A carnival of white trash America:Kids creator strikes again with Gummo

Arizona Daily Wildcat

I found myself laughing at things one just shouldn't laugh at. The scene where a whole bunch of overweight drunk rednecks kick the shit out of a kitchen chair was hilarious. At one point, a voice-over calmly says, "I once knew a guy who was dyslexic. But he was also cross-eyed, so it all evened out," and I smiled at the utter futility of it all.

In Gummo, two boys and three sisters are the general focus: Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), Tummler (Nick Sutton), and Dot (Chloe Sevigny), Darby (Darby Dougherty) and Helen (Carisa Bara). The boys ride their bikes around Xenia, Ohio and kill cats for money. The girls just hang out and wander around.

The cats aren't important. As a matter of fact, they're kind of a symbol for the unimportance of everything - there are cats everywhere and that's just the way it is.

Gummo is interlaced with super-8-type, amateur-fuzzy shots of people just kind of staring at the camera, talking about jail or suicide or who knows what - you can't really understand their midwestern drawl sometimes. Korine, 23, has a distinctly original directorial style that's fascinating to watch; you know you're dealing with definite talent. The film begins with footage of a tornado that swept through the town, killing people and leaving a dog impaled on an antennae, and the tornado seems to displace the entire setting of the film. It's realistic, but skewed.

A "Chronicle of White Trash America, " is what my friend Deborah called the film. At first, I thought she said "carnival," and that would work just as well; Gummo has received most of its backlash from the scenes involving Down syndrome kids, midgets, and cats. People have literally walked out of the theater after the first few minutes because they were so offended by what they perceived to be an exploitative treatment of these people and animals.

I'm not so sure it is exploitative, though. There's something that seems to even everything out. It opens with a scrawny boy wearing bunny ears standing on a bridge over a highway. The bridge is covered with a chain-link fence, and he sits there throughout the entire credit sequence, almost like it's his own rabbit cage. He smokes a cigarette, he hangs from the fence, he pees over the edge, he spits. But he's got these bunny ears on. Bunny boy pops up here and there throughout Gummo, as kind of the passive, peaceful one. At the end, he's shown swimming in a pool in the rain, kissing two of the sisters. Bunny boy is never shown taking a bath in brown water like Tummler, he's never shown wearing a T-shirt from a really bad heavy metal band from the '80s. He's the balance, he's the cross-eyed eyes, he's like the scene with the man on the skateboard in Kids ("I have no legs") where the seemingly uncaring, sex-driven, Casper and Telly give him money. They actually care for a second.

That use of contrast is what balances Korine's films. That balance is what makes the movie so hard to decipher. Korine's showing you things you wouldn't normally see every day, and they're going to leave an impact on you - and that is Korine's entire goal. He just lets you see everything indifferently, without the weight of an imposed meaning or morality, so you can get up and walk out in disgust, or enjoy the film, and either reaction is commendable and justifiable.

Or you can just kind of blink.