Crumb
Eccentricity at its most extreme
BY ROGER EBERT / Sep
10, 1994
"Crumb" is a
meeting between two eccentrics in sympathy with each other. The artist R. Crumb
created such bizarre images in his underground comic books that the art critic
Robert Hughes named him "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th
century." The director Terry Zwigoff knew him before he had any notion of
making this documentary. They shared a love for obscure musicians on 78 rpm
records from the 1920s and 1930s, and they once played in the same band. Long
before he knew the inhabitants of Crumb's childhood home would be the keys to
this film, Zwigoff had slept the night there and met Crumb's brother Charles,
who is perhaps the key to the whole Crumb story.
The old 78s led Zwigoff
to his first film, "Louie Bluie" (1986)
about a musician named Howard Armstrong, whose forgotten recordings from the
1930s fascinated him. Learning that Armstrong was still alive, he made a film
about a man who was ageless, gifted in music and art, a clown and mimic, a life
force. Zwigoff was now a filmmaker, and knew that his next subject was
obviously his fellow music lover, Robert Crumb.
This was not obvious to
Crumb, a legendary underground artist from
Zwigoff told me he
"called in every favor he owed me" to persuade Crumb to be in his
film: He spent nine years on the documentary "while averaging an income of
about $200 a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three
years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the
nerve to kill myself."
I am apparently
responsible for the urban legend that Zwigoff told Crumb, "Make this film
or I will shoot myself." That never happened, but it may be true that Zwigoff's life was saved because he did make the film.
Among documentaries
about artists, "Crumb" (1994) is unusual in having access to the key
players and biographical artifacts of Crumb's entire life. Crumb himself is
entirely forthcoming on camera, uninhibited, honest. We meet both of his wives,
who talk cheerfully about the way their images and secrets were incorporated,
sometimes directly, into Crumb's work. We see the high school yearbook
portraits of classmates immortalized into grotesques and sadists, sometimes
under their own names. Most crucially, we enter Crumb's boyhood home in
We leave the film
convinced there are no secrets still concealed in this family. We know that
Robert's central sexual fantasy was to ride bareback on women with
overdeveloped rumps; that Charles remained a virgin and recluse, rarely leaving
his bedroom, his erotic imagination forever fixed on Bobby Driscoll in the 1960
film "Treasure Island"; that Max lived in monkish isolation, slept on
a bed of nails and regularly passed a 30-foot cloth ribbon through his body;
that their alcoholic father broke Robert's collarbone when he was a boy, and
that the parents fought between themselves so fiercely that their faces were
often covered with scratches and bruises. Photographs of the family circa 1950
find parents and five children posed in their Sunday best on a suburban lawn,
looking as if they are awaiting the arrival of Diane Arbus.
Charles was the first
artist in the family. He hand-drew comic books, and encouraged Robert and Max
to draw, against their will at first. Handmade comics from the period survive
and are seen in the film; Robert seems to have saved everything, and Charles
did, too, although after his death by overdose, his mother threw out most of
his work before Robert could rescue it. Max accumulates little, as befits a
monk, but his paintings now draw high prices in galleries. Ironic that Robert
and Max gained fame as artists while Charles remained in his room, reading
stacks of paperback novels and filling notebooks with endless entries, some of
them words, some only elaborate typographical patterns. In an extraordinary
scene involving Robert, Charles and their mother, Beatrice, she sprawls almost
flat on a sofa, but like her sons is funny, articulate, and very strange.
Art may have saved
Crumb from madness, turning private neurosis into public validation. Zwigoff is
unsparing in showing Crumb's more transgressive work; the camera follows panel
by panel through comic books as Crumb narrates stories of incest, necrophilia,
scatology, assault, mayhem and sexual couplings as unlikely as they are
alarming. To call some of his images sexist, racist and depraved is putting it
mildly.
Zwigoff is fair enough
to provide an articulate objection to Crumb's work: Good sane Deirdre English,
a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, is not shocked as much as saddened
and repelled by Crumb's work, which treats women as objects, commodities,
victims, mindless (sometimes even headless) conveniences. In defense of Crumb,
the art critic Hughes finds a vision of suffering and yearning, of barriers
ignored, of inhibitions disregarded, of a psyche turning itself out naked upon
the page. Certainly it is true that Crumb's men are treated no better than his
women: all are disgusting creatures driven by animalistic lust and depraved
need.
His graphic novels have
undeniable energy and a visual style that depends on meticulous command of the
divide between portrait and caricature. We see his pen at work, we see the
materials that inspire some of his images, we see him
giving a drawing lesson to his teenage son, Jesse. He is one of those artists
whose pen stroke is instantly identifiable as his own. His subjects are not
superheroes or comic characters (although Crumb reveals that as a child he
masturbated to Bugs Bunny). They are lonely, disenfranchised, pimply, unpopular -- all the things we sense Crumb was when he was
"the most unpopular kid in high school." In some of his most
loathsome caricatures, Crumb is still settling scores with bullies from his
adolescence and girls who turned him down.
Yet the women who knew
him best seem fond of him, especially his first wife, Dana, and current wife, Aline, who see him (as we do in the film) as a smart and
entertaining companion who has transformed his demons into his work. Yes, he
has sexual hangups, but not ones they find unpleasant
or painful. Researching Crumb's fetishes for isolated body parts, especially
feet, buttocks and breasts, Zwigoff visits Dian Hanson, the editor of the Juggs and Leg Show magazines, who attributes her publishing
success to the fact that she actually reads the letters from her readers.
She arranges a fantasy
session for Crumb and some of her models, but this scene doesn't work; for
Crumb, the point is not realizing his fantasies, but displacing them into
obsessive visual caricatures. In this process some of his work becomes a
critique of the same values Deirdre English deplores. If pornography
dehumanizes and objectifies, then perhaps that is the point of the Crumb story
(shown in detail) about a woman whose neck ends with a peg on which a mannequin
head can be attached? She is otherwise functional in all the ways Crumb's hero
desires. The strip has a shocking climax, when the hero discovers his woman is
not without a head after all; it has been shoved down inside her neck, and when
it emerges, the woman has a great deal to complain about. Such a work is
disgusting and depraved at the same time it is satirical and subversive; it is
an overdose of sexism, inspiring not desire but disgust. It is also, let us be honest, satirical in a dark and scary way.
Crumb's art and career
would define the limits of this film if it had been made by someone else. What deepens Zwigoff's work are the
scenes with the family members. There is in Charles such a gentle sadness, such
a resigned acceptance of his emotional imprisonment, that we sense how Robert's
art has saved him from a similar destiny. In the fondness of his wives and
girlfriends, there is a redemption to be sensed. As
the film ends, Crumb is moving with his family to the south of France, where in
the last 10 years he has not produced so much, perhaps because, let us
speculate, he is happier.
A new DVD edition of
"Crumb" including a commentary/conversation between Zwigoff and Ebert
will be released in 2006.