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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Terry Zwigoff's Crumb:
Chronicle of a postwar American family

By David Walsh
13 August 1998

Terry Zwigoff's documentary Crumb, about cartoonist Robert Crumb is remarkable not so much for what it shows about the life and work of its nominal subject, but for the glimpse it provides into the failure of a postwar American family.

Crumb himself, best known for his underground drawings and comics of the late 1960s ("Keep on Truckin", the cover art for Janis Joplin's "Cheap Thrills" album, Fritz the Cat, etc.), is of limited interest. An artist of obvious ability, his raunchy and crudely humorous comic books reached an audience of middle class adolescents of the type who might have found Frank Zappa and William S. Burroughs the last word when it came to anti-establishment daring.

To his credit, Crumb has had the good sense or sheer stubbornness to resist the advances of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general. He comments, "The instant I realized I was an outcast, I became a critic, and I've been disgusted with American culture since I was a kid."

The sexuality of Crumb's drawings provokes a debate in the film between Robert Hughes, the Australian-born art critic, and a feminist cartoonist. The latter is highly critical of the hostility, fear and aggression which Crumb exhibits towards women in his comics. Hughes comes to his defense, comparing him to Pieter Bruegel (the sixteenth century Flemish painter of peasant scenes) and Honor* Daumier (the nineteenth century French painter and caricaturist), and rejecting what he calls "self-censorship."

The references to Bruegel and Daumier are out of place. Crumb's drawings, while lively and eye-catching, have none of the depth or breadth of those artists' work. His comic book work is much more an expression of individual fetishes and phobias. Hughes is certainly right, however, to reject the "politically correct" approach of Crumb's feminist critic. But to a certain extent, like so many cultural disputes today, the debate is a false one.

Self-censorship is artistically destructive, but so, in the long run, is self-indulgence. The issue is not that the artist ought to avoid dredging up what's unpleasant and even antisocial inside him- or herself, but that he or she needs to subject it to an artistic and intellectual processing. The problem with Crumb is not that he holds "incorrect" views or is dominated by "unhealthy" desires, but that he doesn't adopt a sufficiently self-critical attitude towards his emotional life or his art. The result is stagnation. While Crumb says he despised the hippie ethos, he seems, in a fairly complacent fashion, to have remained emotionally and intellectually frozen in that era.

But it is the fate of the Crumb family, whose story emerges bit by bit through the comments of Robert and his two brothers (two sisters declined to be interviewed), which haunts the spectator.

The eldest brother, Charles Crumb, lives like a recluse in a decrepit house with his equally reclusive packrat of a mother. Heavily medicated, he rarely goes out of the house and lacks "external stimuli," in his own words. He is diagnosed as psychotic, but he provides the most incisive comments about the various family members. It was Charles who initially began to draw comic books, inspiring his brother.

A painter of some talent, Maxon Crumb--Robert's younger brother--resides in a San Francisco flophouse and sits on a bed of nails three to four hours a day. He goes out with his "begging bowl" to panhandle each day. Max is subject to epileptic fits and has a history of arrests and treatment for sexual molestation.

The picture that the film finally builds up is that of a middle class American family in which, like so many in the 1950s and 1960s, economic advancement went hand in hand with psychic devastation.

The brothers' father, a veteran of World War II, climbed up the lower echelons of the corporate ladder as a management trainer. According to Charles, he was a sadistic bully. Their mother, at some point, began taking amphetamines in large quantities. Robert comments that their father had wanted three marines, but got three oddballs instead.

One gets a sense from the film of the enormous gap between the expectations created by the postwar prosperity and its reality. A certain creativity and sensitivity were aroused in the three boys, which the improved economic status made possible and even encouraged. But it was this very sensitivity--and the questioning attitudes inevitably accompanying it--which had to be annihilated for the sake of the smooth functioning of the family and wider social structures.

The metamorphosis of Charles Crumb, the film's most compelling figure, seems the most tragic result of the whole process. A handsome boy, apparently full of repressed sexual feelings, he was an utter outcast in high school. He admits to having harbored a homicidal jealousy toward Robert when they were teenagers. The two brothers are shown going over some of the hand-drawn comic books which they produced together as children and as adolescents. As Charles's work progressed, the dialogue balloons took up more and more of the space in his drawings until they filled them completely. As he descended into madness he produced entire notebooks of pages filled with nothing but line after line of a finely-drawn scrawl. There is something quite terrifying about those pages.

Has any society ever squandered its natural and human resources more flagrantly than American capitalism, even (or perhaps especially) at its height? The overall impression the film produces is of a system which blindly and ignorantly takes from people what suits its most short-term needs and considers the remains only worthy of the scrap heap.

The unhappiness continues. The film ends with Robert Crumb taking off for France with his wife and daughter--as if that's going to solve anything--and a note on the screen indicating that a year after Zwigoff interviewed and filmed him, Charles Crumb committed suicide.