In Search of Harmony Korine

By Charlie Fox

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Here’s Harmony Korine on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1997, aged 23, looking like a teenage Walter Benjamin with the voice of a spooked cartoon puppy. We sneak in as he’s mid-sentence, ears cocked, audience gawping: ‘You know James Joyce, Ulysses?’ Scarcely the stuff of Letterman appearances, but then a glorious swerve, a punchline played as non-sequitur: ‘I was just inspired because I used to know Snoop Dogg a long time ago and he was starring in a production of that story.’ And there, in a few lines, is Korine’s description of where his debut film Gummo (1997) came from. He’ll soon tell a bemused Letterman: ‘I’m a commercial filmmaker, I’m a patriot, I hide in trees,’ then a riot of applause will break out and we’ll cut to a commercial break.

This is a strange scene, and in miniature it maps out Korine’s domain: trash-surrealist juxtaposition, deadpan incongruity, mischief. He’s long concocted art films – experimental, raucous, deformed, mostly starless – from junk: juveniles, Satanic teens, satyr-like rappers and now Disney Channel girls in the lurid fantasia of Spring Breakers (2013). But the precise method of this alchemy matters little, what fascinates is that strangeness. Across his various works, this is what Korine has supplied in a manic profusion: weird tableaux, surreal mixtures, hallucinations of North American trash. Photographs and fragments, taken from his films and elsewhere, provide an oblique portrait of the filmmaker – and his films are always portraits of some damaged contingent: mesmeric waifs, drug-addled teens, celebrity impersonators, a depraved group of aged vandals or, in solitude, a starving magician. By contemplating stills and stray fragments, an image adrift can become strangely more meaningful than a whole film.

What follows is a perverse sort of homage, not so much non-linear as erratic. In Korine’s films, everything drifts. Plot matters little, and instead there comes a sprawling sequence of artfully arranged moments, interludes, digressions and echoes. Perhaps his reputation lies in purveying stretches of grotesquerie meant to make you shudder and stare. But they are fascinating, delirious works made from weird passions, entrancing and sinister, woozy and purposefully aimless, their mood pitched between a strange kind of calm and utter lunacy.

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When I was 16, I asked Korine a question. Pale, jittery and in the throes of a particularly extreme obsession with his strange work, I yelped through a malfunctioning microphone towards the distant director: ‘Why did you want to work with Macaulay Culkin on that Sonic Youth video?’ He told me the boy reminded him of James Dean, especially in his last film, Giant (1956). Strange, I thought, to use a star as an impersonation of another, as an echo, rather than for their own resonance. That was at the National Film Theatre in London. Korine was there with his comeback film Mister Lonely (2007), about a commune of celebrity impersonators. He has always been fascinated by fame, especially the sort surrounded by rumour and weird myth. In Gummo, a perverted cab driver does little more than recite many scurrilous rumours: ‘Tupac Shakur stuttered, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Warren Oates swallowed his chewing tobacco spittle…’ Child stars, especially those who vanish or flee their fame, accrue myths like so much shadow. None more so than Culkin who has been, according to rumour, variously dead, near-death or addicted to drugs ever since he retreated from stardom. In the video, an eerily serene film, he becomes an incarnation of all these anxieties: a leering, burnt-out monster. The adolescent recluse, who had famously retired at 14, staggers out into the spotlight (inhabitants in a Korine film often seem half-awake, almost mid-dream) and smoulders with sinister eroticism, his blood-red lips blossoming in slow motion.

Orson Welles recalled that, before every take her daughter performed, Shirley Temple’s mother would tell her, ‘Remember, Shirley, sparkle!’ and Korine’s film is a study of Culkin’s corroded ‘sparkle’, which has turned sinister but keeps him hypnotic. His nearest relation is herself a witchlike double of Temple, the little girl in the first shot of William Egglestone’s glorious ‘home movie’ Stranded in Canton (1973) who stares darkly into the distance, utterly still, as if under some sinister enchantment. Time seems to have almost paused to lead us into the drowned world of the scene. And a similar druggy, dreamlike languor reigns over Korine’s video: Culkin in junkie swoon, tempo opiated, echoing the lines of the song as it ‘seems to move so slow’. There is an echo, too, of Korine’s explanation for his addictions: ‘The drugs were a way for me to slow things down.’

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A boy is woken from his sleep by a song. Robert Mitchum, playing the psychotic Reverend Harry Powell, appears by moonlight in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1953), his baritone booming through the dark. ‘Leanin’, leanin’ on the everlasting love!’ he sings. Chloë Sevigny murmurs the same song in Korine’s Julien Donkey-boy (1999); she conducts the cornfield and it nods sleepily, her hair a mass of Harpo-like curls. Pearl is her name, a purposeful double of the little girl’s name in Laughton’s film. Their kinship, though, runs deeper: there is also the matter of light. Laughton’s film is all silver and magical shadow, a supernatural luminosity suffuses everything. A residue of it remains in Julien Donkey-boy where the air glitters, all honeyed light and wintry gloom, ash and atmospheric pollution. The marvel of the film (beneath everything which is traumatic, addled, bizarre) is the splendour of its surfaces.

The other bond between them is Laughton’s image of a fantastical Deep South which is heavily imprinted on Korine’s work. This is an Expressionist wilderness. Night is otherworldly: owls haunt the trees, the sky remains eerily aglow. Like The Night of The Hunter, Gummo is lurid and yet deeply contemplative, sometimes spellbound by its own movements and inhabitants. It transcribes the elusive climate of dreams, their feel of aimlessness and dislocation, non-sequiturs, weird jolts and flashes of vaguely significant things. A parade of strange images: two albino sisters walking home in the twilight with a certain sprawl like enormous bored cats, a boy with pink rabbit ears wandering through junkyards, a little girl with a defaced portrait of Burt Reynolds stuck to her face like a makeshift mask shouting, ‘I want a moustache, dammit!’ Throughout the film it feels like you’ve wandered into a haunted space, the site of some unique deforming weather that makes everything slow and odd. Perhaps all these films (and Gummo especially) come from this darkness in the landscape.

The foreboding silhouette in the frame, singing in the white night, isn’t Mitchum astride a horse but a midget upon a donkey. Somehow this peculiar detail doesn’t spook the mystery of the image away but deepens it. I think of the black dwarf in Gummo who cheerily defeats a yokel at arm wrestling, the boy who rode a pig named Trotsky in his unfinished script What Makes Pistachio Nuts? and Korine excitedly telling Letterman (another sublimely strange utterance) that he wanted to make a movie about Eddie Gaedel, the midget baseball player.

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‘My dad used to be a tap-dancer, he hung out with the Nicholas Brothers…’ Here’s Korine on Letterman in 1995, putting himself in the traditions of vaudeville. Though his father was a filmmaker who made films about the folk traditions of the Deep South – moonshiners, carnivals and ‘mouth music’ – this little bit of myth-making has a purpose. Korine’s work is an index of various obsessions: gangsta rap, gleeful depravity, Herzog’s films, insanity… – tap-dancing appears repeatedly. The art requires a bedazzling mixture of manic energy and elegance that seems somehow unearthly, it’s the mode of dance that longs to become levitation.

In Jonas Mekas’s archives, there’s a video of Korine performing a tap-dance. He mumbles about Flashdance and Busby Berkeley’s films, his hair in electro-shock spikes, his voice smoked-out and his sentences broken. This is one of the few recordings from his five or six years of disintegration brought on by numerous addictions, house fires and profound disenchantment with his art. For all his stagger and vacancy, the dance is a joy: demented, all clatter and anarchy, like a scarecrow in the middle of a seizure, or the chicken’s jittery little steps at the end of Herzog’s Stroszek (1977).

As deeply as Korine is fascinated by trashiness, there’s also a deep, lingering affection for the old, weird American school of entertainment. Tap-dancing is part of a repertoire of magical, bygone acts that appear in his films alongside Groucho’s wisecracks (Gummo was, incidentally, the fifth Marx Brother who left to fight in World War I, then sold raincoats), slapstick and cigarette eating, and scattered echoes of its fondness for the repulsive spectacle of blackface and minstrelsy. With their acts transferred often intact onto the cinema screen, these manic routines became among the first entertainments in the cinema, those comical one-reelers. Recalling the films of these ‘show people’ he’d watched as a child, Korine said: ‘There’s almost a poetry or a strange insanity to what they did. When I was a kid, I would watch their films and I almost couldn’t figure out how they existed […] It was like they hovered above reality.’ Perhaps all his films are about these people who do not seem quite real; strange, surreal creatures.

Tap-dancing of a more classical kind appears in this little interlude from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The dancer provides a masterful switch between birdlike flutter, clockwork jerkiness and eerie glide. He’s momentarily in duet with Linda Manz who leaps from the frame after a few hesitant steps. After a long absence from the cinema, she appears in Gummo, delivering a monologue about old tap shoes in memory of Marlene Dietrich. The African-American dancer looks incongruously refined in the parched landscape: his bowler hat and waistcoat making him a peculiar double of Chaplin’s tramp.

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Paul McCarthy, Rocky (1976)

This is a still from Paul McCarthy’s film Rocky (1976), which is intended to stand in for Korine’s unreleased film Fight Harm (1998, unreleased, Korine claims, owing to the poor quality of its camera-work). In this 21-minute film, a naked McCarthy fights thin air and punches himself repeatedly in the head, sometimes slathers his genitals with ketchup, masturbates and growls throughout like a dying King Kong, all whilst wearing a grotesque rubber mask complete with bloated nose and drooping mouth. The Italian Stallion is transformed into a lumbering oaf, a deformed masochist oddly premonitory of De Niro towards the end of Raging Bull (1980). There’s no trace of the triumphant underdog, only a sustained study in abjection. But it’s also strangely comic; a kind of failed comedy suggested by the cartoonish mask and the smeared ketchup which spurts out in place of blood, a reminder of fake Hollywood violence. There’s also the comedy of repetition and time. Like Stallone, it’s comic that he just keeps fighting. In Korine’s film, he roamed the streets of New York, intoxicated, and started fights which he’d usually lose.

‘It’s high comedy’, he said, ‘like Buster Keaton’. Lacking Keaton’s animal grace, he’d settle for his injuries. The comedy would come, he said, from the repetition, as if Korine was Wile E. Coyote out of his head or one of the burglars maimed by Culkin in Home Alone (1990), doomed to a never-ending defeat. The routines of slapstick would turn real and so, become somehow funnier. Never completed owing to Korine’s injuries, you can guess its effects would come close to McCarthy’s Rocky: a mixture of repulsion, weariness and anxiety. Korine’s films are about extreme states- the dispossession that comes from impersonating someone else, mental illness and violence- and sometimes gruelling, but they are also obscurely damaged, strangely stitched together.

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Diane Arbus, Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, New York (1963)

Every still has its echoes. Every time I look at this image I think of the speedfreaks in Larry Clark’s book Tulsa (1971), the delinquent friends he started photographing the same year Arbus took this shot. And I turn to the three nude bodies gathered together on a bed towards the end of that book, when everyone’s haggard and damaged, staring intently at the needle slipping into the middle figure’s arm.

High above their heads, at the very edge of the frame, is a little Hollywood incongruity: Lon Chaney Jr. playing the monster in a horror movie I can’t name, looking haunted, drooling blood. Then I remember the strange way a scene is punctuated in Kids (1995), which Korine wrote for Clark: an amputee appears on the train, chanting ‘I have no legs!’, as if he’s come through the door between Korine’s work and Clark’s studies of teenage lust. Sometimes in Arbus, there’s also an echo of Fellini who had a similar predilection for the more ‘freakish’ sorts of circus folk: hermaphrodites, transsexuals, dwarves and giants. Arbus took them as subjects, too. (Intermittently, her photographs look like Fellini tableaux with all the mischief and jollity beaten out of them.) Her famous and deeply disquieting line echoes, too: ‘Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot.’ There is always a similar anxiety about Korine’s use of people with Down’s Syndrome, dwarves, amputees, albinos, the blind, as if they became merely aesthetic objects whose misfortune carried with it a sort of macabre fascination. (Like Arbus, though, there is a deep tenderness there, too).

I put this last snapshot down in place of the many adolescents in Korine’s work: stoned boys on the couch towards the end of a party in Kids, a girl looking at the sky, bored, glue-sniffers sprawled under the lukewarm sun, Little Red Riding Hood on a blue afternoon, Sevigny wandering through New York like a wounded foal. Spring Breakers (none of the images from the film possess any allure for me) is about teenagers, too, straight from the beaches on MTV– ‘subversive’, I guess, that they’d end up there, like Dorothy thrown out of Kansas and into Hell but… strangely empty, a kind of trick John Waters perfected decades before.

Arbus was also a supreme recorder of adolescence in a way which is scarcely caught elsewhere; a time of mania, innermost contortion, stupor and despair. Think of her store of strange images that contemplate adolescent bodies: the Republican boy whose face is ablaze with acne, the boy on the cusp of his teens in Central Park with his crooked, claw-like hand, the portrait of Marcella Matthaei. Another line from Arbus also echoes: ‘Freaks are aristocrats.’

The critic Serge Daney defined cinephilia as a matter of ‘not just the films you watch but the films that watch over you,’ as if certain works never ended and commenced instead some permanent angelic intimacy with you, the solitary viewer. During my adolescence, I felt that Korine’s films were my angels: demented and misshapen maybe, but we don’t all feel Scorsese or Bergman at our side. I always imagine Korine’s angels look like this.

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