Review of Crumb (1995) by Known D — 15 Aug 2007

There can be few opportunities to enter so deeply into the hang-ups, the secrets, the fantasies, the fears and desires of a man. It is almost impossible to penetrate this much into a family.

Terry Zwigoff partly manages this because he had long been a personal friend of the subject matter of this documentary, Robert Crumb. He also manages because he too was a forlorn, suicidal and perpetually depressed artist. But not all the painfully transparent honesty of Robert and his two brothers can be attributed to the maker of the film.

Robert Crumb is an established and famous cartoonist that emerged from underground comic scene of the 60s but stayed deeply rooted in that transgressive and hard atmosphere. His comics are visually arresting but also deliver content that to describe it as politically incorrect would be like calling a loud fart in church a distraction.

There is one cartoon that perhaps exemplifies and typifies Crumb?s work and that the film shows frame by frame illustrated by the voice of its author. A man does a favour to his lonely friend. He brings into his flat a woman whose body is designed to Crumb?s particular tastes. Breasts, buttocks, sturdy legs, the works. The most particular feature about her is that in place of her head is a screw presumably to keep her open neck from leaking.

This ?body? has obvious use for the lonely friend, but as he is raping it (there can be no consensual sex if there is no brain to consent), he feels guilty and imagines the severed head of the woman who once owned that body vengefully deriding him. So he calls his friend and asks him to take the body back. But the friend had not chopped off the woman?s head. To show this he unscrews the lid on her neck, stuffs his arm half way down her neck and pulls out her head by holding on to her tongue.

This cartoon is about stuffing a woman?s head down her body and raping her.

The film interviews feminist critics who without hysteria, with dignity and not without a little sympathy for the artistic merits of Crumb, describe this scene and others like it as representative of a misogynistic attitude to women. The cartoon is the ultimate objectification of a woman?s body.

True. But there is another point of view that is equally calmly explained in the film. That men can fear women and they can fear their own inadequacies and their own powerlessness and their own impotence. They objectify that fear in fantasies of power and domination over women, or a specific woman at that. That fear does not necessarily emerge as actual molestation or rape. But it is there, deep in the recesses of a man?s brain. Certainly in Robert Crumb?s.

The film undertakes what is essentially an exercise in Freudian analysis, going back to the family history of the Crumbs and attempting to understand the source of Crumb?s disturbing genius.

Interviews with Crumb?s two brothers and his mother ? his two, presumably better adjusted sisters declined to be interviewed for the film ? give a background that is chilling and harrowing.

The Crumbs are ? for want of a better word ? crazy.

Robert?s elder brother, Charles, is a fifty year old virgin that has never in his life been able to recover from the hell of the high school dating scene. He has lived as a recluse in his room upstairs at arm?s length from his mother, who deserves her own incredulous paragraph. He is pumped with medication which even by his own account aids his brutal honesty.

Charles drew comics at home before Robert was interested. Not for lack of talent, however, the man turned out to become a zombie re-reading books in between his several suicide attempts. By the time the film is out his last attempt succeeds.

Then there?s Robert?s younger brother Maxon. Just as artistically talented and just as maladjusted as his brothers, he lives out his borderline insanity as a monk in solitary confinement. He sits on a bed of nails passing a ribbon through his intestines for most of the day. His version of misogyny comes out in actual episodes of molestation though he says he didn?t do it for long enough to go as far as rape. His confesses to yanking down the pants of a young girl in a super-market half with regret half with glee.

It is facile to ?blame the parents? but the one we see is what you would expect if you went by stereotypes. Beatrice Crumb is a veteran of a marriage with a brutal wife-battering disciplinarian. She sprawls herself in front of the camera casually but as oddly articulately as her sons? vocabularies, speaking of this shocking family history of insanity and violence as if she spoke of lakeside trips.

Then there?s Robert Crumb, who could have been a suicide, a recluse or a molester but instead became a professional cartoonist. Wrapped around his cartooning are all the tendencies of his brothers but in his adults only output there is a product with eminent artistic merits and what must be a tonic that keeps him alive.

The film follows Robert in his last weeks before he moves to the south of France with his second wife.

I suppose this is what reality TV would be like if it actually had something to say. Crumb has a lot to say.