No-budget Harmony Korine shows the narrow-minded normality of TV culture the finger
The uncontrollable provo-auteur of American film, Harmony Korine, is back in 'Gummo'-land with his brand new outsider exposé, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic America on the other side of financial crises, tornado tragedies and terrorist attacks. It's Halloween all year round for Harmony Korine, whose borderless no budget aesthetic has set a fashion far beyond the field of filmmaking. The masked 'Trash Humpers' of his fourth film are no exception, and they embark on a senseless spree of performative vandalism and bizarre songs, as if they were in-bred members of a family consisting of chainsaw massacrers and Tod Browning's circus freaks. Korine has filmed his sarcastic parody of the sleek shock value aesthetics of reality show culture with an antiquated video format with frequent blackouts, and he dissolves any kind of meaningful differentiation of genres with his handheld vérité recordings of the grotesque human inferno of invisible America. Field trip or fiction? Actually: both. And on this point he is in line with the ideal of his mentor Werner Herzog about depicting an ecstatic truth.
