Great Trash

Without missing a beat, Korine shot back, "What's the point of your hat?"

In practice, Korine vacillates between letting his art speak for itself and explaining it ad nauseam — not only the point of his hat, but why it represents a new frontier in hat-making and renders all previous hats obsolete.

Trash Humpers does best without explanation. Shot on smeared, lo-fi VHS tape, the film (so to speak) is styled as a faux found object, the kind of thing that might be discovered in a pile of junk stacked by the curb. As if its smudged, underlit images weren't enough of an affront, it was edited on a pair of daisy-chained VCRs, adding layers of degradation to its already unsightly tableaux. The image wobbles and the sound warps as the decks whir up to speed, marred by blue-screen static and the telltale "auto-tracking" indicator.

The movie plunges us into the world of three misshapen malcontents — four if you count the largely unseen figure wielding the camera — drifting across a desolate urban landscape, sowing destruction as they go. They get it on with what one calls "that sweet trash pussy," thrusting away at garbage cans and fellating dead tree branches. They smash televisions and fluorescent lightbulbs, shoot hoops and sing songs in a screechy Southern twang.

Shards of structure bob to the surface like the aftermath of a shipwreck, but only enough to keep us from going under. Recurring actions or snatches of dialogue give us a sense of the passage of time, as one nattering mantra gives way to the next. The lyrics of the Carter Family's mournful "Single Girl, Married Girl" are taken up for several scenes, replaced by the nonsense refrain, "Make it make it don't take it! Make it make it don't fake it!" The repetition drills the words into your brain, whether or not you care to have them there.

Toward the end, Korine finally lets down his guard, appearing onscreen as the fourth Humper to lay out a sociopath's manifesto: "What people don't understand is we choose to live, like, free ... We choose to live like a people should live." Chaotic, liberating, excessive and sometimes just plain dumb, Trash Humpers takes that sentiment and runs with it. You're free to think Korine's a pretentious asshole — you'll have plenty of company. But he's working in areas where no one else dares to tread. Whether that's brave or foolhardy, it's worth deciding for yourself.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)