Defining Favourites: Gummo (1997)

Harmony Korine's debut feature film has remained controversial over the years for the supposed depravity of its content. But it is also one of the best American films of the 1990's.

Photo: Fine Line Features

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Directed by Harmony Korine
Screenplay by Harmony Korine
Produced by Cary Woods
Starring Linda Manz, Max Perlich, Jacob Reynolds, Chloë Sevigny, Jacob Sewell, Nick Sutton
Premiere Date: August 29, 1997
Running Time: 89 minutes

Harmony Korine was in his early 20’s when he wrote and directed his debut feature film Gummo, and already had earned a reputation as an “enfant terrible” for his script for the Larry Clark film Kids by that point. But perhaps that alone might have been enough to motivate the young filmmaker as he was prepared to show the world his own vision of Xenia, Ohio following its ravaging at the hands of a devastating tornado. How exactly can such people truly cope in the wake of mass destruction? As Harmony Korine would insist, no one growing up in such a period would feel any less human despite their own abnormalities – but that’s also part of why Harmony Korine’s work really has resonated with so many over the years.

By any sense of the word, Gummo is an anomaly. This is a film that eschews any definition of traditional narrative in order to create this portrait of what supposedly is life in Xenia, Ohio in the present following the devastating tornado which hit the town in 1974. Yet it doesn’t follow a linear structure that moves from point A to point B. Instead, even as we’re seeing everything through the eyes of the town’s residents, the beauty of Gummo is present in how every moment of this movie is an indictment of the United States’s gradual descent into an endless void of hopelessness. It’s all so heartbreaking, but for Harmony Korine, it’s just his ways of seeing how he grew up.