdotes engineered to hold our diminishing attention spans. There’s a similar offhand immediacy and randomness to Gummo. But even in our modern age, in which everything that could be put on-screen seems to already be there, Gummo would still scandalize if chopped up into small segments and uploaded online.

And what if Solomon and Tummler themselves had become YouTubers in the digital age, documenting their own antics on camera? Would they find a community at the fringes of what’s acceptable online, only to be lured by far-right subcultures trying to capitalize on their disenfranchisement? Or could they transcend any ideological expectations imposed on them?

The pair are at home in Korine’s body of work, with its end-of-times visions of American misfits joining together—whether a beach bum and his peculiar friends, a pack of spring breakers and a charming hustler, or two celebrity impersonators—to survive a civilization in decay. While in “Like a Prayer”—a song memorably featured in Gummo—Madonna sings, with angelic conviction, that “life is a mystery” and “everyone must stand alone,” the film itself serves to refute that idea, proving that, even at the most reviled edges of our corroded society, nobody is ever completely forsaken.