More Shots out at Slavery: The Gummo Beloved
Harmony Korine is guilty of not making white supremacist cinema. To say this again, in other, properly assimilated words, Harmony Korine wanted to make films inspired by his direct contact with social and natural environments. Harmony Korine calls this direct contact “realism.” In his IndieWire.com interview he says:
I’m obsessed with realism. The only thing that matters to me in film and artwork is realism or the presentation of realism. But, at the same time, I realize that film can never be real and that movies are never real, even documentary falls short. Cinema verite is a fallacy. There is still a kind of manipulation involved.
1997 saw the release of Gummo. It’s an exploded view of “Middle America.” Korine declares:
I always felt that Middle America was interesting. Anytime that people do films about America, it’s always this kind of romanticized version, something that is just false, and I think it’s disgusting. I grew up in Nashville, so I wanted to make a movie with those people I grew up with. I wanted to make the first great American film about America, because I’m an American artist.
So dig baby: I would love to compare the box office or DVD receipts of Oprah Winfrey’s Beloved to Gummo. Perhaps the moneys will back me up when I say that Harmony Korine did more to communicate real, American whiteness to the world—the old-school whiteness capable of living with something so horrible as chattel slavery—than the excellent work of Jonathan Demme. The strong opinion here is that Harmony Korine successfully got his slavery message across without using a single Negro actor in costume chains.
See that black cat at the right. In the rasx() context, that cat represents an enslaved human being. Any random abuse the poor kids in Gummo want to pour out on the black cat has very little to do with sophisticated, intellectual, Bible-inspired, black-cat hatred. They just fuck with the cats because they, themselves, are all fucked up. In the fiction, the black cats are hunted for money by many characters in the film. And their motives and regard for the animals is very nonchalant, non-conscious, habitual. These American children live with a level of violence that makes great soldiers. This explains why the confederate army was so hard to beat at the beginning of the Civil War and how America kicks ass as the Fallujah policemen of the world. Elite, educated, white supremacists would never want this style and these themes to become a part of American youth culture. When white poverty is forced to see itself “realistically” it could get more difficult to raise an army. They don’t have time to give peace a chance because war makes too much money for the few and the proud: the elites.
There is a prostitution scene in Gummo with a mentally handicapped girl that eerily resembles a scene written by Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved where a father and son keep an adolescent African girl as a sex slave. Hey kids, you don’t need pornography and prostitution when you have cows and chattel slavery… White liberal Hollywood formalism needs to explain why this would be happening or such a scene would be “too problematic” to translate to film. Harmony Korine shows how such a scene should be done. Gummo explains to those rich white kids who don’t go to war—and some will grow up and have to explain themselves to the world on top of some bullshit Heritage Foundation—what it feels like to be poor and white. No delicate, scholarly edifices here—just raw whiteness. I am sure there are some liars out there proclaiming that the realism in Gummo is unrealistic.