The Ecstasy of Those Who Hump Trash

It would be inaccurate to call Trash Humpers a movie. It is more like a psychedelic Nuclear bomb dropped in the middle of suburban America, not doing any damage to the houses, garages, or the parking lots but destroying all sense of language and narrative, leaving behind only a detritus of words, ballads, stories, and actions. Yes, Trash Humpers is stupid if stupidity is a lack of intelligence, intelligence being in the end the mastery of language and narrative. Oh, and Trash Humpers is definitively insane if sanity is a fetish of language and narrative, a condition in which we perfectly repeat the sentences and the stories we are taught and be good boys.

However: I know I sound punk and anti-establishment and all, which is a period Harmony Korine might have gone through in his younger years, but Trash Humpers is the work of no angry teenager. Behind all the vandalism and the havoc and the regression is no simple protest-for-protest's sake. Rather, there is a Korine behind the camera who, as distressed as he might be, is free and secure, and who longs for a particular sensation of ecstasy, the revelation of a certain primordial truth.

What that truth is I can't say, but there is just a sheer, intense wonder at watching them masked people wearing beige khakis, polo shirts and snow white sneakers hump trash cans and destroy old, yellow sofas and tube-televisions in empty parking lots and light firecrackers on abandoned highways and drive around the neighborhood and lament the sadness of suburbia in mumbled falsettos with incomplete sentences. Every image feels viscerally true, without resorting to any idea, symbol or metaphor. It is made all the more immediate as Korine, shooting hand-held with a VHS camera, bypasses anything that might resemble a cinematic, aesthetic language. He just pushes REC and shoot what the hell happens in front of his camera at that given moment.

The result is a found tape that is at once familiar and otherworldly. It is familiar because we have seen this landscape in numerous anonymous home videos and otherworldly because, well, it is quite strange. And this is not unlike the films of another great American filmmaker, David Lynch. Although they are quite different at first sight, I think they follow a similar road in portraying America as a strange, uncanny landscape where a feeling of violence lies behind the most mundane things (for a much more eloquent description of Lynch's cinema see David Foster Wallace's piece on Lost Highway). And Trash Humpers is precisely the unleashing of this violence, which eventually turns into a pure spectacle filled with joy, anger, sadness, and, revenge. Pure not in a kind of restrained aesthetic sense, like pure cinema or something, but just a more immediate, direct access to the essence of the American experience.