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Star Review

For a documentary about a cartoonist and satirist central to the American counter-culture, creator of such iconic characters and images as Mr Natural, Fritz the Cat, ‘Keep on Truckin’ and the ‘Cheap Thrills’ album cover, Crumb begins in a surprisingly low-key way with a rather melancholy piano rag. In fact, the film turns out to be as much an elegy for a society’s lost dreams as a celebration of Crumb’s art.

It’s a candid and at times, uncomfortable documentary about a man for whom the expression of his id through art really has been a salvation. A vision of what he could have been is provided by his two brothers: Charles (‘can you give me one good reason for leaving the house?’) and Maxon, institutionalised for molesting women, now released and spending a couple of hours each day on a bed of nails and passing a long linen tape through his body every six weeks or so as ‘a gift to the intestines’.

Robert Crumb himself is a refreshingly candid and self-deprecating interviewee, revealing amongst other things a sexual attraction to Bugs Bunny at the age of 5, though moving on to ‘Sheena, Queen of the Jungle’ soon after. We learn that an extended trip on an unknown chemical compound in 1966 liberated Crumb from self-censorship; he had a vision of ‘the seamy side of America’s subconscious’ and found himself willing to draw the horror show of hidden desires and primal urges around him without wondering too hard about what it all meant. As it was a vision that included incest, sex with headless women, a ‘jungle woman’ forced to lick toilet bowls to participate in the American dream and a pair of all-American children saying things like ‘Hey momma! Let’s have nigger hearts for lunch’ (‘All the kids are crazy ‘bout that good ol’ down home flavour.’), Crumb was horrified to learn that people thought his comics, amongst other things, ‘cute’. The niceties of interpretation however he leaves to other people. An earnest gallery owner and a bluff critic make comparisons to Daumier, Breughel and Goya, while the editor of Mother Jones calls it an ‘arrested juvenile vision’.

The headline of the first Zap comic he drew read ‘Life Among The Constipated’, though it’s not as if his art has done anything to free up people’s motions; in fact, given the prices accorded to originals of his art and comics now, artworks by Crumb are prime fetish material for a society fixated on collecting and hoarding.

Filmed in the final months before his emigration to France, we see Crumb’s disillusionment with corporate America in general and yuppies in particular. He’s appalled that everybody is walking around covered in brand names, and quizzical at the rage and aggression present in the music and the cars around him. Crumb meanwhile is still drawing everything in sight and still wearing socks with his sandals. His main worry concerns the transportation of his extensive and precious collection of early blues and jazz records - ‘do these jocks look like the kind of people that can take care of 78s?’ he says as a package trolley goes bump down the doorstep.

His skill as a cartoonist has enabled him to fulfil the artist’s dream of using lines as currency. Picasso once bought a house with a small still-life. Here, Crumb received his French house in exchange for six of his sketchbooks.

Graeme Hobbs on 7th May 2004

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