Har­mo­ny Korine’s Gum­mo and America’s haunt­ed Deep South

It’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that when Gum­mo first screened back in 1997, it was met with walk­outs and dis­gust. It’s a film that has degen­er­a­cy and pover­ty greas­ing its blue-col­lar cogs. Fol­low­ing dis­en­fran­chised Mid­west­ern peo­ple liv­ing in the wake of a dev­as­tat­ing tor­na­do (based on the real-life storm that destroyed the town of Xenia, Ohio in 1974), Har­mo­ny Korine’s urgent direc­to­r­i­al debut marks a nihilis­tic and inti­mate peel­ing away of America’s skin to reveal the fes­ter­ing sores beneath. The filthy homes of Xenia stand as sepul­chres to the Amer­i­can Dream, and the denizens of the ema­ci­at­ed town walk among its tomb­stones as ghosts of a coun­try that has for­got­ten them.

Sit­ting at the heart of Korine’s sto­ry is Jacob Reynolds’ Solomon, the film’s cat-mur­der­ing, glue-huff­ing chief enfant ter­ri­ble. Solomon spends his days roam­ing the rub­bish-strewn streets of his neigh­bour­hood on his bike along­side Tumm­ler (Nick Sut­ton), a teenag­er who Solomon describes in voiceover as ​“down­right evil” but with ​“what it takes to be a leg­end”. Theirs is a world that exists in a pur­ga­to­r­i­al fugue state, defined by parental neglect and a nihilism that runs through to their core. The youth in Korine’s film – his very own lost gen­er­a­tion – are the spec­tres of immoral­i­ties past, car­ry­ing out the vio­lence of their ances­try as nat­u­ral­ly as a child learns to walk.

Since the writ­ings of Flan­nery O’Connor, William Faulkn­er and oth­ers, the South­ern Goth­ic genre has imbued all that resides below the Mason-Dixon line with a dark, creep­ing shad­ow. It’s a peren­ni­al focus in cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion – True Detective’s land­mark first sea­son bears its great­est glo­ries in recent years – but Korine’s dystopi­an art­house flick stands as the genre’s buried secret. In 1997 Amer­i­ca sim­ply wasn’t ready to look into the smudged mir­ror held up by Korine and see its own blood­shot gaze star­ing back. Rarely has the Mid­west been por­trayed as authen­ti­cal­ly and hon­est­ly as here, and nowhere have white pick­et fences become so divorced from the idylls of sub­ur­ban life, replaced instead with chain­link mem­o­ries of a vio­lent childhood.

As is typ­i­cal of South­ern Goth­ic, the film’s plot is reliant more on the set­ting and char­ac­ters than any clear sense of nar­ra­tive lin­ear­i­ty. Gum­mo flits through its run­ning time with a series of vignettes, a hol­i­day reel of vaca­tion pho­tos best left in the attic. Fer­al cats are hunt­ed and sold to the local Chi­nese restau­rant; a dis­abled girl is pimped out by her old­er broth­er; a man wres­tles an old kitchen chair in a trail­er as he is cheered on by a small crowd. Life in Xenia is sta­t­ic. The tor­na­do that book­ends the film is a cycli­cal reminder of life’s futil­i­ty, and Korine’s world­view inci­sive­ly cuts to the dark heart of white mid­dle America.