Crumb

Your interest in this documentary will probably depend entirely on your interest in the subversive cartoonist Robert Crumb. Crumb is an odd and tortured genius who lives at the mercy of strange sexual impulses and a healthy disregard for American cultural mores. Director Terry Zwigoff uses this as a jumping off point to explore the role that sex and obsession can play in art, and the boundaries of what can be deemed acceptable under the label of 'art'. Crumb inhabits the daggy, debauched and timewarped corners of American society, both the man himself and his work rejects conformity, which (at the very least) makes for interesting conversation.



One of the more magnetic aspects of Crumb's story is his family, and the way they helped create this bizarre figure. The documentary starts on the topic of his family before looking at Crumb's rise as an influential figure in the world of comics and pop art. Most of the film focuses on the way he embraced the unpopular aspects of culture and owned his status as an outsider, and Zwigoff invites critics from both sides of the line (for and against) to deconstruct Crumb's most controversial work (the stuff that plays on racial stereotypes or gets all problematic with depictions of femininity). You watch this and it makes for a fairly straightforward documentary, and then in the last half an hour or so the focus swings back onto Crumb's two brothers and that's when things really get weird.



Carl Crumb is a hermit-like figure living with his mother whilst heavily sedated, re-reading the same pieces of victorian literature over and over while contemplating suicide. Maxon Crumb is even stranger, a sex-offending schizophrenic who paints and live on his own in a californian hovel. By extension, these two guys makes Robert Crumb look like the normal one in the family! Crumb's compulsive collecting of old ragtime music and pursuit of certain sexual fetishes seems quite quaint by comparison. His family and upbringing turns out to be every bit as eyebrow-raising and borderline insane as his comics though... after all, the Crumb brothers were raised by a mother who used the threat of an enema as a discipine measure!





As with all documentaries, Crumb features a slew of information that is collected over a period of time before being arranged into a cohesive narrative. It would be just about impossible to film Crumb's story in a linear fashion after the fact, but what we get on screen is a linear impression of this guy's life. It's no mean feat to assemble something like this, and Zwigoff spent a staggering 9 years putting this documentary together. That kind of dedication to a single project isn't exactly common, and the length of time involved seems to have only served to help create an acutely observed facsimile of a life's work. There's no real sense that this film took 9 years to film, and that's what I found impressive and interesting.



On a sidenote, I think Robert Crumb has a lot to answer for. I enjoy his work and find it quite funny in a slightly-caustic and heavily ironic way, even the way he thumbs his nose at the establishment is funny because it's not always completely direct. His style of cartooning has given rise to at least two generations (Harvey Pekar, Daniel Clowes) of self-obsessed wunderkinds though, Crumb's more autobiographical efforts seemed to spark a whole movement of comics artists seeking to document their mundane lives through the artform of cartooning. Even Crumb's wife thinks everyone wants to know all about her life, with her own brand of narcissistic comics given a small space in the documentary. I just thought that when Crumb did it, it was new, and the guy had some imagination. When some of these other chumps do it it's old and unoriginal (I'm not bagging Pekar or Clowes in particular, but I definitely am bagging out Crumb's wife). It's like livejournal in comic form, and no one really wants to see that. Or maybe that's just me. Hey, is anyone reading this?



DIRECTOR: Terry Zwigoff

KEY FIGURES: Robert Crumb, Maxon Crumb, Carl Crumb, Aline Kominsky



RELATED TEXTS:

- Zwigoff films: Louie Bluie (a blues documentary), Ghost World, Bad Santa and Art School Confidential.

- See also the excellent semi-fictionalised documentary American Splendour.

- Robert Crumb's most famous works include Keep on Truckin', Fritz the Cat, The Confessions of Robert Crumb and The Book of Genesis.



AWARDS

Sundance Film Festival - won Best Film (3rd place).