FILM REVIEW: NYFF’09 TRASH HUMPERS
I’ll be honest. I came to the 2009 New York Film Festival’s screening of Trash Humpers rather terrified of what I was going to see. It really is a logical fear, especially if you’ve seen the trailer. Especially after my last experience with David Lynch’s Inland Empire, I really doubted my ability to sit through at least an hour of jarring absurdity, the one that I came to know from one of Harmony Korine’s most famous movies, Gummo.
Trash Humpers is Korine’s return to the exploration of nihilism and juvenile absurdities, a very different creature altogether in comparison to Mister Lonely. In Trash Humpers, a group of creepy looking cretins (a woman and three guys, played by Korine, his wife and two friends in old people masks) wreck havoc around Nashville, Tenesse. Constipated, the Humpers roam seemingly aimlessly through small town America, vandalizing, teaching kids to put razors in apples and humping trash.
Korine opened the screening by saying that the movie cannot really be considered to be a film, but more of something that is to be “unearthed”. I agree.
Harmony Korine has created a very convincing world that is populated by people that I’d never want to spend time alone with. Shot and edited on VHS, the film looks grim and cheap. The low-tech aesthetics supports Korine’s view of this degraded, trash filled world.
In many ways, the film feels a lot like a compilation of absurd, ominous stuff that you get to bump into in Youtube. The film has no real structure. It meanders just as aimlessly as its protagonists. We are presented with scenes that do not really connect in a traditional way. There was a dinner scene where the Humpers force two men attached by the head with a weird tube, wearing hospital gowns, to eat pancakes lathered in dishwashing liquid. The scene following that act was the Humpers breaking a TV in a parking lot, then tap dancing (I think). Yeah.
The non-linear nature of the film help to make Trash Humpers a very interesting experience. I don’t fucking remember the sequence in which the events take place, for the most parts, but I remember the things that take place in the film quite vividly. So much that they’ll probably stay with me for a while.
There is something unflinchingly human about the grotesque world of Trash Humpers. The hipster-esque pretty-ugly qualities of the film are really held together by moments of brief pathos and epiphanies that are scattered throughout the film. At one point in the film a poet in a French maid outfit recite a verse about the ugly world, reminding us that these Humpers are doing something oddly beautiful.
Later after the screening, somebody in the audience asked Korine whether it’s appropriate for this to be screened in a film theater if it was something to be “unearthed”. Korine elaborated on an idea that made it impossible for me to dislike Trash Humpers. He emphasized that ultimately Trash Humpers is an experience, one that will be completely different if it was distributed through other mediums. To Korine, films should evoke an emotional reaction that may not necessarily make sense to one’s intellect at first.
Jarring and painful to sit through at times, Trash Humpers did stimulate me emotionally, taking me to different places while I was sitting in the dark theater. Not only did Trash Humper remind me of the unique experience that is cinema, it also proved that Korine is still one of the most American director that America has (the other one being Clint Eastwood).
- October 3rd
3 Responses to “FILM REVIEW: NYFF’09 TRASH HUMPERS”
August 13th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
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September 6th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
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