Gummo is an immersion with the feet beyond the water level and the eyes revealing the sea depth and the hands moving forward without doing anything important. The world after-Gummo is already a shattered world. It has never been a world. The hurricane becomes a temporal term, a contrivance to make the film begin, nothing else. What Korine represents has no beginning and no end. It has always been there, in a place that our arms can only indicate but not reach.
Gummo‘s characters are built around a depravation which defines their personalities. There are two psychotic boys who have fun in killing cats and define their self-destruction; two girls who are so obsessed with appearance that they force themselves to stick new nipples with tape; an fictious rabbit-child who tries to force us to see his reality, also inside the fictional representation of his death.
The film is shot with the greatest stylistic freedom. The completely neutral camera – like in Dogma (Korine shot another one following Lars Von Trier’s rules) gets almost in the way. It overflies these lives without expressing them, but leaving them free to exist in front of us for what they are. In a scene, the most expressive of all, a group of people aggressively dash against a chair, breaking it, with the violence of a pack in a fight when the victim lays lifeless on the ground.
It is incredible, how the decomposition of the TV or cinema screen accelerates its course with a light lever towards the limits of imagination. Fantasy obsesses us through its own essence, as a tree planted in a garden in winter time. It’s something that we hope develops denying the sense of belonging in a so strong way that it becomes real itself. Cinema is like an organ which is forced to reply to contraction impulses like rhythmic experiences. That rhythm is our vision that changes according to the film and light up or blow out, immerses or stays on the surface. 89