Trash Humpers

As a child, I really only cared about the first acts of films. Everything else kind of annoyed me - it lost the wonder of establishing ideas, of the new. Once we were in motion for things that "made sense," it felt stale and derivative. We set a stage, and now it needs paying off. Blah blah blah... Later in life, I'd find Korine - a match made in heaven, instantly. Trash Humpers might be my favorite so far. The most disturbing realization I had during my viewing was that things weren't becoming progressively more or less disturbing - just a constant sickness and apathy. Endless singular emotions - that's how life is anyway, so sure. But it's gross and scary; it's uneasing not truly because of the content itself, but because of that quiet horror of nothing ever changing. I guess Gummo being the world Korine grew up in, projected outward, makes a lot more sense this way - and his fixation on a morphing stasis. Here, you’ll find his even stronger fixation on a morphing divinity. Not just in the way his actors spontaneously choose to improvise their performances, but in the way his camera spontaneously improvises its reactions to environment. There's a science here, there's a pattern - but it’s so unfathomably complex that as far we know it's divine. Random and horrifying - the human brain in its articulation of consciousness is to the VHS in its articulation of the process of that horror - is to all those ends Trash Humpers - Harmony Korine.