“Why castigate these creatures
Whose angelic features
Are bumping and grinding on trash?
Are they not spawned by our greed?
Are they not our true seed?
Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash?”–poem from Trash Humpers
DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine
FEATURING: Rachel Korine, Harmony Korine, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson
PLOT: Four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks wander around nearly deserted streets drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, tormenting the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and humping trash. One of the humpers explains to the camera that, unlike the suburbanites sleeping in their homes, they “choose to live like free people.” By the end of the video the focus shifts to a single humper who may be having doubts about the trashy lifestyle.
BACKGROUND:
- Trash Humpers was basically unscripted, although the characters and aesthetic had been thought out beforehand. According to Korine, the cast wandered through Nashville for a few weeks, sleeping outdoors, and filmed their in-character improvisations; the most interesting bits were edited into the final product.
- Korine assembled this film quickly in reaction to his negative experiences making his third feature film, the relatively big-budget Mr. Lonely; he found the bureaucracy surrounding that production creatively stifling.
- Trash Humpers is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film. Their other 2009 release, Vernon Chatman’s absurdist Final Flesh, was previously inducted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made.
- American DVD-by-mail rental giant Netflix originally declined to stock copies of Trash Humpers. Drag City circulated a press release suggesting that the movie was refused because of its provocative content, and pointing out other controversial movies the company stocked. Trash Humpers was accepted into the rental program soon after the press release.
- Trash Humpers was one of two winners of the second “reader’s choice” poll asking 366 Weird Movies’ readership to select films that had been reviewed but passed over for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: It seems impossible to think of the title without immediately calling up the mental picture of actors in creepy geriatric masks in an alley grinding their groins against garbage bags.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive has weirdness in its corner.
Trailer for Trash Humpers
COMMENTS: Weirdness obviously counts for a lot. For a movie that goes so far out of its way to alienate the viewer, Trash Humpers has a surprising number of fans, and even a decent number of defenders among established critics; that’s a tribute to the power of the odd imagination on display in this trashy trek through the armpit of America (i.e. the garbage-strewn back alleys of Nashville, TN). The film’s shabby, uncanny feel flows first from the faces of the wizened old farts themselves: their geriatric masks are calibrated to look almost like real makeup, but are just artificial enough so that you never figure out whether the humpers are actually intended to be old timers, or just miscreants disguised for anonymity. Watching a gang of hoodlums bumping and grinding bagged refuse would produce giggles; but, put these frightening masks on the figures and it the activity turns from silly into creepy. And violating the bags you left out for the garbageman last night isn’t the humpers only strange activity. They like to break TVs with sledgehammers and ride around eerily deserted, trash-strewn suburban streets with baby dolls dragging behind their bicycles. In the course of their wanderings they meet a boy in a Sunday suit whom they teach to slip razor blades into apples, abuse pancake-making fake Siamese twins, consort with overweight hookers who serenade them with a chorus of “Silent Night,” and throw firecrackers while a man dressed in a French maid’s costume dedicates a poem to them.
Among Trash Humpers many qualities, however, weirdness isn’t necessarily the pre-eminent one. The movie is also repetitive, ugly, pointless, unsavory, deliberately annoying, and tedious. In fact, the surrealism here is likely just another blunt weapon used to bludgeon the viewer; the film is intended as an anti-audience provocation. As such, it’s a slog to get through the rubbish: your bourgeois sensibilities may or may not be offended, but they’ll almost certainly be bored and irritated. The humpers all affect shrill Southern accents, and are prone to endlessly repetitive nonsense chants: “make it, don’t take it, make it, don’t fake it…” One of them constantly breaks into mirthless cackles. We get long, lingering shots of streetlamps, toilets, and the rear end of a man’s motionless body found in a field. We get performance artists improvising: the transvestite poet is joined by a trumpet player who toots an “extrapolated monstrosity of redemption.” We get tap-dancing. All this makes Trash Humpers, even at a slim 78 minutes, an avant-garde endurance test. My favorite, and perhaps the most honest, reaction to the film came from Bill C. of the Film Freak Central Blog: “Harmony Korine dares you to hate this movie…and I accept.”
Mimicking the lo-fi aesthetics of VHS tape, complete with horizontal hold tracking errors and blocky-fonted “play” and “rew” legends appearing on the screen, is a great trick to give Trash Humpers an antiquarian, found footage feel, and the film’s unique look is one of its few undisputed strengths. The low-tech cinematography makes the picture alternately murky and glaring, depending on the lighting. At times the lack of sharp detail makes shots look like impressionist paintings: yellow flowers in a field show up as garish smears. And there is a sad sort of harsh beauty in the montage of streets and parking lots at night, with sickly gold and green glows of neon and halogen casting unnatural light on asphalt and cement surfaces.
But the look isn’t the only anachronistic thing about the movie, which evokes (like a third or fourth generation dub) the punk spirits of earlier shock auteurs like Paul Morrisey (1960s), John Waters(1970s), and Nick Zedd (1980s). First rejecting conventional cinematography for the camcorder’s glare, Trash Humpers next dispenses with narrative in favor of disconnected episodes celebrating the beauty of vandalism and sadism. Korine indulges his peculiar obsessions with the grotesque and with white trash anti-culture to the hilt here; the targets of the film’s satire are dumb rednecks, and the implicit sense of classism and self-satisfied superiority grates just as it did in Gummo. In fact, Trash Humpers resembles nothing so much as the work of a budgetless student filmmaker determined to emulate Korine’s notorious first film. But the inspired moments that gave life to Gummo, like the spaghetti in the bathtub scene, are missing, as is the stylistic variety and any semblance of emotional involvement with or sympathy for the characters.
Philosophically, the movie is reprehensible. Some generously see in it a critique of disposable consumer society, and the transvestite’s poem supports that view (“Are they not our true seed?”). But, if you take Korine at his word, he likes and admires the humpers, seeing them as the stand-ins for the outsider artist free from society’s conventions. His director’s statement calls the film “almost an ode to vandalism” and he has said in an interview, “I have a real deep love and admiration for these characters… There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction.” The director finds “creative beauty” here in vandalizing narrative (and other cinematic) conventions. The humper he portrays expresses disdain for working Americans sleeping in their comfortable suburban homes, while he prowls the night looking for something to smash. “That’s a stupid way to live… We chose to live like free people.”
The humpers’ freedom is Sadean, however; they live with no consequences to their actions, free to torment Siamese twins and kill transvestites with hammers for a thrill. They’re hick Übermensch, living outside of society’s conventions according to their own laws, but they’re too stupid and unimaginative to do anything interesting with their freedom. They smash idols (television sets) but can build nothing of their own. It’s this “creative,” poetic,” “mystical” form of destruction that Korine, the artist, identifies with in the humpers; at the very least, he finds it preferable to the boring, bourgeois existences of the unseen respectable family folk slumbering inside their homes while the elderly roam the night, raping their trash cans and peeping in their windows.
Or does he? As in Gummo, Trash Humpers features seventy to eighty minutes of grotesque, pornographic nihilism and ends with quick climax suggesting sudden epiphany, repentance and redemption. The strategy here is reminiscent of what used to be called, in old roadshow exploitation films of the forties and fifties, the “square-up” reel. A salacious feature would display with as much explicitness as possible whatever sex, crime, drug abuse, and general depravity the producers could get away with, then end quickly with a finale showing the socially corrupt anti-heroes getting their just deserts (prison, addiction, or a social disease). The punishment “squared-up” the degeneracy, in a moral sense, and the depravity could be excused as a cautionary tale. Like a bizarre exploitation film, Trash Humpers is detailed and leering when it’s time to describe surreal debauchery, but glancing when it addresses salvation. The ending almost comes off as insincere and ironic, but a biographical fact—the director was a new father at the time the film was made—suggests the conclusion was honestly intended.
Korine is very good at shining a flashlight on American ugliness, but his art seldom progresses beyond that point. All he does is look for a new skewed expressionist angle for that beam, and fiddle with the contrast. He tries to transmutes hideousness to beauty, and in small doses he nearly succeeds (the wrinkled rubber faces of the humpers, or with the tune he himself warbles in a folk-falsetto about the “three little devils” as he films weed-strewn fields.) But a geek show is no substitute for poetry; he gives us novelty but not insight. Like the failed cinematic alchemists of ugliness before him, the universal formula remains as elusive as ever.
NOTE: Trash Humpers originally received a negative review; that stance has been softened only slightly in this reassessment. 366 Weird Movies readers voted the movie onto the List of the Best Weird Movies of All Time, over editor’s objections, and we respect their will; even though we don’t necessarily like the film as cinema, on a pure weirdness level it’s clearly worthy of enshrinement. We do preserve the original “beware” notice we gave the film, however. After all, a “beware ” rating on a film isn’t a guarantee you won’t like it… it just means, well, “beware.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
OFFICIAL SITE: T!R!A!S!H! % H!U!M!P!E!R!S – Features the trailer, links to buy the video, three sound clips suggested for use as ringtones, and dozens of hi-res stills (available in the “press area,” which is open to all)
IMDB LINK: Trash Humpers (2009)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
His Humps – Interview with the director for the New York Press
NYFF ’09 PODCAST: Harmony Korine – Podcast interview with Korine, hosted by The Village Voice‘s Aaron Hillis for greencine.com
Harmony Talks Trash – Less an interview, as the title suggests, and more an expansive profile of Korine from Clodagh Kinsella of Dossier
Harmony Korine ‘Trash Humpers’ Award Video – Korine’s comic filmed acceptance of a prize from the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival
“TRASH HUMPERS” TOO TRASHY FOR NETFLIX? – Blog report on the minor controversy regarding Netflix’s reluctance to stock Trash Humpers
LIST CANDIDATE: TRASH HUMPERS (2009) – Our original assessment of Trash Humpers
DVD INFO: Drag City’s lo-fi DVD (buy) contains the widescreen version of the film (which is odd, when you think about it—oversight, or joke?) along with a xerox-style 24 page “fanzine.” It includes a 2 minute short film called “Blood of Havana,” which features one of the masks used in the film but is otherwise unrelated in theme or style. There are also 16 minutes of outtakes, along with the 27 minute “Mac and Plac,” which, although presented as a freestanding short, is actually one very long deleted scene showing how the Siamese twins got separated. Though this raw footage is an even tougher slog than Trash Humpers itself, the clip does give the viewer insight into the improvisatory process.
(This movie was nominated for review by our own Cameron Jorgenson, who said “looks very promising [but] it may not make it, because Gummo is already on the list.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
To facilitate discussion I have copied the comments from the original Trash Humpers review and pasted them here.
lasopa says
i watched this just the other day and while i completely understand and to a large extent agree with your views there’s still something about this film that i really liked. i have a 2 year old son and sometimes he does things he knows he shouldn’t (draws on the walls, throws things on the floor etc.) his response when he does these things is a kind of nervous delight, i got the same feeling from the film. i don’t think korine is a sophisticated director. i don’t think he thinks a great deal about meaning or symbols but i think he’s interested in that kind of teenage hoodlum boy attitude of feeling alive through silliness, danger and destruction. the film reminded me of that self…
December 1, 2010, 11:53 pm
Rob/Mofo Rising says
Reminds me of a “film” I started watching called PERIOD PIECE–something released by Troma.
Basically it is a series of vignettes involving naked old men and the homeless drooling over encrusted porn magazines found in the garbage, shots of a man sodomizing a teddy bear in a tub with a can of beans. The usual geek show stuff.
I try and make it a point to finish every movie I start, but I had to turn this one off. Not so much for the visceral unpleasantness of the film, but because I was bored out of my mind with the sheer pointlessness of it all. I’ve seen others defend PERIOD PIECE as an exploration of loneliness and the crippling effects of dementia, but I don’t see it.
I haven’t seen TRASH HUMPERS, but I can see the argument for “art.” I don’t think I buy it, especially in Korine’s case. I think the package is the geek show. The shock value and Dada-esque “anti-art” tendencies are all that is there, only this, nothing more. This may be the old man in me talking, but I don’t really care to spend a lot of time with an idea that can be summed up in two sentences. Especially if it’s an exploitation of trash culture by somebody who knows exactly what he’s doing.
Don’t get me wrong, make your film. I’m just not going to watch it.
December 5, 2010, 3:22 am
Alex says
I kind of hate Harmony Korine.
That’s all I have to say. Nothing insightful. Haven’t seen Trash Humpers, don’t plan to.
Great review though, as usual!
December 5, 2010, 11:09 pm
Caleb says
Surprisingly, I enjoyed this movie. Then again, I kinda enjoy Harmony Korine. The movie was a bit ugly, but then again, it was meant to look like that. There was also moments that I thought stood out among others, such as the scene with the prostitutes. And also, I personally laughed through a good portion of the movie, especially when the one guy playing the trumpet was singing about his dick. Perhaps this isn’t as good as Gummo, and surely, it isn’t a movie either. But, maybe it should have a shot at the list, since it did have a rather disorienting, disturbing feel pulsing through the movie.
December 7, 2010, 7:38 pm
Tally Isham says
I really like this video. I found it more mesmerising than tedious. The random shots of empty parking lots and streets with that VHS glare and buzz gave me a feeling of recognition that was sickly and comforting at the same time. I thought the characters were funny in their lack of motivation. Always amusing to see a senior citizen passed out next to a bottle of cheap wine or smashing a TV. Korine has made the images almost impressionistic with the degradation and copy-of-a-copy look of tape and the result is kind of gorgeous sometimes. The kooks he’s incorporated into the video are funny and strange and I don’t see any elitism in simply turning a camera on them and letting them do their thing. John Waters made a career out of it. The only real turn off is the guy that keeps going EEH EEEH EEEEEH! all through the film like he’s the sodomiser in Deliverance.
December 8, 2010, 1:11 am
I have mixed feelings about Korine. I considered seeing Trash Humpers at the Vancouver Film Festival last year but decided the experience was unlikely to be enhanced by the big screen. People humping trash seemed like a subject matter best left for the privacy of my own home. I feel compelled to see this if for no other reason but the DVD special features. Great review as always!
I’m intrigued by the harmlessness of this movie, which I believe has a lot to to with its eerie impact. After all, humping, in the way performed in the movie, is not penetration. It’s just going through the motions. So, already, it’s not shocking like some movies — Pink Flamingos comes to mind, which is as disgusting as John Waters could possibly make it. Restraint was not a part of that movie. Trash Humpers, by contrast, does not seem to be about out-and-out provocation, but about a cultural sensibility. It is a sensibility that I can recognize, having grown up in a small southern town. I don’t mean to suggest the movie represents literally what I remember people doing for fun, but that the performers’ antics seem to stem from a particular kind of boredom and insularity of a small southern town or suburbs. The performers’ antics are just that, antics, and read clearly as such. They are play acting, which is why it’s harmless, but even so, what they play act is bothersome. It’s shown that they bludgeon someone to death. But even if this is understood as just another antic, they still pretend it has no meaning. They drag baby dolls behind them by on their bikes. Not real babies, just dolls. But the power of suggestion gets under my skin. Finally, when the masked woman holds an actual baby at the end, after all the crude behavior and lack of any sense of feeling, the effect is chilling.
I agree with B. Gibson’s thoughts above; the ending where one of the trash humpers holds a real baby after returning home on their baby doll dragging bike is chilling and unsettling.
This is one of the films on the list I personally was not looking forward to watching (along with John Waters fare) so glad I’ve now gotten it ticked off and out the way. I did enjoy some scenes to an extent with moments of bizarrely near to Beat Generation poetry.
I’d given some thought to maybe watching this, but after finally getting around to reading this review, yeah, definitely gonna skip this one. I genuinely saw Gummo as a bold effort to highlight, in an unflinching way, the hardships of a side of American life that is almost never discussed; but if this review is at all accurate, it sounds like, at least this time around, he’s almost FETISHING that side of American life, which just isn’t on.
I never intend to convince someone to NOT watch a movie (although I am willing to make an exception to that rule for Michael Bay movies). That’s why I use the rating “beware” rather than “avoid.” Watching movies whose message or aesthetic you disagree with is still a valuable exercise that enlarges your view of the world. I merely want to give the reader enough information to allow them to make their own decision. If they decide their time would better be spent otherwise, then I feel I’ve performed a service.