Review of Crumb (1995) by Jeremy R — 01 Mar 2008

I'm not sure how to review a documentary, you know. I haven't done it before much, certainly not any full-fledged reviews. And this film I heard a lot about prior to watching it, and of course had some familiarity with Robert "R." Crumb's work. I stumbled across some of his work ages ago, and found it mysterious, titillating, dense (in a visual sense) and sort of hypnotic. I certainly didn't understand it, nor did I pretend to, and mostly just sort of peered, intrigued, at the carefully cross-hatched images he put together into that strange form that is so easily recognized. So, I saw this film with a lot of existing weight behind the subject matter.

Robert Crumb, if you're somehow unaware, is a cartoonist and comic book author, famed primarily, as he points out himself in the film, first for "Keep on truckin'," second for the Big Brother and the Holding Company Cheap Thrills album cover, and third for Fritz the Cat because it was animated without his consent and to his open disgust. However, he's also known to be a very talented, creative and open artist in all senses. He's known for controversial, provocative, disturbing, offensive and extremely taboo material gracing the pages of all of his works. Little twitchy bits of him bled out in movies that followed this one, like American Splendor (about fellow underground comic author Harvey Pekar, whose stories Crumb has illustrated) and director Terry Zwigoff's own Ghost World, based on Daniel Clowe's graphic novel, which has a character who bears some resemblance to Crumb portrayed by Steve Buscemi--who is sort of a less awkward and more attractive lookalike to Crumb. Alternately accused of genius and being a sexist and racist pervert, Crumb is not a man who keeps his mind private--it bleeds out in everything he writes and draws, and he makes no bones about that being what is occurring. Often he illustrates himself narrating these things, or thinking them, or interacting with them, and he does so without fanfare or softening of his own self-loathing.

Zwigoff manages, by interviewing Crumb, his two brothers, his wife, ex-wife, son and various critics, to both introduce all of this and elaborate on it. Those who know nothing of Crumb are likely to come away with an actual understanding of some kind, and those of us who know something are likely to learn something--and I imagine even those intimately familiar with his work would have found something of interest here, at least in seeing and hearing his brothers speak, even if that is the only thing. Crumb comes off as someone who is intensely awkward socially, infamously (to viewers of this film) turning down a request for an autograph that betrays his social inadequacies but is interpreted in two very different ways. I happen to think it is a failing of his social graces based on a principle and idea he holds; he sees autographs as silly and something not of the world he idealizes, the one of the 1940's, has room for. It doesn't make sense to him, and so he attempts to express this, not realizing how offensive his words are, because the world he inhabits is not the world most people do. This is, of course, a dangerous path to take--then are the seeming racist undertones (or overtones, depending on who you ask--if they even think they are a symptom of Crumb's own feelings) simply another "misunderstanding" that comes from his different mental location? I'd argue that--from what I've seen--they are usually used to illuminate the opinion and view of the white majority when approaching other races, rather than endorsing it. As someone in the film points out, the sexism is in some ways simply an acknowledgement of some desires. Crumb never has written--nor does he speak here--as if he feels these things are acceptable or "okay," and is at a loss for words when confronted by someone who experienced his work as a very, very young woman and was scarred by it.

Essentially, he does not come off as angelic nor demonic, but as a human being like all, who has been contorted by the course of events, along with his brothers, into something different from the normal, trapped in a mind that wishes for a different time to continue that has already passed. I did not lose my respect for his work, and was not surprised by the person I saw--not a heroic figure, nor a victimized one (at least not now), but one who is simply outside the general understanding of things, but who manages to make some backward connection through his art, even if it isn't for the same reason he draws it.