Was Crumb right?

It was in my junior year of college that I watched through Terry Zwigoff’s filmography and was stunned and amused by his wry humor and frank honesty about American ways of thinking and life. It also stunned me that he made so few films and basically no features following his last movie Art School Confidential, in 2006. The last bit of news I had heard about him was that he was commissioned to do a billboard for the GAP clothing brand, which he found disingenuous, especially since he had “spent a lot of time… trying to have some sort of social and cultural critique of contrived consumerism”.

His greatest film in my estimation, was his landmark 1994 documentary Crumb, focused on counterculture underground comix writer Robert Crumb. Similar to several of Zwigoff’s narrative film characters, through Crumb’s artistic work – often presenting an ironic view of an oblivious and increasingly cluttered and cacophonous American society – he expressed a lamentation of the way the world was unfolding around them and presented characters who tried desperately to cling to an ironically critical view of modernism and retreating to the safety of the ‘old fashioned’. It seemed at least on the surface that Terry Zwigoff had a conscious agreement with the way that Robert Crumb saw the world, but he expressed that it’s not that simple. Yet, their long-standing friendship, which started in the 1970s, manifested into artistic careers that were inextricably linked culturally through fighting the increasingly consumerist and commercial American mindset.

Zwigoff funded Crumb the painful and patient old-fashioned way of American indies, raising money through favors and slowly building the production over the course of nine years. Filmed on 16mm, the movie production was tumultuous not only because of Zwigoff’s financial strife and severe back pain, but also because of the lack of cooperation from Crumb. He was naturally inclined to despise and reject attention and focus from anything even adjacent to a Hollywood production – one of the film’s final scenes was Crumb on the phone, vehemently rejecting an offer by a producer to adapt Mr. Natural into a movie. Zwigoff mentioned how Crumb “did not play along at all” with standard questioning and direction, and “he found it to all be very false, as if he was cooperating in some sort of charade that he didn’t want to be a part of.” This personality is reflected throughout the film, where Crumb is quite frank about not wanting to do promotion or rejecting any sort of filmic adaptations of his work during calls with agents. Robert Crumb drew a comic for the movie succinctly expressing his feelings with the filmmaking process as a subject, where a gigantic camera was pointing down at him in bed, like a beast ready to eat its prey, with Crumb meekly saying “I’m nauseous”.

Despite his apathy to becoming famous and popular, Crumb has become a much more gargantuan figure in art as the years have gone on while Zwigoff has seemingly disappeared from view other than giving an occasional interview. Crumb speaks in the documentary to a group of students as a guest lecturer where he says that the famous “Keep on Truckin’” comic, “often found on mud flaps of large trucks”, caused him immeasurable pain. He goes on to present some of his other work, such as magazine cover art, that he says granted him a measly payday of $600 but CBS stole the rights and it eventually sold anonymously at Sotheby’s for $20,000. Crumb also describes how he had one of his most famous creations, Fritz the Cat, killed off by an ostrich woman to spite Ralph Bakshi’s cartoon adaptation.

Cartoonist Bill Griffith, one of the film’s several interview subjects, says Crumb’s view of the world is “very rare quality especially in America where everyone aspires to be a sellout.” Crumb’s cantankerous and distant relationship with society and his incessant need to keep away and bury himself in his obsession while feeling suffocated by the direction of where American commercialism and consumerism is headed is a feeling I think has become proliferated among the younger generations. His legacy is manifested in his own comic of the small short bitter man looking at the tall well-built “Normal Guy” and saying “Lookit that stupid asshole!”. Our online terminologies of “normie” would be a perfect description for some of the targets of his humor, while our ideas of “incels” and “nice guys” would be a perfect manifestation of Crumb’s self-inserts.

Zwigoff’s work exists in a sort of similar headspace. In Crumb, he juxtaposes Crumb’s ramblings with shots of the advertising-infested streets of downtown – the signs, the music, the promotion, the incessant noise – and then takes to one of Crumb’s most provocative drawings: a man with mouth agape and an erect penis in front of him representing media and promotion and brands ready to ejaculate into it. The man says “gimme gimme gimme” and the cartoon is titled ‘Colonized Minds’. Zwigoff went on to make a few other movies and even garnered an Oscar nomination alongside Daniel Clowes for Ghost World, but his career has been sparse and he has had a difficult time securing financing as well as finding personal projects to make.

Many of his movies including Ghost World feature outsider characters like Seymour (Steve Buscemi), who is a stand-in for both Robert and Charles Crumb, and Enid (Thora Birch), coming to a reckoning with their own alienation in a world that rejects their cultural taste and reclusive personality. Art School Confidential deals intimately with broken idealism and purity of art as its central character Jerome (Max Minghella) comes face to face with a failed artist-turned-alcoholic Jimmy (Jim Broadbent). Such a reckoning has come to Zwigoff during the shift in Hollywood studio thinking in the 21st century. He mentions that studios now weren’t “interested in making a modest amount of money… they want billions… so you can shoot your movie on an iPhone or you can be one of the 10 guys making a Marvel film. I don’t have any interest in that.”

Zwigoff uses Crumb’s art in Crumb in a similar mode of turning subject into object the same way Herzog’s used Timothy Treadwell’s footage in Grizzly Man. It becomes a part of the aesthetic of the frame. Zwigoff spoke on how it was difficult to do this, with the camera being wide while the comics were presented in a vertical portrait plane, but the results are still stupendous. A brilliant sequence late in the film occurs when Zwigoff cross dissolves the frame of Crumb’s ‘A Short History of America’ that shows the transformation of a small farm town into a bustling metropolis of wires and cars and advertisements. It not only really underlines the running theme of both Crumb’s work and the inherent “narrative” within Zwigoff’s documentary (which is bookended by Crumb’s move from California to the French countryside, of which he says “France isn’t perfect, but it is slightly less evil than the United States”) but it also highlights in the most creative way how Crumb’s work could work cinematically, how it told a visual story that could leap beyond the pages it was printed on. It was a sort of coalescence of Crumb and Zwigoff’s artistic impulses into one critical thought on society and American history that they both shared.

The popularity of Crumb in the collective consciousness of young people interested in art is not a coincidence. While the criticisms of his work – namely the sincere misogyny and racism that percolate within its irony – feel out of place with a much more inclusive modern art culture, it’s the sentiments of everything getting out of control, the chaos of signs, logos, wires, fast fashion trends, and the obsession and pressure to buy and consume (what Crumb called “an American horrorshow”) feels in sync with feelings people have about how art and its appreciation have transformed into flat “content” that is “consumed”.

Zwigoff is but one filmmaker whose career has fallen to this exact thing, and it makes Crumb feel even more important today than it’s ever been. In one of the film’s touching sequences, Crumb adjusts the dials on an old analog TV set that is playing black-and-white cartoons. His young daughter watches on, irritated, and remarks “Why does everything have to be old and black-and-white?” Crumb chuckles and says “It’s just better that way.” Some may roll their eyes at the militant countercultural dogma in Crumb’s incurious and reactionary rejection of everything that’s modern, but seeing where consumerist culture in art has led us, can you really blame him?

Published 5 May 2025

Tags: R Crumb Terry Zwigoff