For Criterion Consideration: Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers

Occasionally, a film rolls around that is a genuine shock to the collective system of the cinematic landscape. While the film may or may not break records at the box office or become a critical darling, its presence is one that not only has to be acknowledged, but needs to be seen to actually be believed.

And throughout his career, director/auteur Harmony Korine has gone about making that films like that his calling card. Be it behind the pen for a film like Kids (the film that ostensibly launched his career) all the way to this year’s gut punch to the American Dream, Spring Breakers, Korine has not only become a master filmmaker, but one of the most entrancing and singular voices in all of film.

However, even a film like Julian Donkey Boy seems like a far cry from what Korine would give us at the turn of the decade, with 2010’s underrated masterpiece, Trash Humpers.

Ostensibly an arthouse horror film of sorts, Korine’s picture is both unlike anything the director has ever given the world, and oddly enough a profound companion piece to the auteur’s recent stunner. For lack of a better term, the film is relatively narrative-free, instead simply following a collection of disfigured elderly people who seem to live solely to wreak havoc on their surroundings. Capturing their antics via a camcorder, this picture is a bleak , breathlessly angry meditation on what we would be (and could very well become) given the death of our moral compass.

Similarly touched on, albeit in a more pop-art way, within the DNA of Spring Breakers (think of this film as a sequel of sorts, finding our group of Breakers at the end of their lives), Trash Humpers gets at intellectually, something that Korine appears thrilled by. Throughout the film, we become privy to some of these men and women’s most off-putting and unflinchingly base level acts. Be it committing the titular acts of sexual aggression on a cavalcade of unsuspecting trash receptacles or, at their most extreme, committing murder, these people take a disturbing level of glee out of the heinous acts they carry out. However, it’s not without reason.

While the women and their rapper-leader in Spring Breakers are deeply influenced by the pop culture that they take in, the influences here are nowhere to be found. These people have seemingly just been birthed this way, themselves expounding upon the fact that they are an evolved group of people living as “free” as any human possibly could. And in that comes the thrilling intellectual profundity. What if these people are where evolution is taking us? We as a society have become, and are still becoming, more and more desensitized to violence, sex and everything taboo one previously thought fit that bill, and with its grainy aesthetic, this feels like a collection of videos one could have found during a YouTube search at 3am one morning. Unhinged and aggressively oppressive, the film is a shapeshifting horror film that finds all of its horror out of the potential that one day, when we as a society find our moral compass no longer in use, these will be the men and women we have become. And the glee Korine seems to take in that is just as haunting and worthy of note.

Speaking of the film’s grainy aesthetic, this may be one of the most beautifully shot pictures you’ll ever see. I say it’s truly beautiful in that it plays perfectly into the bleak, base level nature of both the characters and the acts they follow through on. Shot on VHS and ultimately blown up to 35mm for its brief theatrical run, the film is a series of sequences that are as haunting and unforgettable as anything Korine has ever put on the screen. Grainy, as grimy as a back alley and when the night sequences come on, the film becomes drenched in a brooding sense of dread that is forever hanging over this film’s head like a cloud.  With a brisk runtime of just 77 minutes, the film may still rub many a viewer the wrong way, but Korines use not only of VHS as a format (he also edited the film on VHS) but as a means to tell a story that is almost entirely conceptual, almost entirely aesthetic, almost entirely based on one’s willingness to be unnerved by these grotesque monsters. Now, while the film does get momentarily preachy (Korine pops up in a wig and mask to speak about how they are free of the rest of the world’s infatuation with being trapped in a grind brought on by a 9-to-5 lifestyle), even that pacing killer of a monologue speaks to the film’s thrilling sense of complete sense-based bombast. Speaking directly to the person behind the camera, ostensibly the viewer, the monologue (and the film as a whole) pulls no punches about what it is trying to say. These people don’t mean to do wrong. Look at the film’s final, completely breathtaking, shot. These people just lack one thing guiding them, morals. Toss in some brief questioning by an elderly woman about God’s lack of interest in guiding her, and you have a film that is as layered intellectually as it appears to be simplistic aesthetically.

With a DVD that is allegedly out of stock (as per the film’s official site), a new release on both DVD and Blu-ray could be enticing. The transfer would look rather stunning with a good bit of care, because while the source material is admittedly poor, it’s no less visually awe-inspiring. A collection of short films and deleted scenes adorned the release, and with Korine always willing to talk about his work (even if it is in esoteric ways) even more materials could be mined. The promotional artwork for the film is equally as off-putting and eye grabbing, and could make for one hell of a cover for a potential Criterion release. Now, while his work, and this film in particular, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, Harmony Korine is a filmmaker unlike any other there is currently working. And for that singularity, this release is one that this writer believes should happen, no matter the cost.