Gummo is a 1997 American independent film written and directed by Harmony Korine. It was his directorial debut and has since become a cult film. The film stars Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Jacob Sewell, Chloë Sevigny, Linda Manz and Max Perlich. Rather than following a linear plot, the film is a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes depicting the hopeless, nihilistic lives of fictional residents of a small Ohio town that had been previously stricken by a tornado.
Plot
The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a small town hit by a tornado in 1974. The film depicts Xenia as the home of various oddball and somewhat disturbing backwater characters. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other denizens of the town.
The film opens with a grainy voiced narrator recounting the events of the tornado while disturbing home-movie images play — mostly of the town's people. Following the narration, the credits roll over a montage of a pre-adolescent boy, known as Bunny Boy, wearing only pink bunny ears,shorts and tennis shoes on an overpass in the rain.
The next scene opens with a cat being carried by the scruff of its neck by a teenage boy. He drowns the cat in a barrel of water. The film then cuts to a different boy, Tummler, in a wrecked car with a girl. They fondle each other, and Tummler realizes there is a lump in one of the girl's breasts.
Tummler and Solomon then ride down a hill on bikes. The narrator introduces Tummler as a boy with "a marvelous persona", whom some people call "downright evil". Later, Tummler aims an air rifle at a cat. His friend Solomon stops him from killing the cat, protesting that it is a house cat. They leave and the camera follows the cat to its owners' house. The cat is owned by three sisters, two of whom are teenagers and one who is pre-pubescent.
The film cuts back to Tummler and Solomon, who are hunting feral cats. They bring the cats to a local grocer, who intends to butcher and sell them to a local restaurant, and the grocer tells them that they have a rival in the cat killing business. They then buy glue from the grocer, which they use to get high via huffing.
The film then cuts to a scene in which two young boys dressed as cowboys curse and destroy things in a junkyard. Bunny Boy arrives and the other boys shoot him "dead" with cap-guns. Bunny Boy plays dead and the boys curse at him, rifle through his pockets, then remove and throw one of his shoes. They grow bored of this and leave him sprawled on the ground.
Tummler and Solomon track down a local boy who is poaching "their" cats. The poacher is poisoning the cats rather than shooting them. When Tummler and Solomon break into the poacher's house, they find disturbing photos of the young teen in drag and his elderly grandmother, who is catatonic and attached to life support machinery. The poacher is forced to care for her, which he had earlier opined was "disgusting." Tummler shows signs of sympathy for him and turns off the grandmother's life support, saying she is "dead inside."
A number of other scenes are interspersed throughout the film, including: an intoxicated man (played by Harmony Korine) flirting with a gay little person; a man prostituting his Down syndrome sister to Solomon and Tummler; the sisters encountering a child molester; a pair of twins selling candy door-to-door (which they steal the money from); a brief conversation with a tennis player who is treating his ADD; A long scene of Solomon taking a bath in brown water; a drunken party with arm- and chair-wrestling; and two skinhead brothers slap-fighting. A number of even smaller scenes depicting satanic rituals, racist conversations, and some disturbing hygiene round out the film.
The final scene in the movie is set to the song 'Crying' by Roy Orbison, which had been previously mentioned by Tummler as the song his older brother would sing (the brother eventually went to the "Big City" and abandoned him). The final scene involves Solomon and Tummler shooting the sisters' cat repeatedly with their air rifles in the rain with jump cuts to Bunny Boy kissing the teenage girls in a swimming pool. The film ends with Bunny Boy running towards the camera through a field holding the body of the dead cat, which he displays prominently.
Cast
- Jacob Sewell as Bunny Boy
- Patrick Daly as Tummler
- Jacob Reynolds as Solomon
- Jack Latham as Darby
- Chloë Sevigny as Dot
- Harmony Korine as Boy on Couch
- Max Perlich as Cole
- Linda Manz as Solomon's Mom
- Mark Gonzales as Chair Wrestler
- Michael Banks as The Redneck
Production
Pre-production
In writing Gummo , Korine abandoned traditional three-act plot structure and worked to avoid creating characters of a clear-cut moral dimension. In favor of a collage-like assembly, Korine focused on forming interesting moments and scenes, that when put in succession would become its own unique narrative. To justify such a chaotic assembly, Korine set his film in Xenia, Ohio which had been hit by a tornado in 1974.
To help him achieve his vision, Korine sought out French cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier. His work on Leos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf made a tremendous impression on Korine. Escoffier, who liked the script, worked on Gummo for a fraction of his usual rate.
During the months of pre-production, Korine scouted for locations in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, filming unusual and distinctive homes to shoot in. Korine often approached people on the street, in bowling alleys and in fast food restaurants and asked them to play a part in his movie. Korine notes, "This is where I grew up. These people are interesting to me, and I'd never seen them represented on screen in a true way."
Chloë Sevigny designed the costumes for the film, mixing pieces that people already owned with items bought at local thrift stores.
Casting
Korine cast the film almost entirely with local non-actors. Old friends were eager to help Korine, such as the two skinhead brothers, skateboarder Mark Gonzales, and little person Bryant Krenshaw. Some exceptions include Korine's then-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny, Linda Manz, and Max Perlich.
On Linda Manz Korine stated, "I had always admired her. There was this sense about her that I liked - it wasn't even acting. It was like the way I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about her, a glow. They both burnt off the screen." (See Days of Heaven) Gummo was her first screen appearance in 25 years.
Korine spotted his two main characters while watching cable television. Korine noticed Jacob Reynolds as an extra in The Road To Wellville . "He was so visual... I never get tired of looking at his face." The character of Solomon, played by Reynolds, is described in Korine's script as looking "like no other kid in the world."
Nick Sutton (Tummler) was spotted on a drug prevention episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show called "My Child Died From Sniffing Paint". In the show they ask Sutton where he thinks he will be in a few years, to which he responds, "I'll probably be dead." Recalls Korine, "I saw his face and I thought that was the boy I dreamed of, that was my Tummler. There was a beauty about him." Producer Scott Macaulay on Sutton stated, "He's this person that Harmony sort of found and put in the middle of this movie, which is at times realistic and at times magical. I think of Nick as being Harmony's equivalent of Herzog's Bruno S." (See The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser & Stroszek).
Korine cast his actors not by how they read lines, but by the visual aura they put off.
Shooting
The film was shot in some of Nashville's poorest neighborhoods. Producer Cary Woods comments, "we're essentially seeing the kind of poverty that we're used to seeing in Third World countries when news crews are covering famines, seeing that in the heart of America." One small home housed fifteen people and several thousand cockroaches. Bugs literally crawled up and down the walls. Korine comments, "we had to take out stuff to be able to put the camera in the room." At times, the crew rebelled against filming in such conditions and Korine was forced to purchase hazmat suits for them to wear. Korine and Escoffier, who thought this was offensive, "wore Speedos and flip-flops just to piss them off."
Korine encouraged improvisation and spontaneity. To achieve this, Korine had to establish a mode of trust. "If an actor is a crack smoker, let him go out between takes, smoke crack, and then come back and throw his refrigerator out the window! Let people feel they can do whatever they want with no consequence." Producer Scott Macaulay commented the improvisational methods yielded deep results for everyone involved. "For a lot of the non-actors, you sensed that it was a very emotional experience for them, and that they were tapping into something important." Korine adds, "I wanted to show what it was like to sniff glue. I didn't want to judge anybody. This is why I have very little interest in working with actors. can give you what an actor can never give you: pieces of themselves."
Korine wanted each scene to be shot with different visual looks and styles. While many scenes are shot in traditional pre-planned 35mm, Korine handed out 8mm, 16mm, Polaroid, VHS and Hi-8 cameras to his crew, friends and family to achieve an enhanced collage-like style. "I wanted everything to feel that it was done for a r
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