Crumb · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits on a bed in his mother's Philadelphia rowhouse, stacks of paperbacks around him, reading aloud from notebooks he filled as a teenager. The early pages are comics, legible. As he turns them the handwriting gets smaller. By the last pages the lines are still dense, still made with evident care, and nobody can read them. Charles Crumb performs this for the camera in the flattened voice of his medication and finds it a little funny. A title at the end of Crumb reports that he killed himself about a year after the interviews.

Keep those shrinking pages in mind. Terry Zwigoff spent six years filming his friend Robert, the cartoonist behind Keep On Truckin' and Fritz the Cat, and came out with something else: three brothers from one house, one of whom turned his damage into an internationally collected body of work, and two of whom did not.

There is a Deleuze concept that fits this film so exactly it reads less like a lens than a diagnosis, and it's one people rarely reach for, because it's ugly. Deleuze called it the impulse-image, and he built it from Stroheim, Buñuel and Losey — the naturalist strain of cinema where behavior isn't psychology, it's appetite. The concept has two halves that need each other. There's the derived milieu: an actual place, dated, furnished, socially specific. And there's the originary world, which is what that milieu turns out to be a crust over — a zone of raw drives with its own weather. Naturalism films the first until the second shows through.

Zwigoff films the rowhouse exactly that way, as an archaeological site: the accumulation, the mid-century Catholic-military-suburban debris, the childhood house he walks Robert back into, the father who published a manual on managing people and ran a household on it. That's the derived milieu. The originary world is hanging in the galleries. Crumb's drawings — the caricature, the appetite, the sexual violence — aren't commentary on that house. They're the house with the plaster off.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because it gets you out of the argument the film is usually made to have (genius or monster) and into the one it's actually having. Naturalism doesn't moralize about drives. It charts their line of slope, Deleuze's term for the downward gradient a world of pure impulse runs on — entropy with a face. Crumb measures that slope three times from a single origin. Robert's bends: the drawing metabolizes the appetite and, by luck more than virtue, pays. Maxon's flattens into ritual. Charles's runs all the way down, and the film hands you the evidence in the most literal form available, handwriting contracting toward a point, page after page.

The smaller terms in the cluster land without forcing. The symptom — an act that reads as the surface of a drive rather than a choice. Crumb's laugh, that high nasal giggle, arrives on top of his most alarming disclosures with such regularity that the film uses it structurally. It isn't amusement. It's a deflection you can hear. The fetish — a part-object charged with compulsive force. Here it's shellac. The pre-war 78s draw more devotion than most of the people on screen get, and the film's closing movement is crates of them being packed for France. A man whose income depends on the mechanical reproduction of his drawings has built his interior life around a technology that stopped being manufactured before he was born. Maxon's bed of nails is the same logic in another key.

What keeps all this from being a freak show is where the camera stands. Maryse Alberti shot it in available light in rooms that are too small, close but never pushing, and in the Charles sequences she holds a conversational distance — no move in for the collapse, no retreat to a safe medium shot. That restraint opens a second register: the gest, Deleuze's word for a posture held long enough that the social relation inside it becomes visible. Maxon's self-presentation is ceremonial, nearly liturgical. Robert wears the hat and the Depression-era clothes and talks in the affectless drawl. These aren't quirks. They're a family's system of containment, worn.

Which raises the question every documentary since direct cinema has to answer. The Maysles-Wiseman contract said: don't intervene, hold the take, and the truth turns up on its own. Zwigoff keeps the patience and drops the pretense. His voice is in the room, and it's a friend's voice rather than a journalist's, which is exactly what licenses what people say. Deleuze, writing on Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault, argued that the strong documentary isn't the one that catches reality instead of fiction; it's the one that catches a real person in the act of legending — making himself up out loud, on camera. Robert performs a self for two hours and the film neither endorses it nor punctures it. It just runs long enough for the seams to show. That method is Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1967): a self-mythologizer given unlimited time in front of an off-screen prodder, until the performance fissures.

The invention is in the cut, and it belongs to editor Victor Livingston as much as to Zwigoff. This is not a chronological life. The Charles material is metered out instead of delivered in a block, so the film's center of gravity arrives late and re-sorts everything behind it; the closing title converts two hours you thought you were watching into a different film. Livingston also solved the artist documentary's chronic problem — how to cut between a still image and a talking head without making a slideshow — by dropping a drawing in at the instant a claim is made, as evidence, contradiction or joke. The cut supplies the irony the narration refuses. Half the artist docs since run on that discovery.

And the verdict never comes. Deirdre English and Trina Robbins make the case against the work; Robert Hughes makes the case for it and puts Crumb with Brueghel. Zwigoff won't resolve it. Deleuze has a name for an image that leaves thought with something it can't settle: the unthought, the undecidable that thinking runs into and cannot get around. Here it isn't evasion. It's the precise condition Crumb's drawings put a reader in, reproduced at the level of form.

The debts are specific. Grey Gardens (1975) gave Zwigoff the whole setup — camera parked inside a decaying family house, mother and adult child performing their co-dependence straight at the lens, the take held well past where a polite crew would cut. That holding is dead time, the stretch where nothing advances and the everyday is simply endured, and it's the film's basic unit. Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981) supplied monologue-as-structure, no narration, no reaction shots, no authorial ruling, and the habit of reading a person's clutter as biography; Zwigoff keeps the withheld judgment and drops Morris's frontal formalism. The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (1970) supplied the two-person crew, the available-light kitchen, and music only ever performed in frame. His own Louie Bluie (1985) was the prototype: friendship rather than press access as the way in, prewar 78s as score rather than a composed cue.

Forward, the field is large. Every documentary where an artist's work and pathology can't be pulled apart — American Movie, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Marwencol, Finding Vivian Maier — works in the room this film opened. The family-implication mode runs on to Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation, Stories We Tell. Grizzly Man inherits the hardest part: a subject whose self-narration the film cannot endorse.

Crumb also arrived at the end of something. Shot on 16mm, blown up to 35, it's among the last major American documentaries made entirely under the analogue regime; consumer DV shipped in 1995, and within five years the economics that nearly broke Zwigoff — the credit-card debt, the back pain, six years of deciding whether a moment was worth the roll — were gone. That discipline is visible in the frame, and so is the duration: light, stock and faces all shift across the material, so the film ages the way an album does.

What it did to the art form is a posture rather than a genre. A documentary can love its subject and indict him in the same shot and trust you to hold both. Next time, watch the drawings the way Alberti shoots them: a slow lateral move across a page, a pull into one detail, a rack focus that finds a face in the crosshatching. She gives them the same patience she gives the interviews. That's the argument, made without a word — the drawn world and the photographed world are one world, seen from two sides. The question the film leaves genuinely open is whether the drawing saved Robert, or just gave the appetite somewhere to live.