CRUMB
A film review by Benjamin Edward Swire
Copyright 1995 Benjamin Edward Swire
Terry Zwigoff's film CRUMB was the hit of this year's Sundance festival (the Cannes of the independent film world), winning the festival's cinematography award and Grand Jury prize for its category. After seeing the film, Siskel & Ebert begged their audiences to flock to the local theater and demand that the movie be booked.... Not bad for a documentary whose subject masturbates to his own cartoons.
CRUMB focuses on underground comic artist R. Crumb, most recognized for his X-rated characters (Frits the Cat, Mr. Natural, etc.) and the infamous "Keep on Truckin'" drawing which has made its way onto mud flaps, coffee mugs and the like. The film is essentially made up of interviews with Crumb's family, colleagues, critics and Robert Crumb himself. What emerges is a dark picture of a dark man whose art and life both border on the psychotic.
Crumb's work took on its warped, explicit tone in the late 60's. After experimenting with LSD, he began filling pages with the taboo, forbidden urges and desires he found floating around his unconscious. He puts his darkest impulses out in the public for all to see, proudly acknowledging rather than nervously concealing his deviant side. For better or worse, Crumb's artwork offers up his Id in a pure, unadulterated form.
For example, there is a story about a family of characters who look and talk like the archetypal '50's nuclear family: Dad in his suit, just home from work; Mother in the kitchen with her apron; Brother and Sister in front of the TV, etc. By the end however, Father has ordered the willing daughter to give him a blow job while muttering things about lollipops and candy canes. Meanwhile, Mother has taken Jr. into the back room and suited herself up in an S&M outfit complete with leather and chains. The punch line spoken from one parent to the other is "you know, we really ought to spend more time with the kids."
In the film, Robert Hughes, a Time magazine art critic, says he feels that Crumb uses graphic art as social criticism, "exposing the seamy underside of American consciousness," turning comics into a "pertinent social portrait of politics, drugs and religion." Critics such as Hughes defend Crumb's work as a necessary acknowledgement of desires which exist and need to be recognized and dealt with rather than suppressed, ignored, and allowed to continue existing in silence.
Counterpoised to this viewpoint are perspectives such as the one held by Trina Robbins, a fellow cartoonist. Robbins is adamant that Crumb has gone over the line from satire to pornography. She insists, that "it is irresponsible" to put the types of desires Crumb deals with onto paper. It is between these two camps of necessity vs. obscenity that much of the film's discussion of Crumb's work takes place.
The brilliance of Zwigoff's CRUMB is that, like Crumb's work itself, the issue is presented to the audience unadulterated. Neither side of the critical argument is particularly skewed or emphasized, and both are allowed to articulate their opinions clearly. The audience is handed the responsibility of judging for itself.
Rational judgement however, is pushed to its limits by the emotional points which Crumb's artwork strikes. For example, in discussing Crumb's mock advertisement for canned "Nigger Hearts," (in which clean-cut white kids yell enthusiastically for the product as lunch) cartoonist Spain Rodriguez comments, "a knee-jerk reaction is going to be 'yeah, he's a racist.'" But, he continues, the comic also turns the reader back on him/herself, leading to a consideration of the origin of the racism, and eventually a confrontation of one's own racist tendencies. The issue of whether Crumb's work satirizes or supports its racist, sexist content is debated throughout the film. It is not, however, the extent of the film's concerns.
Normally the psyche is hidden beneath the personality, hidden from the public sphere. However, when dealing with a man who publicly paints his psyche for a living, Zwigoff's challenge was to find the person lurking behind the psyche--the motivating force behind this bundle of neurosis. As a result of this search, much of CRUMB is dialogue between the smiling Robert and his two brothers, Charles and Maxxon.
Robert, though a successful, fifty-year-old artist, still seeks the approval of his older brother Charles--his original inspiration for becoming a cartoonist. "He made me feel worthless if I wasn't drawing" says Robert of his older brother's influence on him as a child. In fact, comics were originally Charles' passion, and to be included, little brother Robert got involved. Thus began the rise of one brother and the descent of the others.
In adulthood, while Robert had drawn his way across the country, ultimately settling in San Francisco, Charles had remained at home with his mother since graduating high school. At the time of the filming he had not been outside in fifteen years. In fact, Charles says he spends most of his days sedated, rereading through his cluttered stacks of old paperback novels.
While reminiscing about their childhood ("Mom used to threaten us with enemas if we didn't behave") Charles confides to Robert that as a child he had to stifle the urge to "bash your head in with an axe" and "put a butcher knife in your heart." "Geez," says Robert without blinking, that eerie smile still plastered to his face.
The brothers' discussion topics range from masturbation to suicide. While sitting on a bed of nails, Maxxon, who dwells in some sort of mental facility, smilingly speaks about his past need to molest Asian girls. Meanwhile back at home, Charles speculates about the effects of his "lack of exterior stimulation."
All three brothers speak of a lonely, friendless childhood made all the more miserable by a bullying father and drugged out mother. Robert's adolescent feelings of alienation remain intact to date, but he uses them as fuel for his work--allowing him a sense of revenge. Still bitter about the "football types" that laughed at him and beat up Charles, Robert vehemently criticizes the society that holds them up as an ideal. He uses his work to reject the culture which he feels rejected him.
"I like the feeling of being removed from humanity," says Robert, who takes every opportunity to make it clear that there is no love lost between himself and the rest of the world: "Whatever's the biggest latest thing, that's all they care about. I get disgusted with humanity for not being more intellectually curious about what's behind all that jive."
Initially Crumb comes off as a spooky, withdrawn, misanthrope. But then you realize that this man is screwing around with the very boundaries of what society allows us to think--i.e., how far do you let your fantasies roam before stopping them and labeling them as perverse and unacceptable?
CRUMB is a chronicle of a deranged man spending his life confronting people with the deranged natures they spend their own lives hiding. For some this confrontation is an incredibly liberating force--one which recognizes the darker, yet inherent, corners of the mind and airs them out rather than repressing them. Other people however, consider these boundaries which Crumb so blithely disregards to be the very foundation of our society and aren't as amused by his disrupting sense of humor.
In rejecting the boundaries of the public, Crumb places himself in an odd position. For he is attempting to live outside of the society he lives within. That is, he makes art depicting thoughts which society forbids its members to have, hence he is on the outside. Yet at the same time he places himself and his thoughts on display within that very society which he has just placed himself outside of. By disregarding society's rules (via acknowledging those thoughts which it demands remain invisible), Crumb forfeits the securities afforded by those same rules--he opens himself to its condemnation.
For instance, him saying "the only one I'd say I've ever been in love with is my daughter Sophie," sends shivers through the audience to whom he has just admitted masturbating to his own comics--such as the 50's domestic, father/daughter scene described above.
The audience, while perhaps enthralled by his rejection of cultural norms, still dwells and judges from within those norms. Crumb becomes a kind of outlaw hero--both condemned and admired for exposing himself to his audience, flashing them his smile, and dangling his Id in full view.
CRUMB will be released April 24th.
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