CRUMB
Whereof One Should Not Speak
The underground comic book artist, Robert Crumb, achieved cult status during the flower power generation as R. Crumb, founder of ZAP Comix, creator of characters like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Angelfood McSpade. He is arguably best known to mainstreamers for the ubiquitous "Keep On Truckin'" logo, which became a contemporary Kilroy Was Here; it's has been pasted upon virtually every adornable surface since the Sixties.
The reclusive Crumb previously avoided self-disclosure, keeping interviewers at arms length with wry put-downs that revealed as much as they concealed. Filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, a friend of several decades, has always believed Crumb is an unrecognized American genius; wanted to tell his story before it was debased by some flack from the media culture which Crumb despises and which his work frequently mocks.
By report Zwigoff was able to overcome Crumb's considerable resistance, because the artist was moved to pity by the director's near suicidal despair from a creative stall. Over six years he allowed Zwigoff access to family, friends, an ex-wife and several former lovers. Zwigoff then interspersed personal footage with adulation, condemnation and equivocation by critics of various persuasions.
Crumb has received highly favorable reviews (Roger Ebert calls it "one of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made."). The fanfare is unmerited: this is a cold, deeply problematic piece of business, less skilful than Zwigoff's earlier compassionate portrait of an obscure jazzman, Louie Bluie. It's often insensitive, when not alarmingly cruel towards its more vulnerable participants; and ultimately raises serious questions about the value of the very work it vaunts.
Crumb initially is presented against the background of the jaunty old jazz he loves (and which he also plays expertly), as a simulacrum of one of his own flaky, feckless characters. On and off the page, his iconoclastic wit is as likely to be directed against himself as bourgeois society. He's a thin, slightly stooped man affecting dweeb hornrims, a nerd hat, and a toothbrush moustache -- all of which which foster the impression of disarming innocuousness. The more one hears and sees of him, the more one suspects this diffident image is deliberately cultivated -- or disingenuous at least.
One learns that Crumb grew up in a suburban Phildadelphia nightmare. His father, now dead, was an ex-marine martinet who beat, bullied, and belittled his family (he possibly broke young Robert's collarbone). The mother appears to have been angst-ridden, and largely ineffective in preventing her husband's depredations. Mention is made of her possible amphetamine abuse. There are five children; two daughters who refused participation (wisely, in this reviewer's opinion); an older brother, Charles, and a younger, Maxon.
Max lives in San Francisco. A semi-derelict with no visible means of support, he paints well if weirdly when he isn't lying on a bad of nails, or passing a strip of linen through his body by way of yogic purification. With little affect or regret, he tells Crumb and the camera that he was once arrested for groping a woman in a store.
Crumb and Zwigoff also visit the family home, where Charles and his mother still live in appalling squalor. Charles rarely leaves his book-strewn room; he's unkempt, heavily tranquilized, still obviously brilliant, sardonically lucid. He relates a lifetime of humiliating alienation with unhealing insight, hesitates amidst his painful reminiscences to consider -- "I don't think we should be talking about this..." -- then plunges on, no one to stop him. "At least he's not out taking illegal drugs or making some woman miserable", mutters his dishevelled, no less marginal mother.
All the brothers were exceptionally close, their tightness conceivably enhanced by their hurtful upbringing and their status with peers as derided misfits. A particularly symbiotic bond between Charles and Robert was charged with intense rivalry. Charles was a talented cartoonist -- Robert thinks he may have been the most innately gifted of the three -- who by the sheer force of his strange personality compelled participation in an idiosyncratic comic universe. As Charles' obsession with Long John Silver mounted, "The Animaltown Comic Club" eventually waxed so bizarre that Robert dropped out. He quit the family altogether in his late 'teens, moved to another state, drew greeting cards for awhile, then became a full-time magazine illustrator.
Charles' adolescent maxim -- "How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is to be sure..." hung over his brothers' tormented puberty. It betokened that formidable irony a sensitive teenager may use as a defense against emotional wounding, but which also can fence off a wary heart from possibilities of intimacy and joy, however slim.
The capacity for withering irony enabled Robert to cope with the hurtful rejections from women experienced throughout his 'teens -- which he speaks about, and draws ceaselessly. Crumb's typical spindly hero seems barely post-adolescent. He quails in fear and desire before a huge dominatrix with "shapely, powerful legs". When he isn't fleeing the wrath of this fearful Maillol-like figure, he's at her feet, or riding on her back. Occasionally he gets to service her sexually, heart in mouth.
A very different, far from humorous persona than this beaten-down wretch emerges from the artist's grimly satisfied account of the pleasures he took from the women who idolized him once he became famous; and from his frequent drawing of woman as an obscenely degraded object -- headless, or with a head jammed into a toilet bowl. These representations pass beyond a meaningful, if repugnant aesthetic into the very stuff of solipsistic pornography (his thick-lipped black stereotypes demonstrate the same enigmatic, disturbing scorn). About such material, he mutters: "Maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken away...Sometimes I think it's a mistake...but somehow revealing that truth about myself is somehow helpful." Cui bono?, one is prompted to inquire.
Crumb's lovers underscore one's intuition that he's hardly the Milquetoast of his strips. Both by their and his account, he often seems to be living out his conviction that romance is a fiction; that women are essentially drawn to male nastiness, arrogance and power. A former girl friend speaks mordantly about the cool manipulator beneath his helpless facade. Another, who edits magazines like LEG SHOW and BIG BUTT, claims his sensibility is aggressively pornographic at base (she admires it).
His second wife, Aline Kominsky, a cartoonist who clearly resembles one of Crumb's Valkyrie, is seen encouraging him to craft an egregiously sexist, outrageously offensive sexist strip. She offers him similar latitude away from the drawing board in their "open" marriage. Crumb says their daughter, Sophie, is the only person he has ever loved. While his inveterate cynicism softens during his scenes with her, he comes most authentically -- and perversely -- alive during a photo-shoot for LEG SHOW, hopping on the backs of scantily clad, strapping models; happily tucking his head beneath their shoes.
Crumb has been praised for documenting its hero's triumph over the most adverse psychological circumstances to gain his place in the sun. While one is happy for any victim of early misfortunes who eventually prevails in this world of pain, caution is urged about overmuch lauding Crumb's progress as a testament to the dignity of the human spirit. As a monument to its relentless toughness, that is another matter. Crumb's transcending his traumatic origins seems to have been a matter of luckier genetics; and a talent which could be communicated to others (unlike his brothers'), which Crumb developed with meticulous persistence after making the crucial decision to distance himself from his family.
Professional achievement enabled Crumb to become more secure, indeed unadmirably manipulative in aid of fulfilling sexual desire. Success also arguably made it easier for him to discover lovers, friends, and colleagues who were supportive of his maverick, often off-putting views; who could furnish him opportunities to be his own ornery self -- more socialized, but perhaps in many ways not very different from the embittered, embattled outsider of his adolescence. If today he is no monster, neither is he Helen Keller.
Of course, the artist never owed the public assurances of being a nice guy. The art's the issue, whether its creator be saint, scoundrel or merely of quotidian virtue. The imagery shown in Crumb is often unabashedly scatological, heavily inflected by private narcissistic preoccupations, doing little to back the fulsome claims of critic Robert Hughes and a pixillated art dealer (who can hardly be objective) that Crumb is another Brueghel or Daumier, largely overlooked upon his native ground.
The impression gained from his wider output, including work viewed in the l99O "High and Low" exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, is of skilful draftsmanship deployed in the service of highly site-specific, scabrous satire; of a substantial but not great skill, which materialized at the right place and time -- the Sixties counterculture. (Crumb is certain that the LSD he took during this period considerably ripened his art). Whether that talent will endure past this time is moot. Perhaps he will evolve and mature further in an angry self-imposed exile: The film ends upon his quitting the "jive bullshit" of a country he deems culturally bankrupt, to relocate in rural France.
As to the merit of Zwigoff's cinematic craft, Crumb is reasonably well constructed, but possesses neither the complexity nor depth of Hoop Dreams, last year's other highly praised documentary. It lacks the latter's dignity; balance; essential respectfulness towards its characters. It is also hopelessly tainted by a mean confessional spirit typical of our age, a Geraldo faux-honesty which cuts brutally to the bone, while reeking of specious titillation.
One speculates that a major cause for Crumb's hurtful irresponsibility resides in Zwigoff's diminished objectivity about his subject. He had long known and identified with Crumb before undertaking the movie. It is conceivable that during the process of filmmaking he became swayed by the indiscretion and lack of censorship Crumb previously reserved for his art. Entering the documentary mode may well have provided a spur for both men to resonate with each other, energizing greater exposure than either had intended of Crumb's troubled family, tangled earlier relationships, ongoing conflicts and resentments.
Primum non nocere, goes the old medical tag -- first, do no harm. This prime directive should have guided a documentary like Crumb -- and clearly didn't. How must Jesse, Crumb's son from his earlier marriage -- or Crumb's present wife -- or his mother, however marginal her relatedness -- or Maxon, on his bed of nails -- have received Crumb's declaration of loving his daughter, and her alone?
What were the injuries to Charles' perturbed spirit, knowing that his private psychic hell had been dragged into the light over his weak objections? For that matter, how may Crumb's own sensibilities been abraded by the dawning awareness that his cherished privacy had been so definitively invaded -- with his beguiled consent? Did that realization of self-violation play any part in his departing for an obscure foreign locale?
In sum, Crumb's minor virtues are greatly overbalanced by its terrible, or at least terribly ill-considered traumatic revelations. One is moved to paraphrase Wittgenstein:
Whereof one should not speak, one must remain silent.