Having recently returned to his native Nashville, Tennessee, The Kids scriptwriter and Gummo director filmed and edited Trash Humpers on a lo-fi VHS camcorder. The image is distorted and fuzzy, static often breaks across the screen and scenes are often split by dead tape.

 

 

The film's non-linear, sequential structure is comprised of fragmentary vignettes of the group's activity. We see them like rednecks smashing up a house, TVs and crashing a wheelchair, whooping joys that at times are indistinguishable from wailings. They howl with laughter at a kid failing to throw a basketball high enough to reach a hoop. 'This is how you do it', whines a little uniformed fat kid as he shows the elderly perverts how to suffocate a baby doll with a plastic bag before screaming with devilish glee as he hits the doll's head repeatedly with a hammer.

 

Trash Humpers is porn. Or rather porn is humping trash, as it seems Korine is saying. In this kind of way the film deconstructs America's media landscape by holding up a mirror to the images flooding into the nation's consciousness through television and the web. It shows us the dark underbelly of our desires, of what we search out in horror films, hardcore pornography and snuff movies. Besides the trash cinema references of John Waters at al., perhaps it's the 'white trash torture porn' of the 90s' underground Uncle God Damn clips, showing a family tormenting their tragically inebriated uncle by setting fire to him, that Trash Humpers reminds us of most.

 

Repetitious lines circle and loop through the gang's dialogue in Dr. Seuss like rhythms and rhymes, continually intoned like sick mantras or neurotically broken records. The sinister simplicity of the howled, 'Make it, don't fake it' or the gang’s intoxicating lullaby-motif, 'Three little Devils jumped over the wall, lopped off his head, then murdered them all', reveal the deviant madness driving the group.

 

This is reinforced by the soundtrack to the film. Captured on the shoddy onboard microphones of lo-fi VHS camcorders, the audio throughout the film is a continual buzzing of electrical appliances, air conditioning units, streetlights, and airplanes passing overhead. These suction sounds make the film feel like it exists within some sort of vacuum, where reason, or logic or morality is fundamentally absent.

 

 

One scene that best captures the absurdity and madness of the gang’s activities involves the males partying with fat, half-naked prostitutes in a motel room. Like Frank lip-syncing to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams in Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the misogynistic ass-slapping suddenly gives way to Harmony’s Elvis like gang-leader singing Silent Night.

 

Yet for all this, there are strange moments of beauty within the film. Still moments where the camera lingers on the light radiating from a streetlight or, around the female O.A.P. doing yoga, the sun is reflected golden off the puddles of water around her feet. Amidst the fuzzy VHS resolution, the tidal roars and buzzes of nearby freeways, halogen lights and nocturnal insects, the film captures a uniquely suburban emptiness. As much as anything else, Trash Humpers offers us a portrait of this space.

 

On occasion Korine's characters snap into an almost hallucinatory lucidity. These fleeting moments of clarity within the film stand in stark contrast to the Hyena-like cackles emanating from the group almost constantly. Perhaps the most revealing of these touchstones of rationality is when ‘Elvis’ pontificates on the neighbourhood he's driving a car through, "Sometimes when I drive through these streets, I can smell the pain of all these people… suburbia, it hurts me to think I lead such a balanced life. I could never understand why one would choose that way of life. What people don't understand is that we choose to live like three.. free.. freak people. It's one long game. I suspect we'll win it."

 

 

Perhaps the notoriously contrary Korine is here showing his hand. At this point the film suddenly seems to offer a personal portrait of Harmony himself, what it feels like for the former enfant terrible, former drug addict, and original hipster to grow up and to move back to Nashville, to middle America. Yet, it’s important to note that throughout the film Korine doesn’t distance or separate himself from what he is attacking. Trash Humpers is a pure distillation of the world Korine finds himself in and is inescapably a part of.

 

At the film’s end, baby accessories and (presumably) the Korines’ actual newborn baby make an appearance. Within the films’ narrative, one would presume the gang had broken into some poor couple’s apartment, killed them and stolen their child. A subtle horror arises at what is to befall a child raised within this madness. We see the female, played by Harmony’s wife Rachel, walking a buggy down the street, singing the lullaby over and over again with the sounds of a party faint in the background. It’s a horror of America raising its young, raising itself.

 

Trash Humpers is released September 20 on specially Harmony-customised VHS and limited edition 35mm film print.