o hand in hand

so, i watched half of gummo the other night.

i've seen it several times, but not in a few years. it's strange how it felt a bit different this time. the stuff i love about it is all still there (the jarring interplay of stage-y acting and documentary-like non-acting, the merciless integration of exploitation and compassion, the little girl jumping on a bed and shouting "i wanna moustache, dammit!"), but i have to say i felt a little less awestruck by it this time around.

i've seen a lot of great movies in the years since i first saw gummo. and whereas i still think a lot of the grief harmony korine got for being a rip off is unfair, i guess i've seen other movies do what i think he does best in the meantime. that said, almost none of them are american films (save maybe two lane blacktop, which i like for many of the same reasons)... its nice to see a young filmmaker in the states that is as daring as he is.

but what bothers me about gummo is the way korine's bratty taboo-breaking gets in the way of what is, in my opinion, most integral to the film. i'm not neccessarily thinking of his "exploitation" here-- surely, korine is guilty of it, but, i would argue, no more so than any number of noble-mentally-challenged-guy movies from hollywood (among many, many other examples). and at least he wears his class-fetishism on his sleeve, for better or worse. it's more the way he keeps insisting on taboos as his focus. at his best, he arrives at the film's richest moments through what collides with this emphasis (i'm thinking, for example, of the scene where the younger of the two "protagonists" goes in the bedroom to sleep with a retarded girl, and ends up having a strangely affective interaction with her instead). but at his worst, it just ends up as a bunch of needless clutter in an otherwise very moving and relevant experience (the scene involving korine himself-- attempting to seduce a very unimpressed little person-- struck me as particularly cheap and obnoxious this time around).

the reason i busted out my copy of it in the first place is that me and a friend had watched lynne ramsay's wonderful ratcatcher the night prior, and parts of it reminded me of gummo. i have to say that ramsay is quickly becoming my favorite filmmaker of the moment (save maybe abbas kiarostami, whose recent stuff is getting harder and harder to come by, unfortunately). and i think what i like about ramsay is often similar to what i like about korine. both filmmakers deal with essentially nihilistic premises (ratcatcher begins with a young boy drowning a playmate in a river, korine's julien donkey boy begins with the title character murdering a young boy in a schitzophrenic tantrum of some sort), and add to them a dimension of, let's say, amoral affectation-- a kind of quasi-sympathy that resists ethical judgement.

in ratcatcher, the element of the amoral is less overtly provocative due to its focus on childhood. some of the film's more "questionable" sequences carry with them the evocations of "innocence" afforded to a child's world. however, this comfort is effectively done away with in ramsay's more recent morvern callar-- a film i would argue is ultimately more interesting (that said, i loved ratcatcher, by the way). in morvern callar, samantha morton (who is straight-up fantastic in this role) finds her boyfriend dead in their apartment (from an apparent suicide). he has left her a mix tape, money for his funeral, and a computer file containing a finished novel. morvern (the title is the name of morton's character) proceeds to hide the body, claim the novel for herself and use the cash to take a trip to spain. all with a precise and intensely foreign aloofness (ramsay herself has described the character as being in "a catatonic state") that falls into your lap, so to speak, with little explanation. unlike the mentality of a korine film (or for that matter, the occasional trace of sentimentality in ratcatcher, not that i'm arguing against it, neccessarily), there is no sense in morvern callar that ramsay expects the audience to do anything with this "unethical" remainder. the thing that makes the atmosphere of morvern so strange is how it lacks any structural incentive towards judgement beyond its questionable premise.

ultimately, it's not even "morality" i have a problem with. you can make a great movie/work of art and utilize the governing abilites of a moral stance (however many "punk points" i may loose in saying so). but what morvern callar succeeds in doing-- and what ratcatcher and korine's films partially succeed in doing-- is using "atrocity" as a kind of rupture in the emotional "trance" of a work of art. through actions that are seemingly deplorable, morvern callar effectively challenges me to restructure my emotional investment as a viewer. the liberating abandonment that occurs, in calculated ignorance of an attending cultural antagonism, paves the way for new sensory and emotional resonance. beyond posturing, booing, hissing, or what have you, it is films like this that initiate an unfamiliar momentum within me. and i crave that sort of thing.

i wish i could say the same of gummo-- and at moments i can. when korine abandons his posture of revolt and concentrates more exclusively on what designates him as a person of great curiosity, he is brilliant. and there is a sense in both gummo and julien-- following larry clark's kids, at least-- that he is moving away from simple provocations. i hope he continues in this direction in the future. and while i'm at it-- what the hell happened to him anyway??? but i digress...

i read on the "philadelphia metro" today, alongside such groundbreaking news as "boy brings crack to show and tell," that, according to travel + leisure magazine's recent "america's favorite cities" aol online poll, philly was dead last on two accounts: least stylish, and least attractive...

so stuff another soft pretzel in yer face, fellow philadelphians... if that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing...

while noodling around on the arts and letters daily page today, i found this enlightening article, in which a journalist meets a man in baghdad who has been documenting post-war graffiti there. the results are all over the board, and amount to a rather detailed little window into what may (???) be indicative of the various sentiments there. hopping around from article to article these days, i think it's pretty unclear as to the nuts-and-bolts of the "iraqi reaction," but this seems to me to be a step in the right direction. i dunno, i could be wrong. at any rate, some of these are funny as hell. like this one:

HIS COMING WAS A DISASTER, HIS STAYING WAS A DISASTER, AND HIS LEAVING IS A DISASTER

(i laughed out loud)