In the first minute of the film, a cat is picked up by the neck and is drowned in a garbage can of water, a scene which sets the tone for much of what is to come in director Harmony Korine's debut feature. The reviews about Gummo tend to center on the sideshow that is the grotesque nature of the film's imagery. There can be no doubt that Korine has set out to shock and horrify his audience, but if you can get past the almost violent nature of the repulsive imagery, there is a lot of meat left on Gummo's bones. Gummo may not be a masterpiece and it's certainly not for everyone, but at its core it's an effective and poignant meditation on life, death, and various forms of alienation which cause some to live as though they aren't really alive in the first place.
Gummo is a series of dark sketches which focus mainly on the young inhabitants of Xenia, OH, a town that we are told has been devastated by a tornado some years earlier. The inhabitants of the town are not going to win any beauty contests. The boys of the town are personified mainly in Tummler (Nick Sutton), skinny and hickish in his features and Tummler's best friend, the shockingly bizarre looking (almost grotesque) Solomon (Jacob Reynolds). The women of the town are represented mainly by three sisters. There is Dot (Chloe Sevigny), a woman who might be beautiful if it weren't for her disastrously frayed and freakishly blonde hair and eyebrows and her two sisters, one a shorter, uglier and more inbred looking blonde and the other a young brunette child.
The boys listlessly drift through their days, killing cats in order to sell them. When they do have money in their hands they fund various forms of debauchery from huffing glue to paying to have sex with retarded women. In one of the scene's more poignant moments, Tummler and Solomon break into the house of a rival cat-killer and discover his grandma in a bed, kept alive by a respirator. Solomon asks Tummler if she will ever wake up, and we get the sense that Solomon is really asking if they will ever wake up. If they will ever wake up and live different lives, where they didn't list through life high on glue, where they were loved and "normal." Tummler's answer is a quick, dismissive "hell no" and he pulls the plug on the old woman as the two walk out.
The females on the other hand obsess mainly about the same things you would expect young women to obsess about, boys, their looks, and finding their lost cat. Yet they too are reminded how little the world thinks of them when an old man cons the women into getting in his car and then improperly touches one of the sisters. As he drives off, he repeatedly says to the women "nothing new for trash like you." Unlike Tummler and Solomon, the sisters are possessed by a human spirit that is keenly alive. However, in the end they wind up as isolated and alienated from society and normalcy as the boys.
And that is really the core of Gummo—an exploration at the ways we become alienated from life during our formative years. One by one the film displays dysfunctional family systems, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, degrading sexual behavior, violence, illness and ugliness. Each scene further isolates the characters that inhabit the world of Gummo. Each scene sucks a little bit of life out of its already lifeless characters. In the end, we are left with the film's most haunting and memorable scene-- Solomon, bathing in impossibly dirty bath water while his mom serves him grotesque looking servings of spaghetti and strawberry milk. This is oddly perhaps the most inhuman scene of the movie (which is saying a lot considering as already mentioned there are some other pretty disturbing scenes) and serves as a perfect metaphor for the alienation from humanity that Gummo's inhabitants feel. They don't' just feel it, they bathe in it, it surrounds them, it is their reality.
Gummo is a series of dark sketches which focus mainly on the young inhabitants of Xenia, OH, a town that we are told has been devastated by a tornado some years earlier. The inhabitants of the town are not going to win any beauty contests. The boys of the town are personified mainly in Tummler (Nick Sutton), skinny and hickish in his features and Tummler's best friend, the shockingly bizarre looking (almost grotesque) Solomon (Jacob Reynolds). The women of the town are represented mainly by three sisters. There is Dot (Chloe Sevigny), a woman who might be beautiful if it weren't for her disastrously frayed and freakishly blonde hair and eyebrows and her two sisters, one a shorter, uglier and more inbred looking blonde and the other a young brunette child.
The boys listlessly drift through their days, killing cats in order to sell them. When they do have money in their hands they fund various forms of debauchery from huffing glue to paying to have sex with retarded women. In one of the scene's more poignant moments, Tummler and Solomon break into the house of a rival cat-killer and discover his grandma in a bed, kept alive by a respirator. Solomon asks Tummler if she will ever wake up, and we get the sense that Solomon is really asking if they will ever wake up. If they will ever wake up and live different lives, where they didn't list through life high on glue, where they were loved and "normal." Tummler's answer is a quick, dismissive "hell no" and he pulls the plug on the old woman as the two walk out.
The females on the other hand obsess mainly about the same things you would expect young women to obsess about, boys, their looks, and finding their lost cat. Yet they too are reminded how little the world thinks of them when an old man cons the women into getting in his car and then improperly touches one of the sisters. As he drives off, he repeatedly says to the women "nothing new for trash like you." Unlike Tummler and Solomon, the sisters are possessed by a human spirit that is keenly alive. However, in the end they wind up as isolated and alienated from society and normalcy as the boys.
And that is really the core of Gummo—an exploration at the ways we become alienated from life during our formative years. One by one the film displays dysfunctional family systems, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, degrading sexual behavior, violence, illness and ugliness. Each scene further isolates the characters that inhabit the world of Gummo. Each scene sucks a little bit of life out of its already lifeless characters. In the end, we are left with the film's most haunting and memorable scene-- Solomon, bathing in impossibly dirty bath water while his mom serves him grotesque looking servings of spaghetti and strawberry milk. This is oddly perhaps the most inhuman scene of the movie (which is saying a lot considering as already mentioned there are some other pretty disturbing scenes) and serves as a perfect metaphor for the alienation from humanity that Gummo's inhabitants feel. They don't' just feel it, they bathe in it, it surrounds them, it is their reality.