In a lush suburban neighborhood in the South, dogs bark, birds tweet, and the sun shines on basketball hoops hung over powered garage doors. By night, soccer fields and parking lots glow under streetlights, fluorescent crosses illuminate churches, and crickets chirp.
The establishing shots of this Tennessee neighborhood are almost never without at least one depraved trash humping geriatric, but even in their absence, the mawkish landscape still feels ripened with the particular kind of American malaise filmmaker Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mr. Lonely) has gifted to his audience.
Shot and edited on VHS, the movie was intended to be something of a “found” artifact, an accidental film in which a band of unhinged elderly vandals taped each other as they lumbered through the streets and traipsed in and out of houses, wreaking perverted havoc and hijinx on television sets, fluorescent light bulbs, pancakes, and other people too. Day or night they do not discriminate, but one thing’s for sure: they always seem to be having a good time.
Of course there is a lot of humping of literal trash, but other things are humped as well: chain-link fences, windows, trees, telephone poles, mailboxes, and refrigerators, for example. Shrubbery is jerked off and leaves are sucked off. Most of the humped trash takes the form of plastic bins of the household garage variety, but a pile of standard-issue black bags is also humped. The film is not quite a horror movie — though much of it is horrible — but more of a slice-of-life film, or amateur reality TV, like Gummo would have been if Gummo were filmed by its own characters. Cultural comparisons that come to mind are Jackass and the soldiers at Abu Graib, though here the humiliated victims are not hooded with black cloth to protect their identities, but capped with plastic bags and suffocated to death instead. The camera is on. The cackles are high-pitched. Many scenes are disturbing, but many are hilarious too.
The gang performs for the camera, whether they are humping, spanking prostitutes, telling stories and jokes, playing heavy metal drum solos, singing lullabies, or talking about the things they own. My favorite character appears only for a short time. He is a squat spectacled child in a black suit who plays basketball with the trash humpers. When he misses the basket, the old people laugh maniacally and in the next scene, the child puts a doll in a plastic bag and shakes the baby and the scene cuts to the child hitting the doll with a hammer shouting in a deranged Southern squeal, “I told you I’d kill it.”
The DVD, which was released on September 20th, includes a photocopied zine with a director’s statement from Korine: “I remember when I was a child there was a small group of elderly people who would hang out in the back alleys and under bridges by my house. They always seemed to be getting drunk and dancing. One night I looked out my bedroom window and saw a group of them humping trash cans and laughing… This is a movie about them.”
Harmony Korine is a child of the eighties who grew up in Tennessee. He created and captured these people they way he remembered them, in analog. He and his wife (who recently had a child together) both acted as characters, which involved taking on the roles, sleeping under bridges, and wearing horrific masks. Kornie has been called an enfant terrible, but Trash Humpers is not a self-indulgent fantasy. Lacking cinematic flourishes and ascribing at least partially to the Dogme 95 restrictions, the movie feels as clumsily real as the words of analog technology: “tracking,” “play,” and “rwd” that intermittently flash on the screen.
Trash Humpers is surprisingly watchable. Fully realized in its execution, it’s disturbed, but it’s not, as I feared, boring. The fragments are non-linear and chaotic, but they do build. The soundtrack (released by Drag City Records), when not ruled by hellish cackles, includes authentically haunting and strangely beautiful American folk songs and spirituals, like something Harry Smith might have found. In the beginning of the film, a female trash humper (played by Harmony’s wife Rachel) sings to a doll and the mood is insane and weird, but by the end of the film her lullaby is sung to a real baby held in her arms on a deserted street at night under the sickly orange glow of a streetlamp. And it makes you think, shit.
