CRUMB
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Come spend a two-hour visit to the
Mount Everest of dysfunctional families. CRUMB is
a documentary that was seven years in the making
about the famous underground cartoonist, his
family, his editors, and his hang-ups. The
conclusion the film seems to draw is that this is
not so much a guy writing really weird comic books
as a really weird guy writing comics. Rating: low
+2 (-4 to +4)
Human beings, as evolved animals, have a dual nature. We have an intellectual side and an animal side. The latter we have since we are, after all, we are animals. We are forced to spend time eliminating wastes, we have drives to reproduce ourselves, and we have physical animal bodies. But we wall off that part of our lives by doing it in as much privacy as we can arrange. Much of what we consider to be indignity, much of what we find embarrassing, is to be reminded that we really are biological. There is sex humor and bathroom humor. We find it funny that a President of the United States would vomit on a high dignitary of Japan because it reminds us that even a President has a lot in common with all other animals. CRUMB is a film that says little more that Robert Crumb is very hung up on the fact that everyone has an animal side and that his bizarre humor comes out of these obsessions.
Robert Crumb's nihilistic and misanthropic underground comics precisely reflect his personality. The man himself is as misanthropic, misogynistic, and kinky as the underground comic books he draws and writes. Or at least that is the face he is trying to present in the documentary CRUMB, made by his long-time friend, Terry Zwigoff. On one hand the documentary has the air of authenticity because the style of Crumb's work seems so naturally to arise from the person the film describes. But Crumb is obviously someone quite capable of playing jokes on the documentary maker and his audience. It might even be to be expected. When Crumb describes some of the odder aspects of his childhood, like his sexual attraction to Bugs Bunny, it could be true. But it also sounds suspiciously like a put-on in the style of comedian Emo Philips. Crumb could be as weird as he wants us to think he is, or it could be in part a joke or even a publicity stunt.
As weird as he presents himself, Crumb is a functioning human being and in the Crumb family that makes him not just not just unusual, it makes him a real wonder. Each of the Crumb children we see leads a psychologically knotted and screwed up dysfunctional life. The family peculiarities are due in large part to an abusive father who tried too hard to force the family to fit his concept of a norm. We meet three brothers: Robert, the younger Max, and the older Charles. (Two sisters understandably did not want any part of the documentary and perhaps the family.) The oldest of the brothers is the suicidal Charles who has retreated from the world, making himself a recluse in part due to the drug treatments for his self-destructive impulses. Robert's brother Max supports himself by begging on the street and in his spare time performing feats of yoga. The boys continue to rebel against their father and society in general in many different ways. At one time the standard Crumb family mode of rebellion was to draw amateur comic books and this has made one of the boys moderately rich and sort of famous.
In the course of the documentary Crumb tells the camera about his background and particularly his sexual hangups. Bugs Bunny gave way to a marginally more normal fixation on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, the heroine of a 1955 syndicated television series. The Crumb brothers were social outcasts in school and continued to be so in the drug culture. In spite of rumors that he was at one time "in" with well- known rock groups, he was an outcast with just about everyone but his family.
His discussions in the film include his sexual fetishes, particularly sitting on women's shoes and riding women piggy-back. We are told that he is not much interested in sex in usual way, though he does have a daughter who is apparently his own. What we do discover is that he has a seriously negative attitude about nearly everything that strikes him as being normal and he seems bitter about just about all that is around him. One temporary exception is France; he seems to think that he will like France and in the course of the making of the film he moves there. Though we do not find out in the film, it seems very likely that he will be disappointed as much by that as by just about everything else in his life.
The film's view of Crumb is at times ironic. While on one hand he claims to be very disinterested in being successful and is unwilling to make some effort that would make his art more saleable, he complains bitterly how his most famous pieces of art did not pay him very well and all the profits are going to others. He claims he was "ripped off" though, in fact, from his account given at a lecture, it sounds more likely that he just made a bad bargain and sold off the rights for considerably less than they would eventually be worth. The three most successful works were the "Keep on Truckin'" cartoon, the "Cheap Thrills" album cover, and the film rights to his character "Fritz the Cat." Zwigoff's documentary style is very often just to let the camera roll as Robert talks with his brother frankly about sex or describing their masturbation or toilet habits.
There are some nice ironies captured on film. Another artist, comments she was never bothered by Crumb's material--some of which it appears was quite racist, at least on the surface. But she did object when his cartoons started taking a misogynist tone, including mutilation fantasies. The film does make some interesting points when it suggests that the image of the wholesome family--the "Leave it to Beaver" family--that was considered the ideal in the Fifties--may have been a reaction to WWII in that people found the stable family reassuring. It is unclear, however, why there was no similar reaction to the Korean and Vietnam wars.
While I am not sure CRUMB lives up to the expectations raised by some of the critical comment, it is an engrossing documentary with the same sort of unaccountable fascination that a dead horse by the side of the road has. Rate it a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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