Crumb

CRUMB              A                

USA  (119 mi)  1994  d:  Terry Zwigoff

I decided to reject conforming when society rejected me. I’ve heard all that “be yourself” stuff. When I’m myself, people think that I’m nuts. Guess I’ll have to be satisfied with cats and old records. Girls are just utterly out of my reach. They won’t even let me draw them…Yeah, all that changed after I got famous.     

—Robert Crumb, reflecting on Valentine’s Day thoughts from 1962

 

How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure.       —Charles Crumb

This is one of the more remarkably revealing documentary portraits on record, as CRUMB is an endlessly fascinating project that was nine years in the making, six following around Robert Crumb, and three more years editing the film, made at a time when the director himself was penniless and near homeless, with back pain so severe he was contemplating suicide, where the making of the movie may have actually saved Zwigoff’s life.  Crumb is easily the most infamous comic artist of the 60’s, the originator of such underground staples as Zap Comix, Mr. Natural, the cover art of Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album, and the Keep on Truckin’ logo, not to mention dozens of other publications which made him a fortune as they were devoured by the psychedelic generation as a symbol of a weird and trippy imagination.  A friend to Crumb for over 20 years, both collectors of vintage blues and jazz records, and a member of R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders, the band Crumb founded in the early 70’s (Zwigoff plays the saw, cello, Stroh violin, and mandolin), Zwigoff has unprecedented access, examining the artist’s life from many fronts, interviews with family, including former wives and girlfriends, colleagues and friends, various art critics who have differing views of his work, including feminists who find his work fascinating, but troubling, as despite highly amusing satiric threads, his drawings are unflinchingly raw and misogynistic.  Described as self-indulgent orgy fantasies, part of an arrested juvenile vision, often little more than masturbatory pornography, including hostility and depraved violence towards women, incest fantasies, a descent into horribly racist caricature with demeaning and humiliating “Mammy” fantasies, where being turned off and disgusted “is” an appropriate reaction to much of his work.  Part of Crumb’s unique talent is his ability “not” to censor his art, to let it all out, so to speak, often surprising even himself with the darkness of the material, while part of the film’s unique approach as a documentary exposé is to reveal all the inner demons and not shy away from the provocative controversy.  What is indisputable is his drawing ability, which surpasses everyone else doing comic social satire.  In nearly every scene, especially walking or sitting around the streets of San Francisco, which are among the best scenes in the film, Crumb carries around a sketch pad and continuously draws portraits of people or situations that attract his interest. 

His obsession with drawing started young, as it was actually his older brother Charles who developed a strange fascination with comic books and ordered his two siblings, Robert and Maxon, to make their own comics, initially inspired by watching the movie TREASURE ISLAND (1950), so they wrote pirate adventure tales, often sharing the same frames, responding to what the other wrote.  Charles continued dressing like a pirate around town, obsessing for the rest of his life over the young boy actor playing Jim Hawkins, Bobby Driscoll, suppressing his desires, while his younger brother Maxon developed equally inappropriate habits, like molesting young girls in public, sneaking up behind them and pulling their pants down.  Easily the strangest and most bizarre aspects of this film are the sequences where Robert visits each of his two brothers, as after unsuccessful suicide attempts, Charles lives on a steady diet of antidepressants with his equally unbalanced mother, who was an amphetamine addict with an abusive and over-controlling husband.  Charles remains a total recluse, “Can you give me one good reason for leaving the house?” while Maxon also lives in San Francisco, developing a vow of poverty where he meditates on a board of nails while begging on street corners for several hours each day.  Crumb also has two sisters, but both refused to appear on camera.  Peeling away layer after layer, the film simply defies belief, where in this dysfunctional family, Robert, sharing an extreme outsiderist sensibility with his brothers, is the least tormented as he has found a socially acceptable outlet for the inner turmoil within.  R. Crumb was the right guy at the right time and hit counterculture paydirt during the 60’s, where there was a limited circle of comic artists at the time, where his creative breadth blossomed with his initial psychedelic experience, while his mother and brothers continued to wallow in their mental instability and dysfunction.  Unlike the supposed myth, Crumb actually hated the hippie movement, including the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia, “I never had anything to do with those guys.  I hated that music.  I went to a couple of their rock concerts and just fell asleep.  Found it completely boring, that psychedelic music.”

Having gotten a taste of fame, Crumb continually turned down gigantic offers of money, such as $100,000 to do a Rolling Stones album cover or to appear on Saturday Night Live TV.  “After about a year of recognition and all the bullshit of fame and all that, I just said ‘Fuck it,’ and I just started drawing the dark part of myself again in the comics, which I’d always kept hidden before.”  Crumb developed such a hostility for the commercial modernization of America, with people walking down the street wearing corporate logos on their clothes, something he found insufferable, so the film actually includes the final months before he and his wife and young daughter move to the south of France, someplace he considers “less evil” than the United States.  He also has an older son through another relationship, and both children possess his drawing interest, where he can be seen sharing time and offering comments with each one, interestingly drawing together as a family.  Crumb’s love of the past is reflected in two of his projects, 36 Heroes of the Blues drawings, sketching famous blues artists, and A Short History of America seen here: A short history of America - Robert Crumb - YouTube (52 seconds), converting individual black and white drawings to a short film, a montage of old times moving towards modernity set to ragtime music played by Crumb on the piano, as the same pastoral country home is redrawn again and again reflecting the changing times, as horse drawn buggies are replaced by cars, adding more telephone wires, paved streets, and several new stores on the corner until eventually it’s a city street overrun with commercial fast-food enterprises, advertising billboards and busy street traffic, exactly the kind of world he now despises, cynically believing the American Dream is a big lie.  His daughter can be heard objecting when Crumb still insists upon a black and white television, though she’s grown up to be a successful cartoonist.  Even Zwigoff’s exposé just barely touches on the massive range of diversity in Crumb’s work, from sketchbook caricature portraits to blatantly sexual and exploitive material, where early in the film we hear Crumb confess “If I don’t draw for awhile, I get really crazy, actually really depressed, and suicidal.”  While never leaning towards any critical interpretations, the film gives significant screen time to Crumb’s detractors, allowing every view to stand on its own, making this one bold and audacious film that certainly makes the case for art as therapy.