The value of such merciless satire is that it says "Bah!" to the kitsching of America, and to Hollywood and mass consumer culture in general. It's perfect, somehow, that David Lynch should be the film's producer, because his "Eraserhead" is the only other film to capture that same sense of domestic claustrophobia and dread. During these powerful, harrowing scenes, Zwigoff presents a picture of family as common affliction. The movie returns to Charles a number of times, and in each encounter he seems worse, more spectral, less in this world. (The artist's two sisters refused to participate in the film project.) Actually, compared to Charles and Max, the youngest brother-who begs on street corners and meditates on a bed of nails-Robert comes across as verging on normal. Charles comes off as profoundly disturbed, and his own sense of psychic distress was so great that he infected his younger siblings with it. As boys, they created their own world up in their room Dad was physically and emotionally abusive and Mom was a speed freak. It was Charles who first turned Robert on to comic books-not just reading them, making them. There, sitting on the bed in his room, unshaven, unwashed and with a mouthful of rotting teeth, is Charles, who ventured into the world only briefly, failed, then returned home never to set foot outside again. One look at his family in Philadelphia and you see why. His medium is self-loathing and disgust: for the pretty cheerleaders and jocks who laughed at him in the hallways and rejected him for the empty, plastic, fast-food, anything-for-a-buck American culture. ![]() Nothing for Crumb is free, not love, not sex, certainly not family. But Crumb-who favors straw boaters and canes and wears a look of perpetual nausea-couldn't have been less of a hippie. The German George Grosz is an apt comparison, though Hieronymus Bosch is a better one, especially after Crumb began taking LSD and his cartoons erupted with psychedelic images and stoned conceptualism.īecause he was based in San Francisco and did an album cover for Janis Joplin, Crumb was immediately embraced by the counterculture. To validate his claims he brings eminent art critic Robert Hughes onscreen to declare Crumb a "modern Brueghel." Actually, Hughes seems to have dozed off on this one, unless he sees Crumb's masturbatory obsessions and aggression as mere lusty fun. Though Zwigoff trots out a couple of experts to discuss whether Crumb has "gone too far" with some of this, it's much more important to him that the audience recognize Crumb as a significant artist and not merely an underground cult phenom. ![]() Black women are stereotyped as slutty Aunt Jemimas, such as the monster-thighed Angelfood McSpade. In one late cartoon, the author goes so far as to show himself "involved," so to speak, with a headless torso-a fantasy that, he says, freaked out even him. Women are defiled, objectified and mutilated. In Crumb's art, the id runs amok, smashing pieties and throwing down the gauntlet at the feet of political correctness. ![]() His drawings are a deliberate affront to good taste that is their purpose. ![]() As a result, Crumb has something to offend just about everyone. The work itself is brutally-even cruelly-cynical about human desires and motives. And you watch him draw, working his bony, scarecrow fingers in sharp, birdlike movements, translating onto the page what he sees through the dark filter of his satire. Organizing his affairs prior to departure, Crumb sorts though old boxes at his San Francisco house, comments on his career, gossips with old girlfriends and ex-wives, and pays farewell visits to his brothers Max and Charles, back home with Mom in Philadelphia.Īll the while, you can hear the rage and self-pity and pain in his snide, adenoidal whine as he denounces the American dream as a rip-off and a lie. Shot over the course of six years, this extraordinary record focuses on a period in 1993 just before Crumb and family abandoned America for France. Natural, Fritz the Cat and Zap Comix, is a portrait of a vividly misanthropic artist. "Crumb," Terry Zwigoff's unforgettable documentary on Robert Crumb, the underground comic book pioneer and creator of Mr.
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