Trash is created by sorting.
— Susan Strasser, Waste and Want.
Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us[?]
— Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art, and the Movies."
The dried grasses, fruits of the winter—gosh! Everything is trash!
— John Ashbery, “The Skaters.”
1.
A junior, she skipped the last bus step and asked me out, the second sentence ever exchanged between us. The camera shifts from comedian, holding his impromptu stand-up behind chain link fence, to audience, masked and cackling only roughly in time with the punchlines. She, Christian and cheerful, introduced me to her mother, smoking cigarettes and halfway through a thought aimed at Child Protective Services. Setup: these two colored fellows are in the middle of a street; punchline: they fuck each other in the ass. Certain silences, protracted and evasive, are made tolerable only by the long death of their author. Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers spare the comedian; their laughter is indiscriminate, but their violence employs a perverse discernment. “Noah, and we must remember the sun was much further afield back in those days,” her pastor said and I, masqued blandly agreeable, listened, “lived to six hundred; you know, skin cancer wa’n’t such a concern.” In the trash humpers’ sole soliloquy, the one in a wig and Confederate flag tee shirt, says, “You see these [inaudible] fucking go to church on a Sunday, chili on a Monday, school on a Tuesday, by the time they’re all dead and buried, I’ll just then be catching my second wind.”
2.
I haven’t bothered to recall nor to cross-reference the details. But then Trash Humpers cares little for questions of narrative or continuity. “Eng and Chang Bunker had twenty-one children,” a man says, connected to another by a cheap length of tube about the forehead. Are they meant to be conjoined? The trash humpers’ masks may or may not be skin; with the infidelities of VHS, the possibility of such a distinction is only occasionally suggested. One speaks of the distancing of masks and another of their intimacy, that they might be had from any costume store and slipped over one’s face. A third reminds us that children like masks. An item dropped in the trash acquires a sudden aura; it is almost already trash itself. In an early sequence, the trash humpers laugh at a third-grader, chubby and dressed up, struggling to launch a basketball scarcely to the hem (setup), but then the child shows them a thing or two about trashhumping, laughing that, when one decapitates a doll, one does it “like this” (twist). One speaks of geometric progressions and another of fitness. A third dreams of a pink Cadillac and thinks to warn her son, chubby and dressed up, away from the driver. In the end they died within a couple of hours, Chang first and then Eng; a trash humper scowls, or not scowls exactly, and tuts, “That shit is depressing.”
3.
The fades, the impositions of a tracking “Play,” suggest formlessness, but Trash Humpers has the open-ended structure of a Punch and Judy show. That summer, it took a jumpstart even to get the Civic out of Los Angeles. In its pastoral moments, the camera finds itself considering a street lamp, whose light bursts and blurs. Nevada reached one hundred at midnight and my passenger door opened for a hitch hiker; Miami, but Palm Beach was “close enough.” A trash humper bang snaps the concrete parking structure while a barefoot old man, a Bukowski in maid outfit, recites a poem about “people like them.” He spoke, one does not know exactly how to put this, to some character known only to him. Burke tells us curiosity “quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects.” Not that we are to find utopia in the society of trash humpers (they kill the poet, by the way), and the film wears out its little bag of tricks by the second skit. What surprised was not that the cops pulled us over (the car had no license plate), but that we reached Jacksonville by the time it happened. One finds in that “gosh” a final, inexhaustible novelty, a least uninteresting number. In its last joke, the annoying ditty our cameraman has been humming (“Three little devils jumped over the wall”) morphs into a genuine lullaby as the smurfette of the trash humpers calms an infant she has lifted from the suburbs. The Civic, after the investigation, drew itself off the freeway and my hand lingered too long at the horn. My hitchhiker considered me and withdrew into the early morning. “The balloons drift thoughtfully over the land.” Supposing he never made it to his court date in Miami.