By Max Graham, Second Year Philosophy
Understanding Harmony Korine is no easy feat. He embodies a complete blurring of fiction and reality, done so in prolific fashion. An artist who dips into filmmaking, painting, short films, music videos for the likes of Sonic Youth, a novel, even his own installations. Harmony's work is absolutely singular and within its own realm of absurdity. He represents a perfect, unique symbiosis of insanity both in the director and the resulting films. I want to give a perspective on Korine's elusive character, which ultimately mystifies the already-blurred meanings of his films but hopefully entices a leap-of-faith into the rabbit-hole of his bizarre deep cuts ready for discovery.
Tales of harmony are given almost mythic status. It is almost impossible to decipher which are true, but I believe the spirit of the director and the way in which this informs his films is epitomised by the legendary, fabled tales of 'Fight harm'. The unreleased short film consists of Harmony himself provoking strangers on the streets of New York and in turn being beaten up. Repeatedly. This rather uncomfortable, I would say brutal, image for us is retorted by Harmony to be 'the great American comedy.'
Korine’s films have enjoyed much precedence in recent years as the fountainhead for a grotesque aesthetic of cultural malaise, especially within youth culture. He established himself as the enfant terrible of cinema with the notorious emergence of 'Kids', a gritty portrait of street-kid culture in 90's New York. Written for director Larry Clark, Harmony himself was 19 at the time of writing the script, a precocious, yet erratic, usually high and ultimately degenerate youth. We can see the film as a dramatised reflection of harmony's environment at the time, as the characters used are mostly those found within the skate-culture surrounding Washington Square Park. The film ensued moral panic regarding the nihilistic portrayal of American youth alongside a well-received critical reception, even an appearance at Cannes.
Gummo is Harmony's directorial debut, a riotous launch into cinema featuring the tornado-torn town of Xenia, Ohio. The citizens themselves make up most of the cast, resulting in a naturalistic portrait of middle-America that filmmaker Gus van Sant describes as 'both bracingly realistic and hauntingly dreamlike.' You are thrown into a flurry of scenes and impressions without any string of logic to their arrangement or their content. Bacon taped on the wall, Mark Gonzales wrestling a chair, the character ‘Solomon’ eating spaghetti and chocolate in the bathtub, Chloe Sevigny’s character dancing to Madonna’s 'Like a prayer'.
Much like 'Kids', Gummo garnered widespread controversy. Janet Maslin of the New York Times nominated Gummo as 'the worst film of the year'. This could be a fair valuation. However, the hallucinatory logic of Gummo is intended to enact Korine's insistence on throwing traditional notions of filmmaking in the air. In his infamous series of Letterman interviews Korine declares that 'films should have a beginning, middle, and end. Just not in that order.'
Despite their oddities and controversies, both Gummo and Kids still have enjoyed credence as culturally significant films. More obscure is the 1999 'Julien donkey boy'. Julien has schizophrenia, and the film follows his grappling with a disjointed mental state and a surrounding family, which is admittedly dysfunctional. His family includes the wonderful Chloe Sevigny, and quite surprisingly Werner Herzog as the dad, delivering an unforgettable scene drinking out of a house slipper. Korine states that 'directing him (Herzog) is like ice cream- it just tastes good'.
Korine has some deep-cuts that seem to betray any significant interpretation as found in Gummo and Kids but reaffirm the necessity of a deep-dive. In 'Mister lonely' you get skydiving nuns doing tricks on a BMX bike in the backdrop of a glimpse into the life of a Michael Jackson impersonator. If this sounds beyond the pale of any sane imagination to you, you are completely right. But that’s the beauty of Korine, who you need to take on his own terms.
In the same spirit, 'Trash humpers' is an anti-film. It follows the same documentary-like, low-resolution aesthetic of Julien donkey boy. Just definitely without its poignancy and melancholy theme. Instead, you have a group of elderly people with a hilarious predilection to vandalism and sleeping under bridges- all while leaving low-stake destruction and anarchy in their wake. Korine describes the film as something you would find buried in a ditch somewhere in Albuquerque. If that isn't selling the film, I'm not sure what else will.
Now 52, Harmony is far from the transgressive teen who wrote Kids. Despite this, he remains singularly faithful to his intent to subvert cinema. Works like the 2023 'Aggro Dr1ft' carry the experimental nerve of his past work with a visual intensity and luminosity to sear your retinas. Shot using thermal imaging, it follows an assassin, played by Jordi Molla, in a fractured assortment of encounters in a crime-ridden Miami. You are bombarded with bright and attention-grabbing neon hues that Harmony intends to invoke the same over-stimulated passivity of social media consumption and aesthetic novelty. Just beware of the resulting headache.
I hope this sketch of an endlessly interesting artist has sold you an interest into his work. There exist equally unorthodox deep cuts of his that space did not permit to show, which are perhaps even more deranged. Take him with a grain of salt and enjoy.
Have you watched any Harmony Korine films?
