![]() Instead, he also goes to Crumb's most vociferous critics-feminists who see him as a vile misogynist, liberals who call him a racist-to check the current barometric pressure. ![]() Despite all the traumas endured by his protagonist, Zwigoff is not content to churn out another hand-wringing portrait of an artist in torment. Give the filmmaker credit, though, for thoroughness. Clearly, Crumb's personal armor has damaged his self-regard, too: "At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else," he says, smiling mysteriously. We can almost feel the chill wafting off him as he calmly asks brother Max about the ten-foot shoelace he regularly swallows and passes, or as he dispassionately sketches the bums, drunks and wackos strewn about Haight-Ashbury. Unfortunately, his best defense always appears to have been the same kind of detachment that characterizes his art. Perfect: Even in the era of "communal love," he remained an outsider.īut Crumb is also the story of survival: This twisted family produced three artists, but only one of them found the strength to endure. ![]() In the Sixties, Crumb tells us, the hippies suspected he was a narc. But he clearly had talent and, with a little help from LSD, began applying his paranoiac view and his exaggerated, faintly poisonous nineteenth-century drawing style to the falsities and follies of the twentieth. Little wonder he turned out to be a hollow-cheeked, badly damaged misanthrope walking the streets in a shabby suit and stingy-brim hat straight out of the Depression, a man devoted to scratchy 78 records from the Twenties. He found himself in the middle of an incessant middle-class nightmare. He watched his two brothers descend into madness. His father broke Robert's collarbone on Christmas Day when the boy was five years old. Natural" or the sweating, panting desperadoes that dominate Crumb's work hardly feels exaggerated. Seen in this light, the corrosive and-some say-liberating view of life expressed by "Mr. If anything, Robert's younger brother, Maxon, is an even scarier case: A convicted molester of women and veteran of the psycho wards, this gaunt figure remains holed up in a San Francisco fleabag with a collection of his own nightmarish paintings and a literal bed of nails.Īs for Mom, well, watch and listen for yourself. The Charles we meet is a gray-faced hermit who's been living in his mother's Philadelphia attic for years-still possessed of wit and sharp intelligence, but clearly a tragic casualty of the family's emotional battleground. Robert's older brother, Charles, was the family's first cartoonist, and probably the best. Crumb's father is dead, and his two sisters declined to be filmed, but no moviegoer is likely to forget the rest of the Crumbs. The terrors he uncovered there might keep a small army of psychoanalysts busy for years. For six years filmmaker Zwigoff, a longtime friend of the cartoonist, enjoyed (if that's the word) intimate access to the Family Crumb. While enduring his classmates' scorn and plenty of discord around the dinner table, he took early refuge in his fantasies, which, he says, included an erotic attachment to Bugs Bunny and a penchant for humping his mother's cowboy boots in the dark of her closet while singing "Jesus Loves Me." The son of a violent ex-Marine and a meddling amphetamine addict, Robert Crumb grew up, by his own description, nerdy and disconnected in Philadelphia. It's a deeply comic film, but no horror flick could match it for sheer creepiness. That's just one of the things we learn in the course of Terry Zwigoff's extraordinary documentary Crumb, which reveals in gruesome detail the sources of a social satirist's art, alienation and sexual obsession. ![]() Crumb may be startled to learn that this trafficker in headless female sex objects, anxiety-ridden male outcasts and pornographic kitty cats was probably the happiest member of his family. Devotees-and detractors-of the underground comics pioneer R.
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