Text by Philippa Snow
“I wanted to write the Great American Novel,” the Ritalin kid informs the talk-show host, the camera lingering on his twitching Converse sneakers. “Or I wanted to write a novel. Either way, I wanted it to be American.” The filmmaker and artist Harmony Korine, who is in this moment 25 years old, is on The Late Show with David Letterman promoting his new book, A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998), which is less a novel than it is a demonstration of what boys like Harmony Korine could get away with if they happened to be famous in the 1990s. This is Korine’s third time around on the show, after which he will earn a lifetime ban from Letterman for being caught trying to steal from Meryl Streep while in the green room. In his earlier appearances, he had the look of a boy dressed up in his older brother’s suit for Sunday school, as if somebody shrank him down by 10 or 15 percent with a cartoon ray gun before sending him onstage. This time, he looks downcast and a little fucked around with in a hoodie, a T-shirt in pale jonquil, and tattered jeans, his vibe unsettling enough that David Letterman feels moved to enquire as to whether everything’s alright. “You look,” Letterman adds, not exactly paternally but not entirely unkindly either, “as if something might have happened.”
Whatever it is that happened – and there is an air that something is not right, as if the wheels were bound to fall off this entire interaction any second in the most peculiar and frightening way – Harmony Korine, when he is lucid, remains very, very funny. “I think it made a lot,” he says, when Letterman enquires about Gummo, the hallucinatory nightmare he released in 1997, to reviews that could not decide whether it was the worst film in recent history or a work of modern art. “That’s how I got my outfit.” (“I had to rent it,” he says, chuckling in a burbling stoner’s register, about the shabby “little number” he is wearing. “I rented this.”) Asked whether Gummo is in theatres, he says, “Yeah – yeah, it’s been playing 18 months straight.” When Letterman says, of James Cameron’s soapy blockbuster Titanic, “That’s a movie,” Korine replies, “I know it sank,” before suggesting that he’d like to write a sequel “on a rowboat”. It is 1998, and by this time it is fairly public knowledge that Korine – two of whose homes have recently burned down in what have vaguely been described as “mysterious circumstances” – is on heroin and crack cocaine, meaning that, although some of his eccentricity on Letterman is a performance, some of it is the result of his increasing alienation from the real, functional world. “I became like a tramp,” he would go on to say in 2008, about the tail end of the 1990s. “I wasn’t delusional. I didn’t think I was going to be OK. I thought: ‘This might be the end.’ I’d read enough books. I knew where this story ended. The story finishes itself.”
Because Korine believed that, to be a “great” director, you needed “to go and rob a few banks, do some good crimes, put yourself on the line, to see if you have the stuff”, he was not frightened by the idea that his lifestyle could eventually result in his own story finishing a little prematurely, ending up as less of an American novel than a slim, pitch-black novella. “Go to jail for a few years, so you’ll have some good stories to tell,” he shrugged. “I think consciously insane behaviour should be a necessary part of life.” If A Crackup at the Race Riots – a collection of vignettes that pushed the boundaries of good taste in every possible direction, as the title might suggest – did not succeed in fully capturing the American spirit in the way that he had hoped for, a film project he began to work on in the spring of 1999 looked as if it might do the trick. Fight Harm, a planned feature-length compendium of skits that featured Korine being horribly and genuinely beaten up by strangers, would be the precocious artist’s Meisterwerk, an experiment in pushing “humour to extreme limits” that he claimed would “demonstrate that there’s a tragic component” in everything funny, as well as being a document of the great American sport of drunken brawling. In his first Letterman interview, he had revealed that he once changed his name to Harmful, adding that he “thought it would [sound] tougher, ’cause I used to fight a lot as a kid.”
Whether or not this is the truth, it is telling that he ends the story by suggesting that he changed it back to Harmony again: a boy named Harmony who fights all comers is funnier – more ironic and deceitful and unlikely and thus, ultimately, more Korine – than one named Harmful. (The mischievous way he says “not very good” when asked how skilled he was at fighting, impossible to faithfully reproduce here on the page, remains one of the funniest moments in all three of his appearances, the young filmmaker sounding more than ever like a perfect imp of the perverse.) Preternaturally babyish and sweet-faced, with a build like a teenager and the huge and limpid brown eyes of a fawn, Korine could not have looked more innocent of every stupid thing he’d done, nor more unlikely to be serious when he challenged furious bouncers and muscular ex-Marines to land a blow. Because of this, the fights took work: insults hurled, come-ons issued, objects thrown, the resulting chaos often seeing Korine being “chased in circles”. After six months, he called time on Fight Harm due to various grievous injuries and legal issues, shattering his collarbone and ending up – like, he would no doubt say, a very great director – getting handcuffed and then briefly thrown in jail. To a casual observer, his behaviour might have seemed less funny-ha-ha than straightforwardly and dangerously funny in the head: not just “consciously insane”, but deeply cracked. To Korine, it was a crack-up – a joke cruel enough that, although he had orchestrated it, it could just as easily have been played by fate.
“I couldn’t really finish” Fight Harm, he admitted to an interviewer at Harper’s in December 1999, the novelty having worn off in light of how little footage he had managed to obtain:
It got to a point where I was getting really hurt and arrested and weird shit started happening … with Fight [Harm] I wanted to make a great comedy. I thought that was the best way to achieve it. I’d get a little drunk, but not so drunk that my motor skills weren’t working. I did a few fights – one after the other. But what I didn’t really think about was how short hardcore fights last. When you’re fucking hitting each other in the head with bricks, it can only go two or three minutes, so out of the six or seven fights that I did, I have maybe 15 minutes of pure, hardcore bone breaking … I would go around with a camera crew, and the only rules were that I couldn’t throw the first punch and the person I was confronting had to be bigger than me. That’s where the humour comes in. It wouldn’t be funny if I was fighting someone my size. They had to be bigger than me, and no matter how bad I was getting beat up – unless I was gonna die, that was the rule, unless I was like passed out and they were still killing me – they couldn’t break it up. Because that’s where the comedy comes in as well … that’s where the whole Buster Keaton thing comes in. It’s really high comedy.
Korine, quite often also really high, was not wrong to say that Fight Harm was the most extreme, most logical progression of a genre – slapstick humour – that relied on the twin pleasures of relief and schadenfreude to make viewers happy, their elation stemming from the fact that it was not them being pulverised. “A perfect pratfall is the definition of generosity towards an audience because its sole purpose is to make an audience laugh”, the film critic Sheila O’Malley argued in 2012, writing about Cary Grant’s supreme and masterful manipulations of his body. “When someone else falls, in a moment that is supposed to be dignified, we experience a catharsis. There is that element of: ‘Oh my God, I am so glad that is not me.’”
Bath scene from Harmony Korine, Gummo, 1997.Strange background details like the fried bacon taped to the wall were appreciated by director Werner Herzog
Harmful Korine, MTV promos for Visual Mafia, 1995
Two decades later, Korine reaffirmed the deathlessness of his commitment to the joke – the joke being senseless violence – by describing his new tragicomic psychedelic stoner film, The Beach Bum, in the-same-or-similar terms. “Guy slips on a banana peel,” he told a journalist at GQ listing the three funniest images that he could think of to explain his personal attachment to the age-old slapstick genre, “and smacks himself in the head. W.C. Fields falls down some steps. Buster Keaton [as a] bank teller.” In that profile, Beach Bum star Matthew McConaughey is asked to describe Korine’s personality over email, and does an alright alright alright job of making him sound like a frightening, freewheeling kind of huckster, not exactly malevolent and not quite benevolent, either. “He demands that the world entertain him. His appetite for destruction makes him a birther [sic] of creations,” McConaughey writes, probably a little stoned and thus inclined to be poetic. “He’s inconsiderate, fair-weather, a great liar, will never promise anything, is non-possessive and has no affiliations. He needs controversy. To him, a boring person is a sinner.” This last observation, pithy and near-aphoristic, gets at what might be behind Korine’s desire to make a project like Fight Harm, as well as what is behind his career-long appreciation of the work of Buster Keaton. In The Haunted House (1921), the film he references in passing in GQ, Keaton plays a clumsy bank teller who first appears falling head-first out of a cab, then is sent flying by a swinging iron door, destroys a wad of notes with glue, sticks his right hand to his hair, pours boiling water on another teller’s arse and then attacks him with a hammer, and performs a perfect backflip with his hands stuffed in his pockets, all within the first eight minutes of a 20-minute runtime. His delicate, doe-eyed affect – helplessly destructive, but redeemed by a near-total lack of guile – makes it not only impossible to hate him, but so easy to adore him that the audience forgives him his transgressions instantly, the way viewers often do when people who behave like devils have the pale faces of saints. He repudiates the sin of boringness by being unpredictable, the chaos of him rippling across what was previously lifeless as if something very heavy – as heavy as love, or God, or the iron door of a bank vault – had been tossed into a lake.
What Keaton did in his best stunts was something close to the sublime, an alchemical transformation of a mundane object like a Murphy bed, a chair, a barrel, or a car into a conduit for magic. A scene from his celebrated 1928 film, Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which he stands motionless as the full-sized, two-ton frontage of a house falls down around him, has become one of the most iconic stunts in cinema, a feat that might have killed the actor if he’d faltered by an inch. What kind of man would risk his life in order to produce a single striking image for a comedy film, even if that image happened to be so spectacular that it could barely be believed? As it turned out, the kind of man who’d had a singular and dangerous early life.
Six-year-old Buster and his parents Myra and Joe Keaton, in a publicity photo for their vaudeville act. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons
As a boy of two or three, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton found himself joining his vaudevillian parents in an onstage act that saw them tossing his small body back and forth as if he were a human pigskin, aided by a handle affixed to his back that resembled the handle of a travelling case. “We always managed to get around the law,” he later said, “because the law read: No child under the age of 16 shall do acrobatics, walk wire, play musical instruments, trapeze. And it named everything – but none of them said you couldn’t kick him in the face.” “Buster”, being then-contemporary slang for “a considerable fall”, proved to be as snug a fit as “Harmful” might have been for Harmony Korine circa Fight Harm; that the name was maybe apocryphally given to him by Harry Houdini only helped enhance its sense of mystical predestination. (Equally auspicious: Keaton was born in 1895, the year the Lumière brothers first screened La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, so that Buster and the cinema essentially shared a birth year.) As an adult in the movies, there were moments in which Keaton moved less like a circus tumbler than a dancer, a balletic symphony of minor movements adding up to what looked like a single, clumsy breakneck crash, a single pratfall or a tumble down the stairs. His face, astonishingly lovely in those early 1920s two-reelers, is more often than not minutely expressive, making him appear as modern for the age as Louise Brooks did when she first confounded a furious critic by “not suffer[ing], do[ing] nothing” in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 Pandora’s Box. The falling-house skit, a conjuring trick that used no actual trickery aside from Keaton’s willingness to suspend both his sanity and his desire to survive, cemented him as a pioneer of cinema so unlike any of his predecessors that he might as easily have come from space as Piqua, Kansas.
Harmony Korine nursing an injury during the shooting of Fight Harm, 1999.
Courtesy harmony-korine.com (archived fansite)
“To sit through dozens and dozens of short comedies of the period and then to come upon [Keaton’s first short] One Week,” the critic Walter Kerr wrote in 1990, “is to see the one thing no man ever sees: a garden at the moment of blooming.” Because the blooming of a flower also hastens its demise, Kerr could not be more correct in his assessment – eventually, in the 1930s, a run of extraordinary work came mostly to an end with Keaton’s unsuccessful move to MGM, the rise of talkies, his eventual bankruptcy, the dissolution of his marriage, and a slow slide into alcoholism, gradual at first and then committed, until he himself was briefly committed into a sanatorium. “When I was a dancer,” the essayist Maggie Nelson told an interviewer in 2013,
we were always encouraged to fall in rehearsal, so that you could know what the tipping point of any given movement was. That way, when you did it on the stage, you could be sure you were taking it to the edge without falling on your face. It sounds like a cliché, but really it’s just physics – if you don’t touch the fulcrum, you’ll never gain a felt sense of it, and your movement will be impoverished for it.
In his life and in his art, Keaton touched the fulcrum again and again, feeling the danger and not flinching, his work proving Plato’s claim that laughter is “a mixture of pleasure and pain that lies in the malice of amusement”. Critic Anthony Lane, who describes Keaton’s oeuvre as “screen comedy at its gravest and its most athletic”, argued that his hallmarks were “irony and fatigue, high speed and hard luck, [and] the strong toil of grace”. What was funny about everything he did was also what was human, fallibility and sensitivity being as much of a part of it as the ability to endure crash and smash. Grace, a word most often used to describe elegance in terms of movement, is of course also a word for what is God-given, defined by the theological dictionary as a form of love or favour from a higher power that is “generous, free, and totally unexpected and undeserved”. Grace, found in the second before tipping at the fulcrum, is exactly what the best of Buster Keaton gives his viewers. ◉
An exclusive extract from Philippa Snow, Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, Repeater, 2022
