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Shampoo + spaghetti + dissected Barbie dolls = bliss

Teenagers Run Amok in This Artsy-Schmartsy “Art” Flick…

All art is pretentious, but true art transcends its pomposity, it justifies it by employing unique techniques to portray something or to make some sort of a statement. In a painting, for example, one wants to study the texture, the colors: the ‘how’ may be even more important than the ‘what’. Yet film’s primary goal first and foremost is to entertain the viewer for an allocated period of time; whether it’s a pretentious independent feature such as “Gummo”, or a big-budget picture, a film should keep the viewer’s attention with its imagery and/or plot. “Gummo”, with its pseudo-dogme approach, subjects its audience to an hour and a half of torturous images, and at the end, there’s nothing to interpret, no plot, no moral – nothing. It’s a clear-cut case of horrid pretentiousness.

Take the two skinheads beating the crap out of each other at a random point in the film for a continuous several minutes. Both of them blatantly look into the camera. The scene is amateurish, overlong, mean-spirited. It is in the film for no other reason but for its audience to think, “Wow, that Harmony Korine guy is real cuttin’ edge!” Consider also the scene where Korine himself (making a statement?) seduces a black dwarf – the scene is obnoxious, and seems to define the putrid sense of the whole film.

All right, we get it, suburban America can take horrific form in certain places, but for what purposes do we, the audience, need to see a frankly unattractive boy stuff his face with chocolate and pasta while shampoo drips into the meal from his greasy hair? It’s exhaustingly disgusting for disgusting’s sake.

Now, I understand that all art cannot be ‘pretty’ – I think “Pulp Fiction” or “Kids” (written by Harmony, but a much better film) or “Natural Born Killers” or “Northfork” or even “Idiots” all deal with devastating subjects, and leave a long-lasting impression, yet do it in ways that do not evoke nausea. Last winter, a girl in my Contemporary Art course brought a video to class depicting a feces factory; basically it was just a lengthy series of images depicting… shit. She called it art, claimed that the creator of the video saw beauty in what we consider revolting. Another girl in my class gagged and ran off to the bathroom. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to call shit ‘art’ takes as much guts as to throw some painting on a blank canvas and consider it a statement in post-modernism.

Harmony Korine’s got those kind of guts. He subjects his audiences to over an hour of shit, and claims it’s art.

The first half of Larry Clark’s “Bully” is reminiscent of “Gummo”. There is a lot of gratuitous teenage sex and swearing, and it’s off-putting, it starts to seem unnecessary, yet ultimately what “Bully” is doing is telling a story, it’s all going somewhere, building towards a climax that is powerful and leaves a long-lasting impression. The seemingly excessive amount of unnecessary stuff preceding the finale actually starts to work if one looks at it retrospectively – “Bully” as a whole is excellent but if taken apart it’s ugly and disorienting. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about “Gummo”. Each scene in it is as ugly as the sum of its parts.