CRUMB (Blu-Ray) - #533

"How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure."

There is so much loaded into the above statement by Charles Crumb, that one can't help but immediately seize on it. It is so packed with meaning and says a multitude of things with such poetic economy, Terry Zwigoff had to know immediately upon hearing it that it would serve as ideal punctuation for the epilogue of his 1995 documentary Crumb. What had started out as a film about legendary underground cartoonist Robert Crumb ended up not just a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, but of his family as well. The fact that Zwigoff composes the film with such attention to detail, and yet absent of even a whiff of judgment, has made it one of the most compelling documentaries of our times, as well as one of the most perceptive and illuminating examinations of both the perils and giddy joy of the creative life.

Though Charles Crumb is credited with the phrase, Robert Crumb is the one who shares it with Zwigoff, having scribbled it at the top of a drawing he made to illustrate the anxiety the filming process had been causing him. Robert and his wife Aline Kominsky were preparing to move to France at the time, a fitting end to the filmmaking schedule. Zwigoff had asked Robert if he would miss his family or otherwise felt bad about leaving them. The artist says no, he never sees Charles or his mother, and the interview session reminded him why. That quote was a favorite phrase of the older brother's, and he would say it to deflate any happiness his younger siblings might find in anything that struck their fancy. Imagine it said sarcastically. The underlying meaning is that what Robert liked was stupid and liking it made him an idiot.

And yet, it could also be the Crumb family motto, and it need not be as sardonic as all that. There is something strangely American in how off center this American clan is. Imagine Robert Crumb and his brothers standing on a hillside, the sun setting in the sky behind them, at the end of an old Hollywood movie. "How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure," is suddenly "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."

Crumb is a two-hour perusal of the Crumb family photo album. Though a good portion of it does chronicle R. Crumb's rise to infamy as a satirist and counter-culture cartoonist, the full image doesn't really come into frame without the other boys. Robert is the middle child, and the youngest is Maxon. (Two sisters refused to participate in the movie. Can't say I blame them, lord knows what was done to them in that household when they were young.) All three boys possess a natural ability for art, though it was Charles who literally forced them into comic books, particularly Robert, who saved the fruits of their labor all these years. He's got stacks of the fancy books he and Charles put together, trading story lines and ideas, developing their unique style. There is an obsessive-compulsive trait to both of their aesthetics: R. Crumb is known for his meticulous cross-hatching and immaculate ink lines, whereas Charles developed a "wrinkled" style. As he got older, everything he drew was decorated in endless loops.

A comic book page by the young Crumbs

Maxon's story is slightly different. He started drawing when he was older, and the sudden release of passion resulted in an epileptic seizure. He is more of a fine artist now, but in his paintings, there is a consistent mechanical theme and also a vague obsession with undulating, melting lines, reminiscent of the clocks in Dali's "Persistence of Memory." At the time of filming, Maxon was living a pseudo-monastic life, begging for change in San Francisco. In Crumb's most discussed scene, which comes not long after Maxon has confessed to a misspent youth pulling women's pants down in public, the clearly deranged painter is meditating on a bed of nails while swallowing a chord that he will pass through his digestive track to clean it out. If Charles had the same cord, he would probably wrap it around himself like his beloved wrinkles; for Maxon, it's another undulating line.

Art by Maxon Crumb

Charles lived on the other side of the country. He never moved out of their childhood home, and he has turned into a recluse that never goes outside and only bathes once every six weeks. He's on medication for depression, and he admits to suicide attempts and previous homicidal thoughts. (The sad coda is he did kill himself not long after his interview was filmed.) There is some intimation that maybe Charles, who was a regular troublemaker as a youngster, turned inward to avoid even more dangerous impulses. Many of the comics he made when he was a teen riff on the Treasure Island story--but not because of the escape fantasy the adventure tale offered, but because Charles had become fixated on the young actor Bobby Driscoll, who starred in the 1950 movie version.

Robert Crumb listens to both his brothers indulgingly, laughing at their quirks, but never in a way that is mean-spirited. Robert has a habit of laughing at just about everything, including himself, though there is a lot of anger inside him. It ends up in his work, in his comic book adventures of Mr. Natural and Devil Girl and the sketches and one-offs he fills into notebook after notebook. One thing that Zwigoff succeeds at with smashing success in Crumb is relaying the subject and timbre of Crumb's comics to the audience. I had only a passing knowledge of the artist when I saw Crumb on its original theatrical release, but watching the film made me feel like I knew the work intimately. Zwigoff does this by just putting the camera lens up to the page and tracking the comic book panels as the artist tells the story behind them or sometimes even just reads the dialogue. The director also peers over the artist's soldier while he sketches in public. It's an unbelievable record of a craftsman at work. (Criterion also does a great job of giving us access to the work of all the artists, filling the interior booklet with efforts from all the brothers and even Robert's son Jesse, as well as giving us a full reproduction of a correspondence school's artist test Robert talks about in the film.)

R. Crumb's rendering of his childhood.

The comics of R. Crumb are known for their sexual deviancy and anarchic humor, and the creator makes no attempt to hide his fetishes. There is one hilarious scene where the artist poses for a layout in the porn magazine Leg Show, and the editor who set it up, who also happens to be a former girlfriend of Crumb's, hires models that fit his particular bill: thick legs, big butts, and a frame sturdy enough to give him a piggyback ride. In an effort to puzzle out R. Crumb's work, Zwigoff even gives some screen time to his critics. There are cases to be made for misogyny and racism in his comics, ones that Crumb ultimately seems to suggest are unfounded, but Zwigoff lets the detractors have their say all the same.

I think Crumb makes the strongest case for the value of his work himself when he says, essentially, these thoughts had to go somewhere, so why not channel them into art. If you consider what the other Crumb brothers got up to, the notion bears truth. Maybe if Maxon had put his peccadilloes onto more canvases, he wouldn't have gotten into legal hot water for harassing women. Maybe if Charles kept drawing, he'd have found a way to sort out the wrinkles in his own brain. Those are big what-ifs, their illnesses may have gotten the better of them either way, but you still have to wonder.

Because contrary to all the weirdness, Crumb does have some hope and normalcy. Both of Robert Crumb's children, Sophie and Jesse, were burgeoning artists at the time of filming, and Zwigoff shows the father sharing in his children's creations, offering advice and support. Somehow, this new generation appears to be turning out all right despite being a product of the same mad genius. As any creative person will tell you, making our art keeps us from losing our minds. Personally, if I get away from writing for more than a couple of days, my brain doesn't work right. In the case of the Crumbs, the family that draws together, stays sane together.

Visit the official R. Crumb website.

LOUIE BLUIE - #532

I love hearing musicians tell stories about performing. It doesn't matter what kind of musician, they don't even have to play a genre I listen to that much, I still like tales from the road or antics in the recording studio. I am not a big blues fan, I don't even think I own a blues record. It's just not a form I've really found my way into. That didn't stop me from enjoying every minute of Louie Bluie, Terry Zwigoff's 1985 portrait of Howard Armstrong. It's the man behind the fiddle that counts here, and the fellow they call Louie Bluie is an entertaining rascal.

Armstrong is a Tennessee-born musician who played fiddle and mandolin in African American "string bands" from the depression onward. By the time Zwigoff turned his camera in Armstrong's direction, he was getting on in years and the music he loved was long past its heyday. Yet, Louie Bluie plays his instrument like every audience is standing room only, and his every anecdote is delivered with humor and flair. He's a talkative subject, most of the film is just Zwigoff hitting "record" and letting the old codger's mouth run. He then shapes the stories into a kind of narrative, visiting locations from Armstrong's past, filming him on tour, and showing how he interacts with his friends and the rest of the band.

Louie Bluie captures Armstrong at age 75, though you'd never know he was that old. The chatterbox is full of energy, and he plucks at the strings with impressive vigor. He tells jokes about how fast he played when he was young, but it doesn't really seem like Armstrong has slowed at all. Not in any aspect of his life. The first shot of the movie shows him dry shaving with a loose razor blade, and I can't think of a more fitting image to illustrate what a tough old goat Louie Bluie is. Driving the point deeper, the audio is Armstrong, in voiceover, telling us how he is always driven to create. If he isn't making music, he is painting; if he's not painting he is writing poems. He refers to himself as a Jekyll and Hyde, with the Hyde presumably being his creative side. If the good doctor ever gets control from the monster, Zwigoff doesn't share it with us--though I'm thinking that's because he never stumbled on any evidence that Jekyll exists at all.

As a filmmaker, Terry Zwigoff's stock-in-trade has always been the uniquely obsessive. Louie Bluie was his first feature, and it points the way to what was to come. When Armstrong pulls his Bible of Pornography out of a locked case and shows it to his friend, it's impossible not to think of Zwigoff's most famous subject, Robert Crumb, and the documentary that bears his name. One of the things that impressed me most about Crumb was how the director was able to push his camera over the artist's shoulder and show his work through his eyes. He does the same here, as Armstrong gleefully explains his ABCs of smut. His use of caricature and appreciation of the more corpulent aspects of the female form is also a lot like Crumb. The famous underground cartoonist actually provides the cover art for this DVD release, and the accompanying booklet features some of Armstrong's own drawings, too.

More important than the sexual peccadilloes, however, is the sense that, like Crumb or Enid in Ghost World or even Bad Santa himself, Howard Armstrong could not have existed anywhere else, and that he is a product of his time, so much so that time has kind of passed him by. His yarns about playing an Italian restaurant at the height of Jim Crow or the pick-up bands where his fellow musicians turned whatever items at hand into instruments, couldn't be contemporary. No such stories about anyone as young and ambitious today as he was then could exist. These are experiences that precede technology and easy access. Howard Armstrong's expression was born out of necessity--social, economic, racial, and personal necessity. It's the essence of the blues: you sing about this pain, or you suffer. Though, given how jaunty the rhythm and humorous the lyrics, Louie Bluie is masking the pain rather than wallowing in it. A later R&B song would serve as an appropriate description; as Smokey Robinson would say, "I Gotta Dance To Keep From Crying."

Woody Allen wrote an intro for the movie, which is printed in the DVD booklet. He praises Louie Bluie for preserving the music of times gone by. I'm sorry, though, Woody, I think you miss the point: we should be thanking Terry Zwigoff for preserving this personality, one that sadly left us in 2003. It's not the music, it's the man that makes Louie Bluie a documentary you can watch over and over. It's Howard Armstrong, unfiltered, in his own words. If it was just about the music, all Zwigoff would have needed was a microphone, he could have made a record. Louie Bluie is about one guy, and though he could strike up a fiddle like no one else, it takes a true artist like Zwigoff to see that this isn't the result of practice or that fluke we call talent, but of everything that happened on the way to picking up the bow. The music is made by the performer, not the other way around.

Louie Bluie clip on YouTube