As a curator of chaos — and a catalyst — Harmony Korine has few equals. Throughout the 1990s, in his chemically addled youth, the Nashville-raised artist and filmmaker demonstrated an Andy Kaufman-like gift for industrial-strength media irritation: as the teenage author of the scandalous NC-17 drama Kids, as a fixture in New York’s tabloid media, as an art-terrorist talk-show guest who reduced his patronizing hosts (most notoriously David Letterman) to puzzled desperation.
Critics responded to these taunts like old-timers shaking their fists at the neighbor kid in the orchard. But admirers seized upon Korine’s first features — the Nashville-shot Gummo and its even more elliptical Dogme 95 follow-up julien donkey-boy — as the work of a major talent whose prankish daring and freaks-like-us aesthetic brokered a union between skate-punk anti-culture and European art cinema. Anticipating YouTube by a decade, Korine delivered the equivalent of a warped variety show: clip reels of buzzing, barely connected mania shot through with grubby black humor, sinister cinema verite and an incontestable eye for the allure of the demimonde. Werner Herzog, Bernardo Bertolucci and Lars von Trier tipped their caps; Gus Van Sant gave him a bit part in Good Will Hunting and a “jail consultant” credit.
Now straight, happily married, and a new father in a comfy central Nashville neighborhood, Korine surprised haters in 2007 with Mister Lonely, a lyrical, bittersweet fable about celebrity, the wearing of masks and the fragile bonds of community that was the closest thing he’d made to a recognizable narrative feature. Mainstream reviewers hailed a new, mature Korine. Gummo fans, meanwhile, wondered when the dude was going to stir shit up again.
They needn’t have worried. Clean living has freed up Korine to make what may be the grungiest, most polarizing affront to decency of his career. It’s called Trash Humpers, and it serves up just what the title says: vignettes of masked marauders in hideous old-age get-ups — played by unrecognizable denizens of the Nashville club scene, as well as the director and his wife Rachel — cutting a swath of absurdist depravity across Music City, while grinding their crotches on anything that doesn’t move.
Watch a strangely disturbing trailer of Trash Humpers: