Gummo

1997 film by Harmony Korine
the film

Gummo is a 1997 American experimental drama film written and directed by Harmony Korine (in his directorial debut), and stars Linda Manz, Max Perlich, Jacob Reynolds, Chloë Sevigny, Jacob Sewell, and Nick Sutton. The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a Midwestern American town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other inhabitants of the town. Gummo was shot in Nashville, Tennessee, on an estimated budget of $1.3 million. It was not given a large theatrical release and failed to generate large box office revenues. The film received mixed to negative reviews by critics, and generated substantial press for its graphic content and stylized, loosely woven narrative.

A young boy named Solomon narrates the events of the tornado that devastated the small town of Xenia, Ohio. A mute adolescent boy, known as Bunny Boy, wears only pink bunny ears, shorts, and tennis shoes on an overpass in the rain. Bunny Boy carries a cat by the scruff of its neck and drowns it in a barrel of water. The film then cuts to a different scene with Tummler — a friend of Solomon — in a wrecked car with a girl. They fondle each other, and Tummler realizes there is a lump in one of the girl's breasts. Tummler and Solomon then ride down a hill on bikes. In narration, Solomon describes Tummler as a boy with "a marvelous persona", whom some people call "downright evil". Later, Tummler aims an air rifle at a cat. Solomon stops him from killing the cat, protesting that it is a housecat. They leave and the camera follows the cat to its owners' house. The cat is owned by three sisters, two of whom are teenagers and one who is pre pubescent. The film cuts back to Tummler and Solomon hunting feral cats, which they deliver to a local grocer who intends to butcher and sell them to a local restaurant. The grocer tells them that they have a rival in the cat killing business. Tummler and Solomon buy glue from the grocer, which they use to get high via huffing. The film then cuts to a scene in which two foul mouthed young boys dressed as cowboys destroy things in a junkyard. Bunny Boy arrives and the other boys shoot him "dead" with cap guns. Bunny Boy plays dead and the boys curse at him, rifle through his pockets, then remove and throw one of his shoes. They grow bored with this and leave Bunny Boy sprawled on the ground. Tummler and Solomon track down a local boy who is poaching "their" cats. The poacher, named Jarrod Wiggley, is poisoning the cats rather than shooting them. When Tummler and Solomon break into Jarrod's house with masks and weapons with intent to hurt him, they find photos of the young teen in drag and his elderly grandmother, who is catatonic and attached to life support machinery. Jarrod is forced to care for her, which he had earlier opined was "disgusting". Seeing that Jarrod is not home, Tummler and Solomon decide to leave. Tummler then discovers the grandmother lying in her bed, states that it is "no way to live", and turns off the life support machine. A number of other scenes are interspersed throughout the film, including: an intoxicated man flirting with a gay dwarf; a man pimping his disabled sister to Solomon and Tummler; the sisters encountering an elderly child molester; a pair of twin boys selling candy door to door; a brief conversation with a tennis player who is treating his ADHD; a long scene of Solomon eating dinner while taking a bath in dirty water; a drunken party with arm and chair wrestling; and two skinhead brothers boxing each other in their kitchen. There are also a number of even smaller scenes depicting Satanic rituals, footage seemingly from home movies, and conversations containing racial bigotry. The next scene in the movie is set to the song "Crying" by Roy Orbison, which had been previously mentioned by Tummler as the song his older sibling, who was transgender, would sing (the sibling eventually went to the "Big City" and abandoned him). The final scene involves Solomon and Tummler shooting the sisters' cat repeatedly with their air rifles in the rain with jump cuts to Bunny Boy kissing the teenage girls in a swimming pool. Bunny Boy runs towards the camera through a field holding the body of the dead cat, which he shows to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. The final scene shows a girl, who shaved her eyebrows earlier in the movie, singing "Jesus Loves Me" in bed next to her mom (or sister). The film finally cuts to black as the girl singing is told to "dial it down" and go to bed.

In writing Gummo, Harmony Korine abandoned traditional three act plot structure and worked to avoid creating characters of a clear cut moral dimension. In favor of a collage like assembly, Korine focused on forming interesting moments and scenes, that when put in succession would become its own unique narrative. To justify such a chaotic assembly, Korine set his film in Xenia, Ohio which had been hit by a tornado in 1974. Gummo was her first screen appearance in 16 years. Korine spotted his two main characters while watching cable television. Korine noticed Jacob Reynolds in a short role in The Road to Wellville (1994). "He was so visual I never get tired of looking at his face." Nick Sutton, who plays Tummler, was spotted on a drug prevention episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show called "My Child Died From Sniffing Paint". In the show Sutton is asked where he thinks he will be in a few years, to which he responds, "I'll probably be dead." Recalls Korine, "I saw his face and I thought that was the boy I dreamed of, that was my Tummler. There was a beauty about him." Of Sutton, producer Scott Macaulay stated, "He's this person that Harmony sort of found and put in the middle of this movie, which is at times realistic and at times magical. I think of Nick as being Harmony's equivalent of Herzog's Bruno S."

The film was shot in some of Nashville's poorest neighborhoods. Producer Cary Woods comments, "we're essentially seeing the kind of poverty that we're used to seeing in Third World countries when news crews are covering famines, [but] seeing that in the heart of America." One small home housed fifteen people and several thousand cockroaches. Bugs literally crawled up and down the walls. At times, the crew rebelled against filming in such conditions and Korine was forced to purchase hazmat suits for them to wear. Korine and Escoffier, who thought this was offensive and disrespectful to the residents of the houses, "wore Speedos and flip flops just to piss them off."

The film explores a broad range of issues including drug abuse, violence, homicide, vandalism, mental illness, poverty, profanity, homophobia, sexual abuse, sexism, racism, suicide, grief, prostitution, and animal cruelty. Korine avoided any romantic notions regarding America, including its poor and mentally disabled. Korine comments on the film's pop aesthetic, saying: "America is all about this recycling, this interpretation of pop. I want you to see these kids wearing Bone Thugs & Harmony t shirts and Metallica hats – this almost schizophrenic identification with popular imagery. If you think about, that's how people relate to each other these days, through these images." It was picked up for distribution by Fine Line Features, and saw a limited release with an R rating (edited from the original NC 17 version) in the United States on October 17, 1997 for pervasive depiction of anti social behavior of juveniles, including violence, substance abuse, sexuality and language.

Gummo received generally mixed to negative reviews, with a 38% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 58 reviews, and an average rating of 6.0/10. The site's critical consensus states "Gummos bold provocations may impress more iconoclastically inclined viewers, but others will find it hard to see past writer director Harmony Korine's overwhelmingly sour storytelling perspective." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized score, the movie holds a 19/100 rating based on 15 reviews, which indicates "overwhelming dislike." Werner Herzog praised the film and talked about being impressed by the bacon taped to the wall during the bathtub scene. Director Lukas Moodysson listed it as one of his top ten films for the 2002 Sight and Sound Poll and Australian director Megan Spencer also praised the film. David Stratton of SBS's The Movie Show stated in his review that "cat lovers should be warned", but ultimately praised the film, calling it "original". Filmmaker Gus Van Sant on Gummo writes, "Venomous in story; genius in character; victorious in structure; teasingly gentle in epilogue; slapstick in theme; rebellious in nature; honest at heart; inspirational in its creation and with contempt at the tip of its tongue, [Gummo] is a portrait of small town Middle American life that is both bracingly realistic and hauntingly dreamlike." A short excerpt from Gummo was shown after the opening sequence in the 1998 film Belly. Film websites Mubi and They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? have listed Gummo among their 1000 greatest films of all time.

The Diary of Anne Frank Pt. II is a 40 minute three screen collage featuring the same actors and themes as Gummo, and can be considered a companion piece. Korine comments, "I could probably make another two movies with the excess footage [from Gummo]. Some of this material I'm going to use in this art work the problem you run into doing multimedia projection is that a lot of the time, the style takes over. It threatens and reduces the content. It becomes almost like a music video – mixing all these forms for no reason."