Harmony Korine is not backing down. Just when you thought he'd start toning it down to curry favor with American critics, who at this point just ignore him, Korine brings us "Trash Humpers," his most radical project yet.
"Trash Humpers" is a failure, but it's the most interesting failure since Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" (2007). In these profoundly unoriginal times (I am beginning to wonder if even the concept of originality is disappearing from the American mental landscape), it's heady tonic indeed to encounter Harmony Korine's creativity. How many American filmmakers today can you say are one of a kind, completely unlike anything that has come before?
The best parts of "Trash Humpers" are the first half-hour and last 10 minutes. In between is some of the most random, shallow, repetitious, infantile, unwatchably bad cinema you'll ever see. However, I appreciate Korine's courage in taking extreme risks by including footage like this. American culture desperately needs more filmmakers willing to take risks. It behooves everyone who cares about American culture to see "Trash Humpers" in a theater or rent it on DVD. We need to send a message with our dollars that we value courageous, extreme art even when it is not a complete success.
"Trash Humpers" could be interpreted in a million different ways, as of course is the case with all avant-garde art. I saw the most interesting parts of the film as a cross between horror and satire, with Korine depicting humanity (or at least a subset of humanity) as a worm-like or vermin-like species traveling in packs, randomly vandalizing and humping everything around them. A recurring image is of them humping large plastic trash cans. This was such an important part of Korine's vision that he made it the title of the project. I found the vandalism sequences much more engaging and disturbing than the copulation with trashcans, which gradually became more silly and repetitious than anything else.
Most interesting of all was that Korine fitted the four main actors (one of whom was Korine himself, it appears) with gruesome masks, making them appear like a different species. He also develops a new approach to cinematography such that everything was blurry. This enhanced the feeling that this subhuman race was so disgusting that it was difficult to look at them. The camera itself seemed to be squinting, both drawn to and repelled by what it was capturing.
I couldn't quite make out what Korine did to get this effect. At times it appeared he had first shot the footage on a cheap videocamera and played it back on a cheap TV. Then he set up another videocamera to film the images flickering on the TV monitor. Footage of footage. I found this experimentation with form for the most part creative, innovative, and conducive to further reflection on the film's repulsive and strange content.
At times, however, Korine self-consciously made it seem like we were watching a very old VHS tape, complete with some passages that appeared to go in rewind. I didn't find this homage to VHS either innovative or interesting. I am surprised that Korine would stoop so low as to traffic in nostalgia. But mercifully these faux-rewinding sequences were few and far between.
Other radical aspects of the film/video include a complete break with narrative and a near-complete break with dialogue. What we get is a series of vignettes strung together in pretty much random order, with little to no dialogue in each. Korine is conveying an overall impression rather than telling a story. Surprisingly, when dialogue was used, the film was at its weakest. I wish Korine had remained wordless throughout. The horror aspects would have been conveyed more effectively without dialogue.
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