A Film Canon

A true labour of love, Crumb connects the DIY mentality of the 60s Underground Comix movement to the DIY mentality of 90s indie cinema, in an amauteur fuzz that imagines legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb's impossibly thick spectacles as the lens through which his grotesque, gothic visions might be distorted into cinematic language. As Crumb's eyes alternate between magnification and invisibility, a more residual conflation of candor and opacity allows Terry Zwigoff to craft the best kind of artistic biography, based on confession without confession, insofar as confession already presupposes an interpretative and temporal distance between subject and object, utterance and action. Instead, Zwigoff presents Crumb and his two extraordinary brothers, Charles and Maxon, as cast adrift in the atemporality peculiar to a psychoanalytic symptom, an atemporality that is elegantly edited into the repetition-compulsion of Crumb's beloved blues music and the parsing of the comic strip itself. If Crumb, as satirist, is an "outsider in his own country", it's partly because of this inability to properly feel time, or sync personal and historical time - most beautifully as he wanders around a Haight-Ashbury overflowing with Esprit logos, Terminator 2 video games and ghettoblasters, and wonders how much more he actually had in common with its 60s heyday. Insofar as the film has a trajectory, it's towards exactly this kind of moment, with Crumb exhibiting a sudden, unexpected deadness toward everything that might seem to constitute his confessional 'history', or a radical disinterest in himself that presumably designates the film itself, shot over nearly a decade of his life, as one of those things that his eventual decision to move to France casually disdains. It's in this affective or sympathetic vacuum that Crumb's work ultimately comes to life - and Zwigoff doesn't shy away from presenting him as the "arrested juvenile", the pervert, the misanthrope, or the pornographer. In fact, Zwigoff's thesis - insofar as he has a thesis - ultimately seems to be to make a case for pornography - or at least a certain kind of pornography, the hallucinatory disproportions of Jugs, Leg World and Big Butt - as a subset of satire, placing Crumb in a artistic lineage that stretches from Hogarth through Goya, and is above all preoccupied with the line that separates the right wrong from the wrong wrong.