Crumb

(1995)

Directed by

Terry Zwigoff

Review by Zach Saltz

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

- Opening lines of “Anna Karenina”

The life of the artist has become romanticized, it seems, from the bourgeois parties of vogue modern Paris to the underground sex parties of the Warhol generation.  In Terry Zwigoff’s brilliant and harrowing documentary, Crumb (1995), the myth of the fabulous life of the artist is dispelled, and shown, in stark contrast to popular assumption, as profoundly normal with occasional recognitions by people on the street.

Zwigoff profiles the graphic artist Robert Crumb, who was shot into fame in the late 1960s with bewildering, hallucinatory images of deformed bodies, absurd sex, and a lucid and droll satirical interpretation of mainstream American culture. He is to his generation what Da Vinci and Picasso were to theirs -- an underground savoir of sorts, who could save people���s lives (and dry cynicism) through the sheer power of his art.  His work is compared to Brueghel and Goya by some, but Crumb likens his art less to an aesthetic approach and more to a deep resentment of materialism and conventionality.  “I started out by rejecting all the things that the people who rejected me liked,” he says, “and then over the years I developed a deeper analysis of these things.”

Crumb is one hell of a guy.  His clothes make him looked like he stepped right out of 1947 and his bulging Adam’s apple convulses when he laughs.  He criticizes everything from modern comic books to the Grateful Dead (“I went to some of their concerts and fell asleep”) to even his own work (he all but disowns his famous “Keep On Truckin’” image).  He’s a cynic, yes, but not in the Woody Allen or Lenny Bruce sense of the word.  He’s too isolated to be laugh-out-loud funny, but his constant quirks and antics are so strange and irreverent, there is nothing to do but smirk (like how, when he was first introduced to his future mother-in-law, she thought he was mentally handicapped).

What is most remarkable about Crumb the movie is that it works not only as a study of the life and workings of a great artist and American icon, but also as a sobering look at a deeply wounded family.  We are casually introduced to Robert’s two brothers, Charles (a heavily-medicated introvert who hasn’t left the confines of his house for thirty years) and Max (who sits on a bed of nails while drawing a long linen tape through his body to clean his intestines).  We learn about their immensely unhappy childhood, with a borderline-abusive father and a drug-addicted mother, and how the presence of great art, particularly in the form of comic books, gave them hope for their future as well as a sense of meaning in their lives.  It was their escape, their therapy, from the harsh realities of troubled parents and odious high school bullies.  Many of Robert Crumb’s comics are surprisingly autobiographical, despite the abhorrently deviant nature of his work, and suggest that he was indeed able to find solace from his loneliness; Charles, the older brother from whom Robert says he got his first inspiration, was not able to cope so well.

I think that this is the second-greatest documentary ever made (Michael Apted’s Up Series is the best).  It is the prototype for all amateur documentarians to admire and learn from.  Zwigoff uses a wide variety of techniques to catapult the viewer’s interest to this strange, sometimes disturbing story.  Firstly, the film devotes quite a bit of time to simply capturing Crumb’s artwork; there is one sequence toward the end when the camera focuses on one of the comics for what seems like an eternity, as Crumb himself reads the dialogue from the strip to us.  The artwork seamlessly parallels Crumb’s own absurd and bewildering life, and there is no doubt, when he talks about his bizarre sex life, that the comics are an outlet to express these grossly repressed tendencies.  The art also tells us quite a bit about Robert’s life, and provides us with many integral parts of his personality that cannot be put into words.  The second technique Zwigoff employs is introducing us to a wide variety of strange, equally memorable people in Crumb’s life.  There is his current wife, Aline, whose own wild life could probably merit of movie of its own as well.  She provides some of the film’s funniest moments, as when she introduces us to her own unique artwork.  There’s Crumb’s first wife, Dana, with whom he first experimented with drugs and radical drawing techniques.  And then there are the central artists and critics of the underground movement, some who respond to Crumb with open arms, others who call him misogynistic and perverted.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Zwigoff creates an image of America -- something extremely hard to do in this brazenly confident era of burgeoning John Updikes and Tom Wolfes.  It’s spectrum resembles an impressionist painting; from far away, the image looks beautiful and polished, but as we approach the painting and look closer inward, we discover that the image is skewered, deeply flawed, and often incoherent.  Robert Crumb’s life is about as absurd and unusual as it gets, and it should come as no surprise, through the carefully chosen works of Mr. Tolstoy, that his life is full of woe and sorrow.  But what is most enduring is how Crumb continually found (and still finds today) a way to bear the many inordinate hardships his life has thrown him.  Perhaps this is how so many of us are able to seek salvation through art -- or is it art through salvation?

Rating:

# 25 on Top 100

# 2 of 1995