Gummo · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy in pink rabbit ears stands on a freeway overpass in the rain. He isn't going anywhere. He isn't from anywhere you could name on a map that still means anything. He just stands there while the traffic slides underneath, and Jean-Yves Escoffier — the cinematographer who once lit Leos Carax's lovers as if they were the last two people alive — pours real beauty down over him, the kind of light usually reserved for something that matters. Then the film cuts away and forgets him, the way you'd flip past a bad Polaroid in a shoebox. Hold onto that image. Almost everything Gummo knows is folded into it.

Deleuze had a phrase for a place like that overpass: the any-space-whatever. It's a space that has stopped being the stage for an action — no one is going to do anything decisive here — and become pure mood, pure quality: a fragment of feeling that survives after the story it belonged to has been torn down. Xenia, the Ohio town the film tells us was flattened by a tornado in the '70s and never reassembled, is made of nothing else. Drainage ditches. Junked yards. A bathtub of grey water where Solomon eats spaghetti while his mother washes his hair. And Korine and editor Christopher Tellefsen cut these spaces so that they never quite connect — snapshot spliced into video spliced into staged tableau, with no bridge, no because. That's the sharper idea Deleuze would reach for: disconnection. The town isn't a map with an out-of-field you could walk into; it's a scrapbook of affective shards laid side by side. The film's most radical gesture isn't the cat-killing. It's the refusal to let one moment cause the next.

Now watch the boys. Solomon and Tummler kill cats to sell to a meat supplier, and you keep waiting for this to become a plot — a scheme, a comeuppance, an arc. It never does. They mostly drift and stare. Deleuze: when a character can no longer respond adequately to what he perceives, when perception stops flowing out into useful action, the image goes slack in a particular way and becomes a pure optical situation, an opsign. The person inside it is no longer an agent but a seer, a voyant, someone condemned to look. Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton play exactly this: flat, affectless presence, watching. What they're doing has a name too — killing time, which is Deleuze's dead-time made literal, stretches where nothing advances because there is nothing to advance toward.

But something is moving under the stillness, and it's moving downward. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a world where drives erupt beneath the social surface — appetite, compulsion, degradation, a slow slide toward exhaustion. Cat-killing as a job. A man pimping out his sister with Down syndrome. Bacon taped to a bathroom wall, a fetish part-object charged with a force nobody can explain. This is what Deleuze called naturalism: the ordinary town (the derived milieu) revealed as the thin crust over an originary world of pure drive. And the tornado is that originary world made weather — a single act of flattening violence the whole film happens after, on the line of slope running out of it, everything sliding a little further toward ruin.

Why does the collage editing matter so much, then? Because it's doing philosophy. When Tellefsen splices a Polaroid or a camcorder confession into a staged scene for no narrative reason, he's making what Deleuze called an irrational cut — a join across a gap, an "AND" instead of a "because." The meaning lives in the interval between the fragments, not in either one. That's why each shard feels equally weighted: a boy tap-dancing, a chair being wrestled, a love song, a cruelty. The film insists they are all evidence, and refuses to rank them.

And this is where Gummo turns quietly political, in Deleuze's sense. He argued that modern cinema is haunted by a discovery: the people are missing. There is no unified "people" left to speak for, only scattered lives that can't cohere into one. Xenia is precisely that — a community a disaster un-made and that the film can only gather as loose faces. So Korine does the one thing left: he lets his subjects fabulate, catches them in the act of legending themselves in kitchen confessionals, and lays his own drifting narration and a soundtrack of black metal against tender pop over the top, sound and image telling two different stories at once.

The lineage is real and worth naming. The plotless associative vignette — squalor observed as poetry rather than driven through plot — comes straight from Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. Casting Linda Manz, Malick's child-narrator from Days of Heaven, as Solomon's mother imports that film's lyrical voiceover-over-hardship as a deliberate echo. Herzog's Stroszek supplies the humane grotesque (Herzog loved the bacon image publicly), Kids the street-cast realism, and Escoffier, brought over from Mauvais Sang, supplies the beauty that keeps the whole thing from curdling into a freak show. What Korine seeded is now everywhere: the home-video ugliness treated as the native language of a forgotten American interior, the mixtape as structure, the scrapbook as a legitimate form for a feature film.

So go back to the boy on the overpass. He isn't a character you failed to follow. He's the film's whole thesis standing in the rain: a pure image, beautifully lit, connected to nothing, mattering anyway. Once you stop waiting for the story, Gummo stops being cruel and becomes what it always was — an elegy assembled out of what a tornado left behind.