Gummo

The few words I've found to describe the experience of watching Gummo are as follows:

It's akin to having all the blood in your body drained and replaced with Old Milwaukee while being forced to drink your brain through a foam dome apparatus for 88 minutes straight. After this proceedure, you get your blood transfused back, but there's still bad, evil, nasty, foul-smelling beer in your marrow, and you find yourself wanting to beat the holy hell out of a kitchen table while laughing at anything. Anything.

While watching this movie, I was filled with a drunken sense of extroverted loathing and detached amusement. This movie is like LSD in the sense that it will never leave your body. The few redeeming factors include an arm wrestling midget and a kid with a bunny costume hat, but even Chloë Sevigny didn't make this film something I wanted to watch. It's important to see if you know anyone in danger of becoming trailer trash, but, overall, it just left me wondering what I had done to the person who recommended it to me and, more importantly, where I put my beer.

The strange thing is I now look back on the cheep beer buzz feeling one gets while watching Gummo with a disconnected sort of longing. It's like now that I've seen the movie, I can appreciate the dark art that it is. I still plot unholy acts against its director, but now that I'm in the clear and never have to watch it again, I can laugh about its more ludicrous (and eerily beautiful) parts.

Gummo is one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen, not to mention one of the sickest. I saw it drunk out of my mind, and had to rent it again the next day just to see if I really saw this movie or if the sick happenings were just products of my own imagination. Nevertheless, this movie is real and it will make you laugh, cry and want to throw up.

It takes place in a small white trash town called Xenia, Ohio. In the 1970’s more than half the town was destroyed by a tornado and the town never really recovered.

The movie follows around two kids, Solomon and Tummler. The whole movie is almost, but not quite, them being bored and killing time. Together the boys kill cats, sniff glue, ride around dirt bikes and hang around with the most white trash people you could possibly think of. Picture in your head, if you will, the most white trash, hillbilly redneck. This guy's got a mullet, missing teeth and talks with a drawl. Then, if you will, add to the picture a black midget and an albino girl who wants to pay to have sex with Patrick Swayze, and a man who whores his mentally ill wife out to teenagers.

Then you have the three girls who aspire to be strippers (Chloë Sevignly plays one of them), and the midget trying to fend off sexual advances made on him by a gay man, a gay 12-year old transvestite who kills cats, and my favorite, the kid who walks around in pink rabbit ears and later hooks up with the wannabe strippers. The rabbit is also killed by hunters (just in a game, though).

This movie is also filled with some one liners that will make you laugh really hard, depending on your sense of humor. You’ve got a little girl jumping up and down shouting, “I wants me a mustache! I wants to looks like Bert Reynolds!”

The best thing about this movie, however, isn’t how fucked up the movie is – it’s the soundtrack! I was so surprised to see the soundtrack for this movie, because the bands on it are underground hardcore bands. The soundtrack has bands such as Burzum, Bathory, Brujeria, Sleep, Spazz, and Bethlehem.

Gummo came out in 1997 and was written and directed by Harmony Korine, also the writer of Kids (1995). If we haven’t seen Kids, I suggest we do – that’s a whole other node. Most of the filming for Gummo was done in Nashville, Tennessee. Chloë Sevingy was the costume designer for this movie and apparently purchased all the costumes at a local thrift store.