Did Harmony Korine put a real-life corpse in a 2000s film?
It’s a surface-level observation, but one that bears mentioning, that one of the most delightful ironies in cult film is the fact that the first name of Harmony Korine is, y’know, Harmony – with a name like that, he could only become what he is today, one of the most proudly divisive and controversial filmmakers of his era.
I mean, this was a man whose big break in the industry was writing the screenplay to Kids when he was 20 years old, a film that depicted underage sex and drug taking with an unflinching abandon that showed the grittiness of real-life teenagerdom to an audience that was absolutely not ready to accept it – no matter how raw and honest a representation of his own life it was. Despite it being the single most controversial film of the year, it made stars out of several members of its creative team.
It’s true, Korine wasn’t the only one to make his name off the back of Kids. It made stars out of Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson in front of the camera, but Korine was to continue behind the scenes, moving from writing to directing his first set of films over the next decade. He continued in much the same manner as Kids, but without any of the Hollywood gloss of that film. Still dedicated to showing the dark side of life, but this time, it was the dark side of people who would otherwise never, in a million years, be featured in films.
Gummo, Ken Park, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely and a handful of short films came next, all of which made Korine arguably the most divisive cult filmmaker on the American indie circuit. Which is quite an achievement, let’s be real here. It’s one thing to piss off the mainstream, it’s quite another to take your… Shall we say, a unique creative vision to the very people claiming to clamour for something more radical and dangerous and alienate them too.
The truth is, however, they didn’t know what they had coming. Because in 2009, Korine brought his most bizarre, unsettling and infamous creation to life and, fair play to the man, he did call a spade a spade.
What on Earth is going on in Trash Humpers by Harmony Korine?
Just as Gummo was Korine giving people exactly what they thought Kids was, a twisted, bleak and depressing perversion of childhood innocence, there’s an argument to be made that Trash Humpers was that, but for his entire subsequent filmography. “You think I make nonsensical, disgusting and pretentious garbage with no story, characters or point? I’ll give you nonsensical, disgusting and pretentious garbage with no story, characters or point!”
Trash Humpers is the story of a gang of unhoused people living in a commune in a seemingly abandoned part of Nashville who spend their days… Well, read the title. It’s not even clear whether they’re meant to be elderly people or just wearing masks of elderly people, because the story (for lack of a more accurate word) is so vague that we can’t even tell the precise nature of reality the story is presenting. Are we watching a story presented in an amateurish manner? Are we watching a faux documentary? Is this a found footage film? The choice very much does seem to be yours.
Nowhere is this question of reality more apparent than when the characters stumble upon a dead body. In a film that essentially boils down to a series of nightmarish images viewed through a VHS-quality camera, this is the one part of the film that doesn’t look obviously artificial. In fact, quite the opposite – it’s disturbingly realistic, and it begs a truly horrifying question: is Harmony Korine the kind of director who would trick an audience into viewing an actual dead body in his film?
He’s probably not, but the fact that his films are so purposefully repugnant that we have to ask that question is probably exactly what he’s going for. Say what you like about Harmony Korine, but my God, is he effective at what he does.