"Trash Humpers" Consumer Guide

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• Matthias Galvin says:

  January 5, 2011 at 10:52 am

  While I’m cer­tainly no par­agon of aes­thet­ic appre­ci­ation, I have yet to find any­thing strong in any of his movies. (I regret hav­ing seen them). But I could prob­ably be miss­ing something.
  However, when con­fron­ted with oth­er nor­mal indi­vidu­als, it’s nice to find agreement:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uZgJapYmEI
  Korine’s 1997 appear­ance on the David Letterman show
  The fun­ni­est part of the video isn’t actu­ally the video, but some of the com­ments, where the more self-serious and appoin­ted indi­vidu­als get frus­trated at Letterman’s lampooning.

• Frank McDevitt says:

  January 5, 2011 at 2:18 pm

  I think this Letterman appear­ance is a bit fun­ni­er: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4‑IGcCfLdAo&feature=related
  Re: “Trash Humpers”
  I haven’t seen it, since I’m the kind of per­son who’s strongly dis­in­clined to see a film called “Trash Humpers”.

• Jimmy says:

  January 5, 2011 at 2:29 pm

  Harmony is just one of those guys, a true char­ac­ter in this life.
  I enjoy the hell out of.
  Happy New Year all.

• warren oates says:

  January 5, 2011 at 2:31 pm

  I’d accept that dare but I saw if for free at LACMA, though, in ret­ro­spect, I would have paid for it with no regrets. (My wife, not so much about either the pay­ing or the regrets.) The real ques­tions are: “Would I ever want to see it again? Would I recom­mend it to any­one?” And the answers are prob­ably “no” and “no.” Still, like anoth­er blog­ger wrote: The film has a weird integ­rity all its own. There’s just some­thing about the whole mélange of influ­ences and inten­tions: the makeup, the pranks, the VHS look, the actu­al ridicu­lously lit­er­al hump­ing of the trash cans–and yeah the bore­dom and annoy­ance too. You might think Korine’s always been a poser–and he could still be–but this is the closest to punk he’s come yet.
  If any­body who wants to see an authen­t­ic trash film–a lyr­ic­al poem about out­siders delib­er­ately shot, aged and dam­aged to appear as if found on a junk heap–they can try the excel­lent Second Run PAL region 0 DVD of Artur Aristakisyan’s PALMS. But it won’t be nearly as much fun as the often annoy­ing and bor­ing and mani­festly fake and yet still strangely watch­able (at least once) TRASH HUMPERS, the most hon­est film Harmony Korine has ever made.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  January 5, 2011 at 2:44 pm

  Don’t get me wrong; I like Mr. Korine too, always thought he was a crafty fella. I inter­viewed him for Première when “Gummo” came out, and he wanted to eat at the Royalton, which I thought was funny; I was also amused when, at the ven­ue, he exchanged very warm greet­ings with Laura Ziskin, who was lunch­ing at anoth­er table. We had a nice time, dis­cuss­ing Japanese met­al bands, mostly, although he was a little pre­oc­cu­pied that he had mis­placed his new grill (yes, as in the jewelry-for-teeth) under a movie theat­er seat the even­ing before. I believe he was able to suc­cess­fully retrieve it.
  In any event, to fur­ther cla­ri­fy, watch­ing “Trash Humpers” was hardly as squirm-inducing an exper­i­ence as, say, “Life As We Know It” or “How Do You Know.“But I think we can agree here that whatever else we may think of Mr. Korine’s work, it’s clearly not for every­one. And the silly over­blown praise it’s get­ting, par­tic­u­larly in the Slate Movie Club (where the jokes, I see, are con­tinu­ing to write them­selves) seems to me a pretty base case of crit­ic­al grand­stand­ing, and some­thing that pay­ing movie­go­ers DO have a right to com­plain about.

• bill says:

  January 5, 2011 at 3:14 pm

  Glenn, do you think that, due to the Slate thing, unsus­pect­ing and cas­u­al film lov­ers are going to find them­selves watch­ing TRASH HUMPERS? I sup­pose it’s pos­sible. I’d like to see the DVD cov­er of that one, if there ever is a DVD. Just look at the cov­er for EDMOND, and ima­gine how many people have ren­ted it think­ing it’s an enter­tain­ing and brisk crime thriller.

• warren oates says:

  January 5, 2011 at 3:37 pm

  @Glenn, TRASH HUMPERS is def­in­itely not for every­one. But it is a sur­pris­ing and mem­or­able screen­ing exper­i­ence. I still can­’t get that stu­pid laugh out of my head, for instance. And my sig­ni­fic­ant oth­er for­bids me to re-enact it.
  @Bill, unlikely, due to the scary-ass DVD cov­er art and the truth-in-advertising title, with which Korine branded his film on pur­pose. Netflix actu­ally car­ries TRASH HUMPERS now, so the curi­ous will be risk­ing their time more than their money.
  Apropos rent­al con­fu­sion: One of my fond­est child­hood memor­ies is watch­ing the VHS tape mom thought she had bor­rowed from the lib­rary, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ DRESSED TO KILL. Except it was Brian De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL!

• I.B. says:

  January 5, 2011 at 5:03 pm

  At least Leos Carax and Denis Lavant appeared in ‘Mister Lonely’. And Werner Herzog!

• MovieMan0283 says:

  January 5, 2011 at 8:30 pm

  Sign me on for the Muppet re-enactment of The Wild And Wonderful Whites Of West Virginia, and that’s without even know­ing what The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia is. I’d rather take a WTF exper­i­ence than a yawn, though I liked Gummo a lot bet­ter in snip­pets than as a fea­ture. If he switched his primary ven­ue from film fest­ivals to You Tube, I think he’d prob­ably be 10 times less pop­u­lar with crit­ics, and 10 times more pop­u­lar with the gen­er­al pub­lic (at least the ones who surf the inter­net drunk/high/just look­ing for weird shit).

• Chris O. says:

  January 5, 2011 at 10:28 pm

  It seems like some­thing you might be will­ing to roll with for the first twenty minutes or so, then find your­self look­ing at your watch for the major­ity of the rest, then maybe some­thing kind of inter­est­ing hap­pens toward the end. Am I close?

• abenk says:

  January 5, 2011 at 10:30 pm

  it’s nice blog.…. i like it..
  pleased to meet your blog…
  COME VISIT ME…OK…thank you very much

• nrh says:

  January 5, 2011 at 11:28 pm

  Man, that quote about film fest­iv­al movies spooks me a bit. Because he has a point, and it’s one that applies just as equally to films by Lav Diaz, Bing Wang, Lisandro Alonso or Raul Ruiz (evid­ently, since who ever got to see Dias de Campo out­side a film fest­iv­al? Or Le Domain Perdu? Not count­ing illeg­al downloads?).

• Escher says:

  January 6, 2011 at 12:27 am

  It’s like no one who’s seen the film has ever looked at the pho­tos of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. For that I blame the poor cul­tur­al lit­er­acy of the crit­ics, and not of Korine. I like Korine fine, he’s an amus­ing guy and an inter­est­ing auto­di­dact. But because he’s a pre­co­cious auto­di­dact, with an auto­di­dact’s atti­tude & self-confidence, he’s nev­er seemed to real­ize the degree of his un-specialness: how, for instance, if you’d just set him down in the cafet­er­ia at the Rhode Island School of Design at age 19, he’d sud­denly’ve found a couple hun­dred oth­er people with the same ref­er­ence points and inclin­a­tions and aes­thet­ic as him.

• warren oates says:

  January 6, 2011 at 5:32 am

  @nrh, I agree. What’s wrong with films made mostly or even solely for fest­ivals? The con­trary view is tan­tamount to ban­ish­ing writer­’s writers from the lit­er­ary can­on. Then we’d have to trash PALE FIRE in favor of every piece of crap Stephen King ever wrote. Might not these so-called fest­iv­al films have an import­ance (and a time-delayed influ­ence on future gen­er­a­tions) bey­ond what we can yet know?
  @Escher, I don’t see the Meatyard and the Eggleston bor­row­ing as dimin­ish­ing the final work of TRASH HUMPERS. (You might actu­ally have a bet­ter case against GEORGE WASHINGTON.) Kubrick stole Arbus’ most fam­ous images for THE SHINING and yet the film stands on its own as a mas­ter­piece. It’s in the way that you use it.
  I hap­pen to know a num­ber of RISD film grads and the dif­fer­ence between them and Korine isn’t the ref­er­ences so much as this: He’s the one with the vis­ion, the will and the guts to do it. And to, among oth­er things, con­vince Agnes B. to pony up her hard-earned cash to make some­thing as out-there as TRASH HUMPERS. IMHO, a way bet­ter waste of fin­an­ci­er money than most of the allegedly well-made and sup­posedly hard-hitting for­eign art films I’ve seen this year (WHITE MATERIAL and DOGTOOTH espe­cially). Ambivalent as I am about TRASH HUMPERS, it’s undeni­ably worth talk­ing about.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  January 6, 2011 at 7:08 am

  I asked for some coun­ters, and I’m get­ting them, and I’m glad. I think Warren Oates is pretty right on when he says Korine is “the one with the vis­ion, the will and the guys to do it.” Indeed, just as when someone says of a work of Abstract Expressionism, “My kid could do that,” the start­ing point for the rebut­tal is always “But he/she DIDN’T.” Do it, or even think of it, for that mat­ter. That said, I think there’s a disin­genu­ous­ness in “Humpers” and in most of Korine’s work gen­er­ally that I don’t find in Meatyard’s very sol­emn work, or in Eggleston’s stuff. By the same token I think that disin­genu­ous­ness is a fea­ture rather than a bug. These posts of mine go up as notes on my Facebook page, and a vis­it­or there left a com­ment that he said was­n’t a “defense,” but that still struck me as a good one. In part, it reads:
  “I’d say it presents a land­scape of a demen­ted America. Are we so dif­fer­ent from these old weird freaks? Sacks of flesh and impulses, mean­ing­less ulti­mately in the face of death, which they address very prac­tic­ally in the film (at least Korine’s char­ac­ter when he flees the scene after they kill someone…and what an odd scene it was, at the point it comes in a death isn’t the strangest thing you’ve seen, part of the pack­age). Also the use of VHS, in this day of too crisp, too new, blu-ray whatever the fuck it’s nice to see some­thing shitty look­ing. ‘But why can­’t it look nice?’ Why do we want some­thing nice look­ing? What’s so inter­est­ing about that? The screw-ups and dis­tor­tions cre­ated by the VHS and the pro­cess of edit­ing it on two VCR’s pro­duces almost organ­ic effects in how the col­ors pop or dis­tort or track­ing mis­takes but they don’t simply feel like ‘Oh we’ll fuck it up so it’ll be arty’ It feels apart of the whole thing and pro­duces an effect of a mix­ture of dis­gust and nos­tal­gia. It deliv­ers on the prom­ise of a film, ‘Found on the Trash Heap of the Universe’.”
  Again, obvi­ously I’m not THAT pos­it­ively impressed, but I do believe Korine’s in charge of his “effects” as it were. I sup­pose what irrit­ates me is that I think the praise it’s get­ting in the Slate Movie Club exchange—the cast list of which does con­tain sev­er­al crit­ics whose writ­ings I’m not crazy about—is the way it’s being dis­cussed with­in a con­text of more or less main­stream cinema. There’s some­thing more than a little pat­ron­iz­ing about the whole thing, com­bined with what Kent Jones described in a dif­fer­ent con­text as “look­ing in the rear­view mir­ror.” The whole thing seems inten­ded not to “stim­u­late dis­cus­sion” but self-servingly pro­voke attack—“I know you’re not going to like this, but I’m going to put it at the top of my own top ten list, and then bitch and moan about how mean and unciv­il­ized you all are when you call me on it.” There’s less interest in talk­ing about the film than there is in throw­ing down a gaunt­let. And to what end?
  And again, I don’t have any­thing against “fest­iv­al” films per se. I do have a prob­lem when crit­ics throw fest­iv­al films in the faces of read­ers with such smug insouciance—“I saw this and you prob­ably nev­er will, too bad.” One of my beefs with the self-styled Ferroni Brigade is their whole “Not only have we seen every Lav Diaz film, but we’re friends with her, too!” schtick. Drives me batty.
  That’s one reas­on I was actu­ally rather glad to know that Ruiz’s won­der­ful “Mysteries of Lisbon” was pro­duced as…a tele­vi­sion mini-series. But that’s anoth­er discussion…

• Simon Abrams says:

  January 6, 2011 at 9:08 am

  I put my reax here and step away from the mic to breath:
  http://extendedcut.blogspot.com/2009/11/419-trash-humpers-2009.html
  (No, I don’t know why I star­ted this post with a Tay Zonday ref­er­ence either; it just felt right)

• Evelyn Roak says:

  January 6, 2011 at 9:43 am

  Glenn, Escher, Warren, et al. I think you hit on some­thing that irks me about Korine’s work. It is that disin­genu­ous­ness, a disin­genu­ous­ness that seem­ingly comes from the ques­tion your defend­er offers people ask­ing: “but why can’t it look nice?” The issue for me is that I often feel that ques­tion is con­tained in Korine’s films but even more so is one of its driv­ing forces. Yes, there is a lin­eage of art that asks that ques­tion, and it can be a worthy one (Korine feels miles away from Kurt Kren, per­haps the added “O” and “I“ is indic­at­ive), but with Korine it often feels forced, that the chal­lenge is all too prom­in­ent, that this anti­cip­ated reac­tion is giv­en far too much weight in the con­cep­tion and pro­duc­tion (see his books/zines). This is reflec­ted in the issues you have with the Slate response which seems to take up this dis­course, grow­ing out of the atti­tude and essence of Korine’s work. The adoles­cent pro­voca­tion feels all too large an ele­ment and it is tied to ideas of authen­ti­city I also recoil from.

• Evelyn Roak says:

  January 6, 2011 at 10:40 am

  I should add that the “looks nice”, while par­tic­u­lar to Trash Humpers, is exten­ded to oth­er para­met­ers and ele­ments of the per­ceived “nor­mal” in his oth­er films. I extra­pol­ated that ques­tion to fit sim­il­ar anti­cip­ated quer­ies of con­tent, style, etc that may not be “look nice” but func­tion similarly.

• John Keefer says:

  January 6, 2011 at 11:50 am

  With the ques­tion of wheth­er or not there exists in Korine’s work a disin­genu­ous attitude…I have no idea. Maybe it is all a prank and maybe this isn’t a legit­im­ate rebut­tal (in fact I’ll say it isn’t because it con­cerns things out­side of the frame) but the energy neces­sary to com­plete some­thing like Trash Humpers would need to draw from some­thing a bit deep­er than, “I can­’t wait until people see this and get pissed off. I will then laugh a self-satisfied laugh to myself”. I’d have no way of know­ing what Korine was draw­ing from for this but I’d have to believe that even at the height of a giddy prank­ster high even­tu­ally you’d look around and say “What the fuck am I doing?” and walk away.
  But let’s take the movie at it’s word for a moment and say that it’s hon­est and mean­ing­ful at least to its invent­or and that the suc­cess of that vis­ion lies with the behold­er. I keep com­ing back to the almost palp­able lay­er of filth the VHS extends to the view­er. It’s a grimy look­ing glass that gives you a clear pic­ture of these char­ac­ters and their world. And for me at least it cre­ates an entire world to get lost in, it’s like a poet­ic work of sci­ence fic­tion. Everything looks a bit famil­i­ar but you see those trash cans? They’re not for garbage, they’re for hump­ing. And you see that prac­tic­ally naked old man, he won’t hurt you, he just wants to tell you a story while you throw fire­crack­ers around (is that a Putney Swope ref­er­ence? If not it does­n’t mat­ter, go see Putney Swope, it’ll change your life…or make you smile, either way). What’s the most import­ant thing in this world? Sex, destruc­tion, being a self-actuated indi­vidu­al. I thought the scene where the Korine-humper starts kind of explain­ing him­self to the cam­era was a bit on the nose (boooo, on the nose! According to how-to screen­writ­ing manu­als people nev­er express them­selves by dir­ectly stat­ing how they feel…except when people do that all the time, espe­cially when they’re angry!) But now I think it’s almost a cri­tique of our ration­al­iz­a­tions of how we lead our own lives, the ridicu­lous things we tell ourselves to jus­ti­fy our own needs most of which are just wants but wants we want really badly, to the point where we start behav­ing badly. “We choose to live as free people.” Doesn’t really explain anything.
  And also it’s a per­fect end­ing. Why? Because it ends. Is that a Zen koan?…nope, those are way harder to fig­ure out.
  @Glenn: Do you have a take on the phe­nom­ena of how the opin­ions of oth­ers can begin to influ­ence your own take on a film, for bet­ter or worse? I have a friend who hated Inception but he may have ended up hat­ing it even more when he found him­self in con­ver­sa­tions with people who were won­der­ing if Nolan is the new Kubrick. He also wondered if Nolan dreams in levels from Goldeneye or some oth­er com­par­able shoot­er game. I think he dreams of Armani ware­houses and bor­ing movies. I did­n’t like Inception, loved Trash Humpers and am astoun­ded by crit­ics who don’t know who Powell and Pressburger are…ahh, such is life. Think I’ll go smash a fluor­es­cent tube on the dump­ster I’m humping.

• Evelyn Roak says:

  January 6, 2011 at 1:42 pm

  To cla­ri­fy, the use of disin­genu­ous was not meant as an all or noth­ing dis­missal, nor to char­ac­ter­ize the movies as a prank, or to be total­iz­ing in any respect. Disingenuous not as in a lark but in par­tially (not in the entirety) com­ing across, to this view­er, as all too aware of and formed by the effects of the pro­voca­tion, this being an end in itself and get­ting lost in that to the det­ri­ment of oth­er aspects (I have felt this with most of his output—the ges­ture, and the effects of the ges­ture pre­con­ceived over­whelm­ing the oth­er things going on). It all seems (and this con­nects to the ideas Korine is work­ing with) a little adoles­cent to me (as men­tioned above).
  I con­cur that Korine has a good eye at times and under­stands the cap­ab­il­it­ies of dif­fer­ent visu­al formats but unlike a favor­ite, Dusan Makavejev I a) don’t find myself par­tic­u­larly inter­ested or involved by his ideas and their actu­al­iz­a­tion, invest­ig­a­tion or expres­sion and b) find them lost at times, bur­ied by a too great interest in pro­voca­tion and reac­tion (both of which come across as simplistic).

• jim emerson says:

  January 6, 2011 at 6:03 pm

  Escher: “he’s nev­er seemed to real­ize the degree of his un-specialness.” That’s dead-on.

• Nathan Fisher says:

  January 6, 2011 at 6:23 pm

  I’ve ten­ded to agree in the past that Harmony Korine is mainly a wasted tal­ent; I think that his punk status largely gives him authen­ti­city for not really try­ing to do any­thing, which he prob­ably sees as some sort of counter-intuitive suc­cess. I’ve nev­er liked any of his oth­er pictures.
  That said, there’s some­thing about Trash Humpers, after you real­ize that it really is going to be this way for ninety minutes, that is strangely ambi­tious. To me, I found it some­thing of a form­al­ist hor­ror film: by which I mean, it seemed to be repro­du­cing the icon­o­graphy and semi­ot­ics of hor­ror films without any con­text or jus­ti­fic­a­tion at all. It really is a ran­dom col­lage of, I think, rather dis­turb­ing scenes, and that arbit­rar­i­ness, that abso­lute con­tempt for storytelling or enter­tain­ment makes it all the more dis­turb­ing (I star­ted becom­ing involved around the time the child is cack­ling and hit­ting a baby doll with a ham­mer in a park­ing lot: a pure dis­play of use­less, dir­ec­tion­less terror).
  John Waters gets cred­it for claim­ing bad taste is the heart of enter­tain­ment; I think Korine is tak­ing Waters’ ‘bad taste’ to a new extremes and with a much more inter­est­ing form­al auda­city. This has noth­ing to do with taste; it’s just ‘bad.’
  I found myself oddly mag­net­ized to the film, if only for the very reas­on that it some­how existed.

• Brandon says:

  January 7, 2011 at 1:15 am

  While it becomes entirely obvi­ous that this is a plot­less exer­cise a couple of minutes in, I think the ran­dom­ness of it all is what makes it intriguing (espe­cially if you know that it is only 75 minutes). You have to admit that, even if you were bored with it, you had no idea what was going to hap­pen next.
  Korine has built him­self up as “crazy”. Whether that’s an act or not, disin­genu­ous or not, does­n’t really mat­ter. If you’re watch­ing the film, he wins. You are the ‘bal­anced’ per­son his ‘free’ char­ac­ter is driv­ing by in the night, so to speak.
  If any­thing, I kept expect­ing scenes of more trash hump­ing. I found myself laugh­ing out loud a couple of times at this visu­al and I don’t know if that should scare me or not.
  Spoilerish com­ment: I also thought that, even though they edited around eat­ing the dish­soap pan­cakes (some­thing John Waters would nev­er have cut), I really thought they were going to do some­thing mildly scary to that baby. Maybe that’s the lit­mus test for buy-in to the thing.…

• Evelyn Roak says:

  January 7, 2011 at 9:42 am

  “If you’re watch­ing the film, he wins. You are the ‘bal­anced’ per­son his ‘free’ char­ac­ter is driv­ing by in the night, so to speak.
  Not to beat a dead horse and all but this is what I was get­ting at. Really, what does this mean? This is the simplist­ic paradigm that rankles and leaves one want­ing. Is it just mak­ing the squares squirm, shock­ing them out of their bar­ren lives? The ‘free’ vs. the ‘bal­anced’? The opened eye inhab­it­ants of the night and the sleep­walk­ing cit­izens of the day? This isn’t Thoreau or Bataille and Acephale. Feels more like Nine Inch Nails to me.

• Brandon says:

  January 7, 2011 at 7:14 pm

  The whole schism over Korine, in my mind, stems from wheth­er he is inten­tion­ally inco­her­ent on pur­pose to pro­voke people or he is just too wacked out to make the intel­lec­tu­al con­nec­tions some crit­ics spri­al out of his work. Or, maybe more real­ist­ic­ally, he select­ively uses inten­tion­al inco­her­ence as a crutch for not hav­ing to present a fully formed argument/opinion.
  We can­’t know if Korine is genu­inely try­ing to wax pseudo-philosophical with his “char­ac­ters”, but those words about being “free people” not want­ing to be “bal­anced” come from the only seem­ingly coher­ent part of the pic­ture (while they’re driv­ing aim­lessly around in the night). It can come off as trite to some; as a kind of meta­phys­ic­al bait for so-called “film fest types”, or one could say that by put­ting this view­point in the film it gives some prop­er (nar­rat­ive?) con­text to the rest of the ran­dom­ness. Granted, it’s not very artic­u­late, but the char­ac­ters aren’t sup­posed to be.
  If any­thing, Korine is rid­ing the line between a kind of nar­ciss­ist­ic anti-intellectualism and a com­ment­ary on its ridicu­lous­ness, much in the same way that war movies can glor­i­fy war, even when they are made with peace­ful inten­tions (if that makes any sense).
  And I guess it depends on your take on Bataille or NIN. Were they ser­i­ous in try­ing to provide some sort of reac­tion­ary emo­tion­al cath­arsis for their con­sumers, or were they just a con­struc­ted put-on for put-on’s sake? Or (as is pos­sible with the case of KIDS lead­ing to this), did one lead to the other?
  Ah, the gaze of postmodernity…

• Evelyn Roak says:

  January 7, 2011 at 10:57 pm

  Brandon, I think you are some­what cor­rect in writ­ing: “maybe more real­ist­ic­ally, he select­ively uses inten­tion­al inco­her­ence as a crutch for not hav­ing to present a fully formed argument/opinion.” I guess, and this is a short shrift of a thing to say (and hope­fully doesn’t just seem a pro­voca­tion itself or a con­ver­sa­tion stop­per), I just don’t find him to be very smart, and that is a char­it­able assess­ment. The adoles­cent spurts are dumb if believed in and dumb if thought to be a com­ment­ary or cri­tique or what have you. They don’t seem to be bait, as you put it, and if they are what is the point? His work (espe­cially the novel/other writ­ings) just seems to this viewer/reader as the kind of thing a pre­co­cious 14 year old does, think­ing it is pro­found. Escher’s quote, high­lighted by Jim Emerson, states this well. This isn’t to say Korine isn’t aware of what he is doing (and as I said he can have a good eye) but I guess my brain doesn’t really con­nect with his in the way it does with a Kurt Kren or Dusan Makavejev or a Jack Smith or the Kuchars or or or….It isn’t befud­dling just disagreeable.
  The point on Bataille is that there is an adept and adven­tur­ous crit­ic­al fac­ulty at work there and the inter­rog­a­tions of soci­et­al con­structs and soci­olo­gic­al and philo­soph­ic­al (and fic­tion) writ­ing has an intel­li­gence (and irony) to it where­as NIN is just a bunch of pre-teen adoles­cent wank­ery (and I don’t think Pretty Hate Machine has much in the way of irony going on). It doesn’t have to be cath­arsis or put-on, there is a more nuanced, com­plic­ated middle ground there but that neces­sit­ates a cer­tain level of understanding.
  Thanks for your reply though, you have giv­en me fur­ther things to think about that I haven’t fully worked through at the time of writ­ing this.

• Brandon says:

  January 8, 2011 at 1:25 am

  Thanks for the reply to my reply, so I’ll keep going while it’s on my mind (excuse the length; this is like three posts in one).…
  One thing that strikes me, because I have done it as well, is that it may be a bit too easy/haphazard? to make sweep­ing com­par­is­ons across medi­ums. I was­n’t aware that Korine had a nov­el, but the major­ity of his work is with the motion pic­ture (VHS or not). That is a wholly dif­fer­ent beast than the writ­ten word, music, or even paint­ing. And when delib­er­ately work­ing with a so-called ‘trash aes­thet­ic’ is there much room for inten­tion­ally layered dis­course? (I really don’t know).
  Even the film­makers men­tioned above all had the bene­fit of being hailed as pion­eers (even if only in ret­ro­spect), which gives them cul­tur­al cap­it­al that Korine does not/will nev­er have. He is in a place, like the major­ity of con­tem­por­ary artists, where innov­a­tion may no longer exist. Or at least that’s what they tell the kid­dies these days.
  The so-called avant-garde/experimental/abstract/alternative monik­er is a widely vague cat­egor­iz­a­tion. And in my lim­ited under­stand­ing of such brand­ings, the con­text around the creation/creator seems to mat­ter as much as the fin­ished product when determ­in­ing “qual­ity”. So, of course, Bataille is giv­en cred­it for his fic­tion, because of his lit­er­ary writ­ings. For someone who only read The Story of the Eye (in trans­la­tion) on a whim, without that con­text, I thought it too was just adoles­cent wank­ery (albeit enter­tain­ingly written).…
  And to con­tin­ue my defense of people I really don’t feel that strongly about: If irony is com­pon­ent of qual­ity here, one could make the argu­ment that this is why someone like Trent Reznor rose above hordes of indus­tri­al acts in the ’90s. His ‘fra­gile mach­ismo’ act did some­thing for bring­ing (part of) the genre into the main­stream (for good or bad). I’m not sure if it is even pos­sible to say some­thing like, “Well, he’s no Francis Bacon”. Though this may have less to do with the vir­tu­al impossib­il­ity of com­par­ing medi­ums, than with the wide gulf of social­ized value giv­en to the two dis­par­ate artists/forms.
  I just simply find it inter­est­ing that many are com­pelled to com­pare some­thing like Trash Humpers to a lar­ger body of work in order to find any validity/relevancy in it. Though even I, jok­ingly, thought earli­er today: “It’s just like Inception”: Either you get lost in the Penrose stair­case of self-aggrandizing inter­pret­a­tion or it’s just Michael Mann on ster­oids; Trash Humpers can be either a com­plic­ated treat­ise on the detrit­us of our decay­ing cul­ture (with some extra lay­er that a Jackass 3‑D does­n’t have), or it’s just a video that’s got some dudes hump­ing trash cans and smash­ing shit.

• MilanP says:

  January 8, 2011 at 2:24 pm

  After see­ing “Trash Humpers” on the 2009 fest­iv­al cir­cuit, I had this crazy fantasy of a major dis­trib­uter (say, Universal), pick­ing up dis­tri­bu­tion rights, open­ing it on 3,000+ screens backed by a blitzkrieg mar­ket­ing cam­paign that sold it as a hor­ror flick, then bring­ing video cam­er­as to mul­ti­plexes across Middle America to record the (appalled, of course) audi­ence reac­tion. That would have been a prank of Dadaist–or at least Banksy–proportions.
  “TH” remains a film that’s more inter­est­ing to dis­cuss than it is to actu­ally watch, and that’s com­ing from a major Korine fan.

• warren oates says:

  January 8, 2011 at 4:24 pm

  What I’m look­ing for when I sit down in a darkened theat­er is a reas­on to stay seated, some kind of aspir­a­tion on the part of the film to earn my atten­tion and show me some­thing I haven’t seen before that’s truly worth watch­ing. Against all odds and my bet­ter judg­ment, TRASH HUMPERS did this.
  So there’s my non-defensive, non-defense defense of this film.
  Consider indie crit­ics darling Jim Jarmusch, for instance, who seems like a good enough guy but has­n’t made any­thing I’d want to see again since his first few fea­tures, which flir­ted with the cinema of annoy­ance and bore­dom that Korine has taken up in TRASH HUMPERS. You could eas­ily level the same cri­ti­cism against Jarmusch that Escher and Jim Emerson have pinned on Korine: He does­n’t get the degree of his unspe­cial­ness. Except one of them still risks mak­ing some­thing oth­er than a minor vari­ation on what they’ve done before.
  I walked out of THE LIMITS OF CONTROL after an hour because I felt like I knew more or less what was going to hap­pen and I’d stopped caring. Jarmusch’s films always look so pretty and they’re full of pleas­ant look­ing act­ors. Not so with TRASH HUMPERS, a film that taunts you with its ugli­ness, irrit­a­tion and repe­ti­tion and yet, for all that, remains weirdly compelling.

• Kent Jones says:

  January 9, 2011 at 1:23 am

  “You could eas­ily level the same cri­ti­cism against Jarmusch that Escher and Jim Emerson have pinned on Korine: He does­n’t get the degree of his unspecialness.”
  Okay. We all have our opin­ions. And we all need to remem­ber that what we think of as givens need to be argued. Myself included.
  But…faulting Jim Jarmusch for fail­ing to recog­nize his “unspe­cial­ness?” Classifying DEAD MAN and GHOST DOG and THE LIMITS OF CONTROL as “minor vari­ations” on his earli­er flir­ta­tions with “annoy­ance and bore­dom?” Labeling him as a guy who makes “pretty” movies with “pleas­ant look­ing act­ors?” And Harmony Korine is bet­ter because he “risks” mak­ing some­thing oth­er than minor vari­ations on his own movies? Like TRASH HUMPERS is NOT an abso­lutely infin­ites­im­al vari­ation on JULIAN DONKEY BOY or MISTER LONELY? And he’s to be com­men­ded for hav­ing made a “weirdly com­pel­ling” film that taunts us with its “ugli­ness, irrit­a­tion and repetition?”
  Fine. Let me sug­gest an altern­ate char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion. That Harmony Korine is a nos­tal­gic throw­back who makes genre movies. The genre in ques­tion is “trans­gress­ive faux-primitive,” which has its own unspoken rules and clichés. If he seems to me sev­er­al steps below fel­low genre prac­ti­tion­er Gaspar Nöe, it’s because of a cer­tain meas­ure of craft in Nöe’s work, which trans­lates to a com­mit­ment to the art form. In Harmony Korine’s movies, I see a care­fully cul­tiv­ated, anxiously main­tained and entirely com­pla­cent lack of com­mit­ment to any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. Give me Herk Harvey, Ed Wood, Timothy Carey, Vincent Gallo, any­body or any­thing but Harmony Korine.
  Jim Jarmusch, on the oth­er hand, has a com­mit­ment to cinema, to poetry, to his­tory, to com­edy, to under­stand­ing the urges to viol­ence and destruc­tion. His images aren’t “pretty.” They’re com­posed. I have abso­lutely no idea what roles “annoy­ance and bore­dom” play in any of his movies bey­ond cer­tain trans­it­ory states of mind of some of his char­ac­ters. His first movies look bet­ter and bet­ter to me when I go back and look at them, and it was Glenn’s elo­quent entry on MYSTERY TRAIN a few months back which got me to take anoth­er look at that film, which once struck me as semi-enjoyable and now seems great. Looking at DEAD MAN and see­ing some kind of minor albeit pretty and pleas­ant excur­sion into famil­i­ar ter­rit­ory seems bor­der­line impossible to me – even if you don’t like it, you have to acknow­ledge a level of craft and a com­mit­ment to visu­al awe and mystery.
  But I guess it takes all kinds.

• Josh says:

  January 9, 2011 at 5:35 am

  I don’t get what the hell’s so dead-on about that “he’s nev­er seemed to real­ize the degree of his un-specialness” line. As if any of us were privy to Harmony Korine’s private thoughts and real­iz­a­tions. As if not real­iz­ing the degree of our un-specialness was­n’t a prob­lem for every single human being.

• warren oates says:

  January 12, 2011 at 4:10 pm

  @Kent, You’re right. Jarmusch is com­mit­ted. I value the things he val­ues: poetry, cinema, his­tory, com­edy. I know I’m sup­posed to appre­ci­ate his pic­tures. And I do like a few of the early ones. I even love some of his per­son­al inspir­a­tions: Ozu, Melville, Westerns. And who does­n’t enjoy many of his act­ors, espe­cially Forest Whitaker, Billy Murray or Robert Mitchum?
  And I’m not really a fan of any of Harmony Korine’s work, except, per­haps, in some back­ward way, of TRASH HUMPERS, which seems to me com­pletely dif­fer­ent from his oth­er films, entirely without pre­tense of nar­rat­ive or char­ac­ter or visu­al beauty. (To be fair to Korine, he does value cinema his­tory in his own way, often enthu­si­ast­ic­ally endors­ing and draw­ing from films by Bela Tarr, Alan Clarke and Werner Herzog).
  I’m try­ing to put my fin­ger on why, on what it is in this one work that made me not get up out of my seat and why it stuck with me more than I thought it should.
  I don’t think it’s about the shock value either. I’m fairly famil­i­ar with the tra­di­tion of trans­gress­ive faux prim­it­ive films, as you put it so nicely. And also not unfa­mil­i­ar with good (Vito Acconci) and bad (most of the rest I’ve seen) per­form­ance art.
  Jarmusch came to mind as a point of ref­er­ence because my favor­ite of his early works like STRANGER THAN PARADISE are about char­ac­ters hanging out, being bored and annoyed with each oth­er without the film itself becom­ing bor­ing and annoy­ing. Also because his recent work–well-made, com­posed, thought­ful and beau­ti­ful as it seems to want to be–has left me cold, when we both agree on the many reas­ons I should find it good and interesting.
  The oth­er night I hap­pily and attent­ively sat through one of James Benning’s recent films: RR. Forty three shots of rail­road trains passing through the frame. My eyes were glued to the screen the whole time. A less­er film­maker could have made my eyes glaze over with the exact same idea. But Benning picked some good trains, shot them well and cut them togeth­er in the right order. Not to men­tion that all this was done with a cer­tain qual­ity of atten­tion that was trans­mit­ted to the viewer.
  And some­how, in his own much more minor way to be sure, Korine has cut togeth­er some watch­able trash humpers.
  Sometimes I can tell from the first shot of a film that no mat­ter what hap­pens, I’m going to watch it to the end, fol­low it wherever it goes because I have an inef­fable sense of being “in good hands.” I remem­ber feel­ing this the first time I saw Rohmer’s CLAIRE’S KNEE or Tsai Ming-Liang’s THE RIVER. It might be weird to say it, but I had this same exper­i­ence watch­ing TRASH HUMPERS.

• Kent Jones says:

  January 12, 2011 at 5:36 pm

  war­ren oates, that’s a really inter­est­ing and thought­ful response.
  A ques­tion: did you see a 16mm print of RR pro­jec­ted on a big screen? It’s a genu­inely great film, and it can be appre­ci­ated on DVD, but there are a couple of shots of trains cut­ting through land­scapes, viewed from high angles, where the con­stancy of motion is such that once the train has left the shot, the land­scape seems to pulse and expand in the after­im­age. The effect does­n’t quite trans­late on DVD.
  Back in the day – some­time in the 90s – I crossed paths with Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. Harmony was an extremely intel­li­gent young man, and he did indeed have a real love for cinema and a know­ledge of its his­tory. He and I have a few mutu­al friends, and he seems like a very nice guy. At the time, I thought that GUMMO was sort of inter­est­ing, but apart from the open­ing shot (which I remem­ber vividly), I did­n’t find JULIAN DONKEY BOY even remotely inter­est­ing. And des­pite anoth­er great open­ing shot, I found MISTER LONELY of even less interest. TRASH HUMPERS seemed like more of same. But, you have me intrigued enough to take anoth­er look.
  I sup­pose that Jim Jarmusch’s fas­ti­di­ous­ness – maybe that’s the cor­rect word – is off-putting to some and plays as fussi­ness. For me, the force of his con­cep­tions is so sol­id, in movie after movie, that fussi­ness is nev­er an issue. And I loved THE LIMITS OF CONTROL very much, because among many oth­er things, it stands up proudly for poetry.

• warren oates says:

  January 12, 2011 at 9:54 pm

  @Kent, there’s a good TRASH HUMPERS dis­cus­sion going on at Jim Emerson’s blog with some inter­est­ing and detailed reac­tions to the film so far, espe­cially by a guy named David Graham.
  I saw Benning’s RR pro­jec­ted on 16mm. You’re right about the effect of those shots on the big screen. Though I’ve been wish­ing I could get some DVDs of Benning’s films for a long time. I’ve met him twice at screen­ings now, at least five years apart, asked him both times about DVD. One of the Austrian or German film archives has the exclus­ive rights to his work on home video and they are tak­ing their time. Benning does­n’t like to revis­it his old films, so he’s not very involved, but there’s sup­posedly a box in the works. After the Brakhage set came out, I wrote to Criterion sug­gest­ing Benning and if you or any­one else who cares has any pull with them, it could­n’t hurt to ask again. How great would it be to have Blu-rays of TEN SKIES and THE CALIFORNIA TRILOGY?

• Kent Jones says:

  January 12, 2011 at 10:14 pm

  war­ren oates, thanks for the tip about the dis­cus­sion on Jim Emerson’s site.
  You can find TEN SKIES and 13 LAKES on the inter­net, but it’s kind of silly – they need to be seen under optim­um con­di­tions. As for Criterion, that would be ideal.
  Unfortunately, I have yet to see RUHR.