Gummo (1997)

Gummo is a beautiful film about; memory, identity, perception, loss, and a seemingly chaotic but completely harmonious life, rather both.  The film begins and ends with the image of a tornado.  In the opening Solomon talks about "the great tornado" and how "houses were split open and you could seen necklaces hanging from branches of trees."  "I saw a girl fly through the sky, and I looked up her skirt."  These simple lines tell what Gummo is about.  The veil is lifted and things are no longer grounded and concrete, and we can see what we couldn't see before.  Houses are no longer enclosed dwellings, and nothing is separate, objects and the memories and ideas attached to them have become scattered and thrown together in the fierce wind and the light.  People seem free-er and looser but if anything it is a tighter community, with no boundaries of taste.  The order of things no longer seems continual, and the way things were before is told through abstract, random sentences that tell themselves.

"My dad was mugged on Martin Luther King jr. day.  For the rest of his days, my dad never celebrated this holiday."  Solomon shows how people are defined by the experiences they've had and how identity is shaped, any other day wouldn't have made a difference but for the name "Martin Luther King jr."  Similarly at the end of the film, even more explanatory, the retarded lady with the baby dolls lies in bed and sings "yes jesus loves me, yes jesus loves me, yes jesus loves me, for the bible tells me so."  There is no clever little irony here or in the way it is presented, she is stating that jesus loves her because the bible tells her so and that's her truth.  Everyone has their own truth in this film which they are confined to and tell, but which all seems to add up to the same thing, it's just that the names and labels are all different.  The tornado that split the house open has mixed everything up so everything seems to join together.  Throughout the film Tummler and Solomon search the debris filled town for the last remnant of the old life.  "Dogs died, cats died."  The cat is a wandering animal by nature, and they hunt stray cats for money to fund their glue sniffing habit.  The last house cat "Foot Foot," has gone missing, and three girls go searching for it between tying tape to their nipples for a "better nipple" which could almost be some bad parody of an advert, talking to some boy who has ADD, and who was saved by ADD, as before he knew he had ADD he thought there was something wrong with him and lacked self-esteem and wouldn't go the extra mile.  In the term ADD he found his truth and the drug ritalin is his sacrament.  In the search for cats, the two boys come across a competitor, a cross-dresser who takes care of his granny.  After soliciting the services of a down's syndrome prostitute, for some last comfort, they find the rival's cat traps near a power station and unamused with the loss of the cats that feed their cheap glue-fuelled euphoria they break into the tranny's house, and discover, among other things, his granny, a vegetable kept alive on a life support machine.  The tranny has to clean up around her, which he hates.  Discovering the problem, the cause Jarrod's problems and the subsequent cat shortage because of his need to kill cats, they switch off the machine, because it is a lie, and she is no longer alive inside.  Balance is soon restored when the rain washes it all clean.

Throughout the film are seemingly random but actually very deliberate images.  The boy in the bunny ears with the skateboard rides down hill with arms outstretched, in the middle of the film, whereas once he kicked impotently at the stream of traffic on the freeway against the metal cage of the overpass.  At one  point he plays chords over and over on an accordian painted in blue and red, in the stall of a bathroom among empty stalls as the camera panned over them.  And that's it really, just playing the same chords over and over in a bathroom stall.  Like all great films it works both literally and metaphorically, the difference no longer relevant.  The characters are all symbolic entities of the same thing, but are still characters and real people.  Characters have their own way of communicating with one another.  A couple in the bowling alley scream and yelp at each other like animals.  In another scene Solomon has a bath and eats dinner at the same time (everything in the film makes less sense within the boundaries of taste, yet is strangely more practical), eating a chocolate bar and spaghetti at the same time in dirty water.  His hair is shampooed up into a point, which bends and falls as it does.  In the final scene, the rain finally falls to Roy Orbision's "Crying" and as the last house cat is killed Tummler and Solomon finally accept, and the dead house-cat is held up to the camera by Bunny-boy in a final gesture to show that it is finally dead, then finally back to the tornado, and in the end all is put back together again and this Xenia is just a dream.

There is no real violence in the film.  There is nothing mean or sadistic.  The only violence of the film is the two skinhead brothers brawling in the kitchen, and even that is just mutual play, and a demonstration of the primal, raw feeling behind everyday life, as Solomon tells us about the two boys who had perfect, clicked back hair, perfectly brushed teeth and were always smart, who killed their parents, and that he didn't know what went wrong.  It's merely what is behind the person, and everyone is without that, but also within it.