Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009): USA/UK

Reviewed by Guy Dolev. Viewed at Mann Chinese Theater 1, AFI Film Festival 2009, Hollywood, California.

Notoriously nihilistic filmmaker, Harmony Korine, reemerges after the bizarre cinema of Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007), with Trash Humpers, which continues in the director’s fascination with white-trash and absurd, lower-class antics. Deliberately shooting with the lowest quality videotape available and editing between two antiquated VHS decks, the work achieves a look that is intentionally rife with cold, digital-noise, which appears very much like a haphazard collection of home-movies, haplessly documenting a strange family’s exploits in humping trash and educating the young.

In the first shot, we see the “family” thrusting their pelvic regions into waste bins, accentuated by strange cackling laughter heard throughout the film, originating from the camera-operator. Later, a young boy in a suit shows us “how you do it,” by throwing a plastic bag over a doll’s head and striking it repeatedly with a blunt object, also amidst sickening laughter. Then, more scenes of indulgent trash-humping. Adding evidence of the VHS-editing process, such as seeing “rewind” on purpose to break up certain “scenes” gives the piece an even more raw feel, instantly recalling days when it was perfectly normal to see such awkward remnants of technology in home movies, before the advent of the iMac and FinalCutPro enabled anyone to piece together footage in a relatively clean manner.

Supposedly the idea for the work came to Mr. Korine as he witnessed a series of trash-cans on a nightly dog walk, noting to himself that they appeared to have been raped; mix that with knowledge Korine had of his neighbor filming himself having sex and trashing the tapes and you have the premise for Trash Humpers. Nothing in the film was deliberately planned or written; instead, the filmmaker, his actors and crew would sleep outside and film themselves in whatever circumstances they found.

We see characters wearing grotesque rubber masks breaking things and singing haunting songs in mocking hillbilly accents, but what is this telling us? Some will see the relation between the disturbing characters in the piece and the distorted humanity of our own society, which is ravenously devouring garbage in the form of popular entertainment. Others may interpret it as a metaphor for the suburban wasteland that sprawls America and its self-destructive cycle, or even the sick, subconscious desires that the entire nation exudes.

Though it’s not easy to say what the film means, it’s equally difficult to say that the film means nothing at all. Indeed, it’s difficult to call the piece a film at all, as the director himself says the intention was to mimic a “found object,” rather than anything that might be misconstrued as a proper film or a work of art. Surely, the film isn’t enjoyable in the typical sense that a “movie” is expected to be, nor is it profound and artistic in any conventional sense. Perhaps, the point of Trash Humpers is simply to stand out for how ridiculous it is in the context of a film festival, being presented by erudite film scholars, exclusively on the basis that the film is made by Harmony Korine. If this is so, Mr. Korine has succeeded in making clowns of us all.