TRASH HUMPERS

Tired vocabulary like “enfant terrible” and “provocation” is a constant threat when writing about Harmony Korine. Trash Humpers is no exception: creepy masks, lowgrade torture, frequent public urination, senseless vandalism and the title, acted out on defenseless garbage cans, all have a confrontational panache about them to be sure. But the film is also full of poetry, dance, song and moments of aching poignancy.
Such is the dilemma with Korine and his remarkable career; for all the fireworks, there is an impressive coherence in the subject matter of his work. His feature films all seek to shed light on a certain class of people: unique and bizarre individuals usually lumped under the heading of “subculture”. Poor but not destitute, subject to state disinterest, anti-social and often violent, these are the contemporary equivalent of Brothers Grimm villains, the scary witches in America’s woods. Vilified by the right and condescended to by the left, their official narrative is one of cliché and fake melodrama in Hollywood cinema. Korine reclaims them as individuals through the lens of an unironic but corrosive wit and a bracing sense of the macabre. They are like the denizens of an overly familiar cautionary tale, the post-apocalyptic now. (Noah Cowan)