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Gummo: It Feels Like Home

<i>Gummo:</i> It Feels Like Home

Apocryphal lore—promoted by filmmaker Harmony Korine himself—claims that on the last day of shooting for his entrancingly deviant directorial debut, Gummo (1997), he vomited into a bucket, passed out, and got stabbed, and, when he woke up, the film had somehow been completed. That bit of mythology, however dubious, befits a work of art that is wholly unpredictable in its action and seemingly anarchic in its influences—from vaudeville to British social-realist filmmaker Alan Clarke to physical-comedy icon Groucho Marx.

Gummo fascinates, and sometimes repulses, in its depiction of a segment of American youth that some would deem to be doomed, a symptom of a country in free-fall decline. Yet, notwithstanding his film’s provocations, Korine refuses to treat the subject of teens on society’s fringes—a recurrent obsession in his work as both a screenwriter and a director—with blanket bleakness. That’s too facile a proposition. The director’s gaze instead seems propelled by a profound closeness to their quotidian plights and emotional misarticulations.

Perhaps this attachment stems from the fact that, when he made Gummo, Korine wasn’t much older than his characters, and shooting in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee (posing as tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio). The director even goes so far as to insert himself into the collage of bizarrely moving, oft-perturbing vignettes that make up his savagely entrancing first outing: he is one among his characters, appearing as a drunken, unbearably lonely young man desperately seeking physical affection from a little person. The film’s nonlinear, vivid snapshots center adolescents in a small town still recovering from tragedy, where slurs roll off the tongue, poverty is a widespread affliction, and nothing, not even gruesome death, is treated with solemnity.

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