Gummo

Part of the Special Series RADICAL 90s

Solomon: “Life is great. Without it, you’d be dead.”

Two years after KIDS, screenwriter Harmony Korine made his directorial debut with Gummo — and alongside Spring Breakers, it remains his most talked-about film. Not surprisingly so.

Killing cats, selling them to restaurants, and spending the money on glue. It sounds absurd, but this is the everyday life of two skinny boys (played by Nick Sutton and Jacob Reynolds) in Xenia, Ohio — a fictionalized town previously devastated by a tornado. The black cat belonging to three young sisters (played by Darby Dougherty, Chloë Sevigny, and Clarissa Glucksman) narrowly escapes harm through sheer luck…

The film is structured around these two very different groups, but this should not be imagined as a linear plot. “GUMMO is one of a number of independent features that largely abandons any conventional sense of linear plotting,” writes Geoff King in his book on American Independent Cinema. What we encounter instead is a wildly fragmented portrait of life on the margins — of social outsiders living in a marginalized community, in a godforsaken blind spot of America.