Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ The Origin of Alien Species

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - October 6, 1997

The Creative Life

A brash young filmmaker wants us to suffer for his art.

BY KURT ANDERSEN

IF WE'D BEEN LIVING IN PARIS in the eighteen-seventies, we would have found Arthur Rimbaud annoying-obnoxious, pretentious, self-righteous, overcanny teen-age combination of naïf and faux naïf arrives in metropolis, declares himself a viad-mouths everyone, and produces reverse images that attract a fanatical following among the stylish.

The Rimbaud analogy may be overgenerous to Harmony Korinc, the twenty-three-year-old film director, but it's still apt. After high school, Korine left Nashville for New York to live the groovy low life, and wrote the horrific but interesting cinéma-vérité film "Kids," for Miramax, about brutish teen-agers having sex, getting high, and skateboarding. He promptly became a punk phenom, and now he has directed his own horrific but interesting cinéma-vérité film, "Gummo," which is about brutish tecn-agers having sex, getting high, and shooting cats. He has a new one-man show of "Gummo"-like images†at a gallery in Santa Monica, and the movie will be released by Fine Line in two weeks. In the spring, Doubleday will publish Korine's first book, "A Crack-Up at the Race Riots," which the catalogue calls "'Slacker' meets James Thurber . . jokes, half-remembered scenes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, and suicide notes... the ultimate postmodern video novel."

"There's definitely no plot," Korine confirmed. Book, movie, and art exhibit, he says, make up "a unified aesthetic, like Charles Eames or Noguchi." Talking about himself, he can sound like a piece of swinging promo copy, epigrammatic autoblurbs delivered in real time. "I was a child raised in the movies, raised in the dark," he told me. And, "If Wagner were alive, he'd be making movies."

Yes, he is annoying. In an age when characters on a CBS prime-time series can say "asshole," annoyance is probably as dose to outrage as anything artists can incite in people who aren't members of the Christian Coalition. It's become almost impossible to epater les bourgeois. Korine, however, does his best in "Gummo" to freak out the nice, "Shine"-loving independent-film audience: the dead cats, a retarded girl "playing" a retarded girl, the director appearing as a sloppy drunk who makes a homosexual pass at a half-naked, encephalitic dwarf. And it is pretty much plot-free. The film has already generated a negative-energy shock wave-walkouts at Tclluridc and animal-rights protests in Venice. Shortly, the disapproval will screech into high gear.

May we preemptively cut the kid alittie slack? Korine may, not be Rimbaud (he may not even be Beck), but he's talented and smart and ambitious in the right ways. Korinc is a malcontent as young artists were once supposed to be malcontents-not in the disengaged, everything-sucks, nothing-matters fashion but fired up with specific and impolitic impatience at mediocrity and wall-to-wall normality "I feel nothing in most movies," he says. "I want to feel hatred, disgust, anything but boredom." He doesn't, however, romanticize art-house fllmmaking. "Whenever I think of independent films, I just think they're the same as studio films but cheaper, so they look worse."

Some of the attacks on "Gummo" will be heartfelt disgust; the scenes with the retarded girl are appalling. But a lot will be envy, since Korinc has managed, like so many rebels these days, to have it both ways-he's a radical with a studio distribution deal and a besotted big-time producer, Cary 'Woods, who told me, "I hope to produce every movie he ever makes." The antagonism will also derive from a kind of young-fogey complacency; the risk-averseness of the formerly hip. The generation that came of age impudent and self-righteous in the sixties and seventies cannot now, in middle age, abide youthful hubris or flick-you candor of the kind that Korine embodies. Baby boomers dismiss new pop reflexively as either too familiar and thus derivative (Oasis is the Beatles, Kotine is an MTV Werner Herzog) or too unfamiliar and unpleasant to quali1' as entertainment at all (rap, "Gummo"). When today's former youths were young, the three-Martini-lunch ethos of their parents and their own counterculturalism made it cool to loaf at work, but strenuousness in pursuit of culture was obligatory-you had to suffer a little to read Burroughs or watch Fassbindcr. Now that polarity has reversed: today; the hours of virtuous pain are expected to be spent on the job, and hardly anybody has an appetite for difficult art.

When Korine says, "It's time for people to start seeing films differently," one is tempted to think of Stan Brakhage in 1964 or Robert Altman in 1975, and snort. But the snort and the sneer can become bad habits. When Korine describes his negotiations with the movierating board over "Gummo"-"They objected to realism! They said they would give it an NC-17 for nihilism!"-he certainly seems like an artist fighting the good fight. As he, annoyingly, told me in just those words. ©