Crumb
A member of Crumb’s former band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and a fellow collector of rare 20s and 30s blues and jazz records, Zwigoff has previously made documentaries only on musical subjects–blues artist Howard Armstrong in Louie Bluie, a history of Hawaiian music in A Family Named Moe. He noted in one interview that he was in therapy while shooting Crumb, a fact that’s surely left its mark on the material. Clearly Zwigoff sees Crumb as an artist, not just a comic book artist, and his multifaceted approach to this biographical terrain has all the elegance of three-dimensional chess: he crosscuts effortlessly between Crumb with his two brothers on opposite coasts and Crumb ruminating over his work at home and leapfrogs between Crumb’s first wife, son, two former lovers, and various colleagues and commentators. Crumb’s life is thorny and depressing as well as fascinating, and Zwigoff’s approach is unusually serious and methodical: just about everything that’s said about Crumb is intelligent and seems to have been included because Zwigoff agrees with it on some level.
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Let’s start with the sniggering, which we hear whenever Robert gets together with his older brother Charles (still living with their mother and unemployed since 1969) or his younger brother Maxon (living alone in a San Francisco flophouse, meditating two hours daily on a bed of nails). Both of his brothers are also exceptionally gifted, self-aware artists, but unlike Robert they’re misfits who never climbed out of obscurity and often wound up institutionalized, on medication, or both. Most of what’s memorable about Crumb has to do with these brothers; by the time the film is over, one is fully persuaded that if Robert weren’t drawing constantly and compulsively he’d be every bit as doomed as they are. (Referring to these people as if they were fictional characters makes me uncomfortable, but the film’s careful establishment of their personalities makes it hard to do otherwise; whether Zwigoff intends this or not, they become characters within the context of the film.)
Every American male knows the sound of that nervous tittering, and Robert Crumb’s comic world is not only suffused with it (his own adult sexual obsession is amazonian, big-assed, thick-legged women) but encircled by it. I can’t think of any other movie that’s dealt with this kind of laughter so directly. Cassavetes’s fictional film Faces probably came the closest, but there it was simply backslapping businessmen dealing with everyday sexual embarrassment. Crumb cuts deeper, letting us see the potential madness lurking beyond the simple nervousness of sexual panic–a madness disquietingly made to seem as American and almost as ordinary as that pie in the sky. This is one creepy movie, and it should come as no surprise that David Lynch, who helped to get it released, is mentioned at the top of the credits.
Crumb’s recent productions show a healthy contempt for merchandising, indeed for any effort to gain public approval or notice. Two decades ago Crumb decided to kill off Fritz the Cat after he was made the star of two animated features against Crumb’s will and without his control, and his anger about this and other misappropriations points to an artisanal pride in his work in direct opposition to the ambition he’s expected to have in a culture that equates quality with quantity. At the same time, his shrinking subject matter and expatriate status suggest that he’s backed himself into a corner; without America or his flaky cast of characters to keep his comics going, he’s seemingly milked his own persona dry. Yet part of what Crumb shows us is that a move so potentially debilitating to his art may have been psychically necessary.
His art saved me from a bad trip, no small accomplishment. Beginning with an introductory page that presented Crumb himself in the role of a mad scientist, Head Comix featured numerous free-form trips to instruct and interact with my own. The cast of characters included Fritz the Cat, the dancing dudes of “Keep On Truckin’,” Schuman the Human (“Better known as ‘Baldy’ he goes forth with his fine mind to find God!” reads the opening caption. “And believe me, he took along a lunch!”), Mr. Natural (most likely based on Max, today a Hindu), Flakey Foont, Whiteman (a portrait of Robert’s uptight father, as we learn from Crumb), Western Man (alias President Lyndon B. Johnson), the Old Pooperoo, Kitchen Kut-Outs (including Clever Mr. Ketchup, Sammy Saucer, and Beatrice Bread Slice, the latter named after Crumb’s mother), and finally Angelfood McSpade, a naked African woman Crumb hadn’t yet gotten around to naming at that stage in his career.
Two 1993 items included in R. Crumb’s America, “When the Niggers Take Over America” and “When the Goddam Jews Take Over America,” both clearly meant to ridicule racist paranoia, have reportedly been appropriated by neo-Nazi skinheads in the United States and Europe, all of whom are presumably too stupid to realize that they’re the intended targets. It would be comforting to report that these items are hilarious and dead-on; in fact they’re plodding, obvious, and unfunny. But even if one rejects these two strips as misfires, there are plenty of others in the Crumb canon that rest uneasily between self-indulgent fantasies and grim commentaries on the ideologies they purport to criticize. Consider “A Bitchin’ Bod,’” a morbid story Crumb started about a headless woman Mr. Natural presents to Flakey Foont as a literal sex toy. He set the strip aside, he says in Crumb, until his wife persuaded him to complete it despite his reservations. It hardly qualifies as uninflected pornography, but whether such a sicko fantasy overwhelms any commentary Crumb might make on it remains an open question.
