It took me more than 14 years to get round to it, but I finally watched Trash Humpers – and far from the absurd amusement promised by the trailer, it delivered one of the most harrowing cinematic experiences of my life. Perhaps that’s why it also feels like a prophetic analysis of 21st century collapse.
In a middling review for Variety, Rob Nelson argued that Trash Humpers would be “highly unlikely to gratify all audiences”, and said it was unclear if it would be at all notable, were it not for the director’s “hipster celebrity“.
The first part of that is clearly true, in that a faux-documentary about the ‘darkly comedic’ perversions of America’s lumpen proletariat is not going to be very many people’s cup of tea. But frankly, until I decided to write about this film, I had no idea who Harmony Korine is. I haven’t seen Gummo or Spring Breakers – and so finding out Trash Humpers is from the same writer-director doesn’t change a whole lot (although, if someone wants to send an argument as to how Trash Humpers serves as a thematic prequel for Spring Breakers, please get in touch).
Despite my ignorance of Korine’s apparent celebrity, the trailer buried itself somewhere in my brain somewhere in 2009. At the time, my friendship circle was very into the crass and obscene comedy which had dominated YouTube’s animation scene (David Firth et al), and the teaser for Trash Humpers – featuring four rubbery-faced elders grinding against refuse while singing eery songs about Three Little Devils in a voice not dissimilar to Herbert the Pervert – felt like one of those nightmarish creations had sprung to life. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the film never played any theatres in Norwich – so the film’s release came and went, and the memory lay dormant for more than a decade.
A conversation about the most effective trailers I had ever seen dredged it back up again. I don’t know if it’s possible to make a more effective advert for a film than one which can essentially turn its viewers into a sleeper cell, who could be triggered decades down the line, and immediately want to find out what the movie supposedly about people who fornicate with garbage cans might actually be about.
Oddly enough, first and foremost, Trash Humpers is actually about people who hump trash. Interviews no longer found on the internet quoted him as saying he “didn’t want to fool anyone” – and the extremely low-budget production certainly has no trouble living up to that minimal promise of the name.
Decked out in sinister masks of elderly citizens, Buddy (Brian Kotzur), Momma (Rachel Korine), Travis (Travis Nicholson) and Hervé (Harmony Korine) travel across decaying urban America, with the desire to live without restraint. Summarising the group’s ‘philosophy’ in what may be the film’s only moment of even vague exposition, Korine as Hervé explains, “Most people don’t understand, we live like, free… free people.”
But why is the group’s sense of ‘freedom’ tied exclusively to destructive acts, random fits of violence, and humping trash? As profound as Hervé believes his mission (to smash the screens of abandoned televisions, put on racist puppet shows, murder street performers, and give bulging bin bags a good pounding) is, he doesn’t seem willing or able to explain that particular ‘why’, either. From where I’m sitting though, the answer seems somewhat prophetic.
Of course, it’s impossible for me to say for sure, either. The film was almost completely unscripted, and born out of via four weeks of unbroken guerilla workshopping with the four ‘humpers’ playing up to Korine’s ancient camcorder, before being choppily edited together on a pair of old VHS players. There are not many places where the director has overtly spelled out meaning for us. But I do think that, intentionally or not, the images that it has dredged up turned out to be “letters forwarded from Hell”. In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Korine and Hervé had their fingers on the pulse of the world, and how life was about to change for citizens of its most powerful economies.
Broken promises
People who had grown up in the 90s and 00s, in the US, UK and EU had spent their formative years being promised a very specific world. The supposed End of History had seen the last ideological competitor to capitalism collapse – and in its wake, a co-opted bastardisation of ‘Third-Way’ socialism claimed to have delivered a boom to which there would be no bust. We were promised a ceaseless golden run of consumerist delights, where we could fill the void left by concepts of community and political will with stuff. This fetishised consumerism saw the purchase of products elevated beyond a survival trait, to social currency; buying something was now more than ever a means to make friends, a method of raising healthy children, or even a marital aid.
Rather than financing this by calling for improved wages through collective bargaining, however, the Third-Way encouraged the use of cheap credit to fuel the boom. When it turned out that house was built on sand – and the credit crunch, and Great Recession wiped out the spending power of the ‘middle-class’ to an extent from which it has never recovered – millions of people who had been taught from birth that a consumer was the most important thing they could be, suddenly couldn’t fulfil that function. Scrambling in desperation to find some way of still live up to that ‘normal’ standard, many fell into self-destructive, absurd or dangerous behaviours.
One example of this might be the London riots of 2011. Left-wing commentators tried to frame the riots as amorphous, undefined ‘class rage’, which could be shaped and targeted to hold the country’s government and police accountable. That was because the riots initially seemed to grow out of the protests of the police shooting Mark Duggan dead in that month. But the further things escalated, the more events arguably seemed to have more to do with an inability to live as consumers, than with the cops, or David Cameron’s coalition (something which the fact it seemed very few rioters turned out during the rest of the decade’s anti-austerity or police protests might also speak to). Instead, the endless imagery of mangled storefronts for luxury goods told the story of a pent-up urge to acquire prestige products at any cost – the original themes of social discontent having long fallen by the wayside.
Meanwhile, in the US, ‘hoarding’ has become a common part of the modern lexicon. Partially it has been popularised by the exploitative reality ‘help’ shows which poke and prod compulsive acquirers of stuff – offering mealy-mouthed promises to alleviate their illness, without considering its causes. But those shows could not have succeeded in the way they did, were there not so many people on the brink of becoming hoarders. Week after week, Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive tracked camera crews through formerly middle-class houses, crammed to the brim with stuff. It doesn’t even need to be nice stuff (in fact most of it isn’t), with people unable to scratch their itch in a conventional sense of consumption instead dragging the contents of tips, scrapyards and neighbourhood dumpsters into their abode – to the detriment of their friends, family, and more than a few mummified cats.
Trash Humpers is from the same age – it is shaped by the same economic forces, and its director seems to have tapped into the same cultural zeitgeist, to foreshadow the nightmarish decay to come. For decades, ‘freedom’ in the American sense had been tied to capitalism – and in the years since the end of the Cold War that had gone into overdrive. Without an alternative, consumables became the ‘teachers, mothers, secret lovers’ of the country’s mainstream. But after the financial crisis, Americans were left with an insatiable desire for this perverse sense of freedom, which they could no-longer live up to. Having been programmed to see stuff as the key to individual distinction, a happy family, and sexual attractiveness, in the vacuum left by the recession, these characters have developed an alarming set of fetishes.
Generational wealth
Tellingly, part of the masquerade also involves dressing up as the elderly. (It’s one of the only totally deliberate, pre-determined factors in the film there is to comment on.) As disturbingly convincing as the masks the Humpers wear are, they are still conspicuously masks. The group’s bodies remain young and agile – which becomes apparent the more we see them rampage through the city, sleep under bridges, or make sweet love to garbage in more complicated positions. They are cosplaying as the demographic who seem to have been least impacted by the 21st century collapse: the Baby Boomers.
The generation who happened to grow up in America’s one brief window of social security, when the state at least feigned support for citizens, and when trade unions could still help obtain a respectable wage. The generation who got on the housing ladder at exactly the right time – then spent the rest of their lives kicking away said ladder, and branding everyone who struggled after them as feckless or lazy. While generational politics are at their heart an unhelpful abstraction, which negate the fact there are plenty of Boomers who don’t own property, or are on the left of the political spectrum, that makes the Humpers’ inaccurate obsession with them even more interesting.
The Humpers want the lives of their elders – but they don’t have the support, or the economic and political frame of reference to obtain it in reality. Worse, they are so divorced from the reality their elders did obtain that life under, that they don’t even realise the Humpers’ way of living as “free people” is so pitifully far beneath the life they have been denied – but also that that life, with its own ideological trappings, was also the life of a group of an exploited and duped class of rubes, who have been conned into seeing themselves as chosen people, to prop up a system that is going to destroy the lives of their children and grand-children.
All they know is that they need to have things, and they should be having sex. So, they end up having sex with the only things available to them – literal sacks of garbage. They know, as American settlers have always been primed to know, that maintaining their underwhelming facade of ‘freedom’ depends upon seeing themselves as superior to someone else, so they waste what feels like days guffawing at an amateur stand-up comedian whose material is just bigoted statements with no punchline. And they know the ‘ideal’ life is one where you have kids – whom you love through the art of consumption. So, they abduct a baby.
It’s nightmare fuel – and not nearly the ‘comedy’ that trailer promised me all those years ago. But perhaps there’s something appropriate in that too – for a story centred on the monstrous results of the broken ideological promises which have corrupted these characters – promises which so many of us will recognise from our own lives. And these are impulses which inform our desires to promote some of the most reactionary and dangerous politics of our age – the fascism of Trump, Wilders, Meloni and Farage, promising to return us to a hollow parody of a golden age, at any terrible cost.
15 years on, Rob Nelson’s thoughts on Trash Humpers probably still hold true. It isn’t “notable” in the sense of being widely known, at least. And it certainly won’t be pleasing to anyone who watches it – let alone “gratify all audiences”. It wasn’t pleasing to me – it left me feeling like I needed to go swimming in a vat of bleach afterwards. But if you have exhausted your options this Halloween, I would still recommend it – a relentlessly harrowing watch, which holds up a warped funhouse mirror and dares us to look at the ghouls we are dangerously close to becoming.
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