Harmony Korine
1999
94 minutes
This Harmony Korine film has been on your to-see list for quite awhile, but you've never had the opportunity. You've seen Gummo a few times and are properly appreciative of weirdo actress Chloë Sevigny, but you've never had the opportunity to actually view this film. Werner Herzog, of course, has a significant role in it as the father. The film stars Ewen Bremner (from Trainspotting) in the title role as a young man with schizophrenia and a very dysfunctional family. His brother wrestles trash cans. His sister is pregnant and very childlike and immature. And daddy Herzog is a German-accented lunatic, as expected. It is full of the usual Harmony Korine grotesqueries which hit a little too close to home considering some of the awful people you knew around the town in Indiana where you grew up.
When you had graduated and gone on to college, there were only a few people from high school you kept in touch with besides the few students in your graduating class who ended up at your school. One of your more "punk" friends from high school who did not go to college stuck around your town as a cashier at a nearly-dead local pharmacy and general store downtown. Your friend was one of your skater friends from high school, a clique you never quite fit in with fully, but neither did he since he was a notoriously clumsy and terrible skater. The two of you bonded over music, and he used to hang out during your college radio show. You'd occasionally take him to get body piercings and tattoos, and he was the first person you knew with stretched earlobes, which most people considered a horrific sight back in the day.
The proprietor of the store your punk friend worked in used to be your mother's landlord when you were a child, and the only real functional parts of the store even then were the cigarettes and the magazine stand. Your mother would have to go in before her overnight shift at work to pay rent. She would usually buy you a magazine, either Mad or Cracked or sometimes Fangoria as well. The store would usually be populated with your landlord and a couple of random older men watching sports on a small television, and all conversation would stop when you and your mother entered. Even back then it seemed dodgy and gave you the creeps, and your mother suspected the landlord's primary business had something to do with being a bookmaker or a loan shark.
Years later the situation was much the same. Your high school friend got hired on there after losing his job at the pet store a few doors down for dubious reasons, and your old landlord hired him to hold down the shop during the days, paying him under the table. By that time the business had degenerated and gotten openly sketchier. A lot of expired pharmaceuticals still lined the shelves to give a sheen of respectability, but the only sections that were in operation were a well-stocked rack of pornographic magazines and the cigarettes and rolling papers behind the bar. You would sometimes kill time between college classes hanging out in the shop with your friend, laughing at the weirder and very niche pornographic magazines that featured all kinds of absurd and horrifying fetishes in the days before most of that had moved completely to the internet. Occasionally customers would wander in and you and your friend would go as silent as the old men who used to hang out there as a kid, and you'd try not to watch as they'd browse the magazines before selecting a few and buying a pack of rolling papers to roll whatever matter of loose smokable materials they were smoking. Your friend did not provide them with this material directly, but you're pretty sure your old landlord could have hooked them up if necessary.
One day you were over to your friend's and he was about to close up his shift at the store and he mentioned that he had to stop by another friend's house to drop something off. The other friend happened to be Ed, one of your nerdier friends from high school whom you remember loved roleplaying games. You recall borrowing his copy of Shadowrun so you could brush up on the lore. You were eager to see what Ed was up to these days. "You sure about that?" your punk friend asked you ominously. You nodded, so he sighed and agreed you could tag along to Ed's place while he ran his rather innocuous errand.
To your disappointment, Ed's place turned out to be a trailer that he shared with a couple of other random people your age you didn't remember hanging out with in high school. Ed wasn't home but one of his roommates was, a friendly young man with a moustache who worked as some sort of mechanic. He explained that Ed was off working at the video store, and he invited you in to their musty-smelling single-wide trailer, which was hellish inside. It smelled terrible and was swarming with flies and roaches. Noticing your discomfort, Ed's roommate took a moment to walk over to the wall by the trash and pound hard on the wall about a dozen times. He explained that the trailer wasn't well-insulated and that he occasionally had to do that to kill the bugs that would burrow their way inside through the walls. The place was a dump, and it easily looked like the backdrop for any of Korine's films about trashy people.
You stepped into the living room, where you were greeted by a television with two VCRs and a pile of blank videotapes on top of it. The TV was playing hardcore pornography. Ed's roommate explained that Ed had tasked him with pirating the porn from the rental tape to the blank six-hour tape. He just had to change the tape every hour or two. You laughed at this, and the roommate told you to follow him to the hall, where he pointed into Ed's bedroom, which was filled with boxes and boxes of such tapes. Apparently Ed had quite a collection going. It wasn't clear whether this was for his own benefit or if it was a side hustle from his day job to sell to other people or a mix of both. It made you a bit sad either way.
Your punk friend dropped off whatever the hell it was he had to drop off, which turned out to be something relatively innocuous compared to the environment, and you were happy to take your leave. You think of Ed now every time you see a Harmony Korine film.
Time to choose something different: