My Beautiful Violence

Gummo, a film by Harmony Korine from 1997, made the year after I was born, lives off its unrelenting superficial rawness. Through classism in the form of extreme poverty and lack of education in the neglected Xenia, Ohio, after it was struck by a tornado, it exposes a social divide and thus, from the inherently more privileged perspective of a generic viewer, presents a social critique of the ostensibly shocking circumstances of this place characterized by purposelessness.

One might almost leave it at that. However, the film only unfolds in its full beauty and depth when you stop relating its displayed realities to your own privileged position - at which point, in a more self-contained contemplation, the very pure relationships and subtle social hierarchies come to light. Heroism exists here just as much, perhaps even in more exaggerated form, but the mythologising of people happens here based on far finer distinctions and criteria than one would reduce them to compared to a broad spectrum across all of America or the world.

So once you isolate this cinematic world, the film becomes so pure and legible, and suddenly manages to be extremely sensitive and tender and cruel, but cruel out of very fragile patterns and as a consequence of its environment, which makes every form of apparent violence at once natural and, in its own gentle way, tragic. And malice becomes one of the few social levers for recognition, and through that, a kind of necessity. In doing so, every form of non-violence becomes something very fragile and moving, and altogether it becomes real. Love becomes all the more visible through the absence of love, as though it cannot be killed. The less, the clearer. This almost philosophical idea, which I only project onto Korine and which perhaps sits naturally and unintentionally in his work and thinking, creates in me a feeling shaped entirely by longing.

Alongside a soundtrack consisting mainly of death and black metal, punctuated by the occasional folk or delicate child-like songs and pieces, this separation of violence and tenderness is amplified. Equally fragmentary, various characters or even types from this world appear and serve, in their way, documentarily as props for one another. In parts, there are temporal or spatial overlaps between these isolated lived realities, but there are also images that come briefly and go again. Korine’s disregard for a clear narrative thread corresponds, formally, to the pulsating film itself. The characters quickly cease to be pitiable, and their pride, in its self-containment and sparseness, carries something truthful.

One scene from the film stayed with me with a pounding in my chest and forms the centre of this first column: the scene of the two brothers. It sounds a little grandiose of course, but I get this pounding whenever I discover something truly new or radical or beautiful, and it constitutes something close to a sense of meaning in my life, because I have discovered in myself a kind of growing sensitivity, and it shapes the experience that there are people who understand me, or at least people one admires emotionally and with whom one hopefully shares something. In that sense, discovering something special is for me less a cognitive matter than a gut feeling. This sense-driven meaning-making is something I find deeply life-affirming and optimistic. The purpose of this text is to try to explain what this scene stirs in me, and why it is beautiful, and why it matters.

Introduced by infantile plucking, a few short shots outside by a car or at weightlifting, and a poem-like glorification of the mythologised, charged role and history of the two brothers in the town - spoken by a child - a scene in the kitchen follows. These two bald colossi, who seem crude and, fairly, depending on where you’re looking from, also somewhat are, share an almost tender longing for physical closeness, which expresses itself in a very unsparing and violent play-fight with bare fists. Under the pretence of wanting the other’s shoes, the two beat into each other with a brutal, unperformed directness, brutal even accounting for their heavyset builds. It is intensely intimate, focused on the other, and as the kitchen, furniture, and appliances nearly break apart, but through the focusing on each other as an “inside” the “outside” ceases to matter, each is taken very seriously by the other. It is certainly also about a contest of strength, but this contest requires no purposeful separation of the stronger, or anything of the sort between them - it represents instead something more like a tumour-like anomaly within a tender relationship, one that at its core means the same thing and is intensely close.

I used to fight with my brother a lot, whom I love very much, but we often missed the moment of keeping it a game, and the seriousness then consisted more of outdoing the other in order to preserve or overturn a brotherly hierarchy. In that mode, you lose a trust, gain an enmity, and come to regret that childish narcissism. Violence then takes on something conventional, and cunning becomes something dim and banal. In the scene of the two brothers, this meaning of violence is inverted - it becomes instead a synonym for love, trust, affection, physical closeness, intimacy, familiarity. The apparent crudeness of the brothers suddenly becomes sublime, and not even that - it becomes naturally sublime, the sublimity without self-realisation. It does not even serve to place the brothers above others, it is simply pure. And so violence becomes something beautiful.

But it also requires the framing of an environment like the one depicted in Gummo, which as a dark catalyst produces the distortion of love described above, so that one passes through this perversion and finds, in something like violence - an apparent opposite - a way of expressing closeness. And for this, every scene in Gummo functions as an end in itself, to make itself, and all the others, legible and justified.

It feels almost wrong to theorise about this scene, or the film as a whole or at least to speak of it, because even though it is of course a film, and thus ordinarily a medium for a public, these scenes, by virtue of being so pure and this world functioning so self-containedly, carry no particular need to be watched. They exist as if for themselves, and in themselves are so modest. As something public, one intrudes upon this self-enclosed brutal idyll and risks taking something from it, robbing it of its decent reality and its naturalness. The relationship of the two brothers, seen from a position of privilege, seems so sensitive and easy to condemn. I would be glad if, rather than perceiving them as some cultureless phenomenon, you let them - with a little understanding as you watch this modest masterpiece - love and fight.

 

My Beautiful is a recurring column, devoted to Philipp Burwinkel’s subjective engagement with excerpts from film, literature, art and music that affect him because of their sublime character. Each „something” is expressed in a form that is loosely essayistic, yet otherwise free. By situating within a broader thematic field, the column gradually attempts a possible reinterpretation of the semiotic idea governing its meaning.