Xenia, Ohio: the tornado-stricken town behind Harmony Korine’s nihilistic ‘Gummo’
Harmony Korine was always going to be a cinematic troublemaker from the moment he penned Kids, a bitingly brutal tale of male entitlement, adolescent malaise, and Aids, set among New York’s youth skate culture during the 1990s.
It’s relentlessly depressing, with Korine, then just 19, taking inspiration from those around him. Some people criticised the film for scenes that bordered on being considered child porn, while others saw it to be a brave and raw tale of adolescence that marked a stark contrast from the teen movies that defined the previous decade. This divisiveness would come to inform Korine’s career, though, with his next project, Gummo, further alienating some viewers while delighting even more.
It served as his directorial debut, and its loose style, with pieced-together vignettes of bizarre, often pretty horrific incidents, polarising audiences. Gummo follows various inhabitants of a run-down town, where decay and corruption seem not only to lurk around every street corner, but sit on full display out in the open. Gangs of horrible children, criminals, hillbilly types, racists, child molesters, cat killers, you name it, they’re all in Gummo, woven together with a twisted sense of enjoyment from Korine.
Here is humanity at its worst, manifesting across scenes of pure debasement and filth. What are we meant to glean from the film? It seems like Korine wants to show us utter decrepitude; what happens when humans are left in ruin, in this case inhabitants of a town stricken by a tornado. It’s grimy and gritty, and the utter ruin of the town, where there are no opportunities for anyone, seems to bring out the absolute worst in people, especially teenagers.
While the movie was shot in Tennessee, he set the film in Xenia, Ohio, a town known for frequently being victim to horrific tornadoes, with several major disasters occurring in the few decades leading up to Gummo, like the 1974 tornado, which left 10,000 people homeless, while countless businesses and buildings were completely wiped out. In 1989, another massive tornado hit the town, furthering its reputation as one of the worst areas in the country for tornado damage.
The movie is pretty plotless, with terrible things just happening because, well, because they can, and they do. There are some rather horrid images that linger in your mind long after watching Gummo, not least the scene featuring Solomon eating pasta in the bath while surrounded by dirt.
Gummo does for pasta what Salo does for chocolate, and yet, it puts towns like Xenia on the map, for better or for worse, showing a side of humanity that really exists in run-down places like this.
It’s the kind of world that we rarely see on screen, and rarely with as much raw power as this, and it’s the movie’s confronting attack on audiences that left people deeply uncomfortable, even though the film is simply telling the truth.
The real Xenia might not have been home to men pimping out their disabled siblings, incessant chair-wrestling, and boys walking around in bunny ears, but Gummo shows that such sights really do exist in America’s underbelly, and for the first time, he wanted the real America to appear on screen, cat-killing and all.
