First of all, I hated the experience of watching Harmony Korine’s new film Trash Humpers. I only caught the film because I swapped it at the last minute to replace Hong Sang-soo’s new film Like You Know It All, which I did for three reasons:
- Hong’s film is being released on English-subtitled within the next week in Japan, and
- It wouldn’t have ended until after midnight, which would have been both nearly impossible to sit through (considering that I woke up that day at 6am), and (considering that I would have to do the same the next morning) would have made it nearly impossible for me to get to bed on time. And
- All word coming out on Trash Humpers, both from published reviews and bystanders at the festival, was that it had very little chance of being distributed outside of the festival circuit.
Trash Humpers is seemingly designed to be an unlikable film, and certainly unlovable, yet it has defied these characteristics to become both liked and loved by a significant number of established critics and cineastes, precisely because it accomplishes so well its aspirations of achieving ultimate detestability. I agree with the opinion that the only useless art is mediocre art, a belief that holds up by how I am reacting to Trash Humpers, because the hatred I had built for it is inspiring thoughts which are consistently manifesting themselves in my consciousness to an extent that is only rivaled by those of the three or four films that I saw in the festival that I believed to be at least minor masterpieces. But these lingering ruminations happen to not be about the content of Trash Humpers, but of the politics and manipulation that are necessary for one to consider this film to be of quality. This is because the content of the film is Boring.
At 78 minutes, the content of Trash Humpers overstays its welcome by at least 68 minutes. After the 10-minute mark it is only repeating what it has already done: trash-humping, appliance-destroying, life-hating. These first 10 minutes could have potentially been a very interesting short film, in the same way that a strange and absorbing viral video on youtube can be considered to be a quality work if it was created intentionally. There are several moments here where I chuckled at the absurdity of what I was seeing, both the absurdity of human beings behaving the way the ones on the screen are behaving, and the absurdity that I and 200 other film fans are actually watching this in one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals (not to mention, for this particular screening, in the Cinematheque located in the AGO, Toronto’s largest and most celebrated art institution).
However, once the film becomes repetitive, and, thus, quite boring, it is no longer the juvenilia of the film’s content, nor its sub-youtube quality VHS presentation, that makes the film of low quality. I think that there actually could have been a version of this film that I would have supported and enjoyed quite a bit, because I didn’t mind the childish humor that much, nor the intentionally cruddy look. But, for over 80% of a film to be boring is inexcusable, especially when the length is shorter that 80 minutes. Boredom is the cardinal sin of a feature film, because once the viewers’ attentions drift beyond the content of the film or anything relating to it, there can’t be a completely informed discussion of its content. Boredom is subjective, yes, but I can almost objectively say that a film in which its content does not develop or progress after the 10-minute mark to a level that is in any way different from what has come before it, will not produce enough interesting ideas to satisfy a 78-minute running time. If it does for a particular viewer, then that viewer has a specialized attachment to the material, a bias to its humor, or perhaps the filmmaker, that ignores the quality: no version of the film could have disappointed them.
I checked twitter about half an hour after the film ended, searching for “Trash Humpers tiff09,” and of the 4 or 5 tweets that came up from people who just came out of my screening, none of them were anywhere near negative. Sure, I’m aware that there is a very specific demographic that uses twitter, and even more so that tweets the moment a film ends or during the film; but, for those tweets claiming that the film was ‘hilarious’ or that it ‘rocked,’ I can only say that these people are lying. I was in the cinema. After the first 15 minutes, the people in that theatre, a fairly small theatre, was almost dead silent (save for the girl sitting behind me, who every twenty minutes let out a belly laugh when one of the humpers started humping another trash can). No laughter, no giggles after 15 minutes, yet it was hilarious. These tweeters and fans of the film, as mentioned in the review by Mike D’Angelo on notcoming.com, decided before the film that they were going to like it, and that they were going to laugh when a humper humped some trash, and are probably already planning private screenings of the DVD (or VHS) with a generous supply of marijuana to go around so that they can all giggle and guffaw at the awesomeness.
I was fully prepared for my reaction to Trash Humpers to be a negative one, and given a particular kind of distaste for it, I could have conceivably viewed it as a successfully terrible film. But the manner in which it achieves its low quality is not acceptable, and its greatest accomplishment and discussion point, now, is that it has convinced anyone that it is worth discussing: a tired post-modern idea that has barely any interest anymore. When the film ended, I was ready to never discuss this film again, to let it die as a blemish on my otherwise well-curated schedule; yet, here I am approaching 1000 words discussing it, falling brilliantly or idiotically into its trap.