Trash Humpers: Harmony Korine’s New Film Is a Shaky and Strung Out Nightmare

Harmony Korine films have a special flavor—the bilious, difficult flavor of American degradation (or is that American heroism pushed to the point of degradation?), of people binge-drinking freedom until they’re sleeping in strip-mall parking lots, their organs poisoned and withered from the punishment.

Korine is a bit of a freedom binger, too: His 40-minute The Diary of Anne Frank Part II starred a boy burying a dog, kids in satanic clothes puking on a Bible, and a mentally disabled man in a dirty diaper. Korine himself wore blackface and played O. J. Simpson—with Johnny Depp as Kato Kaelin—in The Devil, the Sinner, and His Journey. He had to cancel the project Fight Harm—in which he challenged people to real street fights and only backed down when someone threatened death—after landing in the hospital. When he was around 30, he met his first wife, a 17-year-old from Nashville. On screen and on earth, dude seems to do what he wants.

And he loves wreckage. He sets scenes in tornado-trashed towns, on a dirty highway overpass where a kid wears filthy rabbit ears, in exurbs and shit-kicking Nowheresvilles, in parking lots and loading docks, in decaying houses where characters go nuts with hatchets and sledgehammers just because. In his previous films—especially Gummo—Korine seemed to go spelunking into subterranean passages beneath the garbage dump of the American Repressed and return with odd, disturbing artifacts. The accumulated weight of his scenes felt like an unsettling, portentous dream. But Trash Humpers just seems like a shaky, strung-out nightmare.

Korine filmed the thing in a grainy VHS style, following around two old men and a hideous old woman (all of them spry actors in what must’ve been pounds of latex and makeup) as they fuck garbage piles and wire fences, swig from bottles in parking lots, smash TVs and fluorescent tubes, go peeping through people’s windows at night, and hang out with acquaintances: a boy in a suit who beats a doll-baby with a hammer, some plus-sized women in BDSM getups, some freak with a German accent and a potbelly who smokes and plays the trumpet while lying shirtless in bed—you get the idea.

Korine and his crew ran around at night mostly, lighting shots with flashlights and street lamps, then rearranged the footage with two VCRs like a William S. Burroughs cut-up. The result looks like a long, grainy, menacing horror, and only a few scenes have the richness of text/image/theme/whatever to justify the project. Trash Humpers feels like something that should play as a video installation, something you wander in and out of. As a 77-minute-
feature film, it’s just punishment without a payoff. (“Such is life,” I can hear the auteurs and haute critics in the crowd murmuring, “punishment without a payoff.” To which I say: “Fuck off. We already knew that.”)

Trash Humpers is a chore to sit through, but it’s difficult to condemn the thing outright—it’s an extension of the ideas and aesthetics Korine has been playing with for years and holds a rightful (if minor) place in his canon. As Werner Herzog told the New York Times after seeing Gummo: Korine is “a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position. It’s not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?” Korine is sometimes a pain in the ass. But that doesn’t mean we want the man to quit.