Crumb (1994) A Meditation on an Important – and Controverisal – American artist (Review)

I have to admit that I’m no Crumb-head, and I came to this documentary – made by friend-of-Robert and ex-collaborator Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World) – knowing the man’s legendary underground comics and other works mainly only in passing. Crumb is now available in the UK in a Criterion Blu-Ray that sharpens, but doesn’t remove, the fitting cinéma vérité grain from what’s effectively a series of uncomfortable interviews held in damp and dingy locales.

Outside of his contributions to Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor series (a personal favourite), and his illustrating of record covers and artist portraits for archive blues and jazz label Yazoo, Robert Crumb’s art seems not to have aged at all, nor have the debates surrounding it. These are spelled out at length by talking heads in a film that rests much of its impact on a certain ambivalence, and a willingness to admit that art is a sticky, often compromising and compromised affair. Art invites complex and contradictory responses within both the individual and the creator themselves, which is a rare sight for in 2024, where a supposed purity of intent and potential reception is often considered of paramount importance.

This sense of “agelessness” is undoubtedly borne of the constituent parts of Crumb’s imagination as much as the wider and shifting meanings of his drawings. A sort of bitter nostalgist who scorns modernity but refuses to argue that the past wasn’t also often overwhelmed by ugliness, Crumb reproduces and reconfigures against realistic backdrops, the imagery and iconography of early-to-mid twentieth-century cartoons and newspaper strips. He was inspired by mass advertising, the one-sheets that promoted blues 78’s (for examples, check out the remarkable series by Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson that publicising new records), food and product labelling, and the earlier chaotic demonologies of Bosch and Hogarth, to forge a hellish and melting American urban vision.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out that, while the critic Robert Hughes calls Crumb the “Jan Brueghel of the second half of the twentieth century” in this film, the first half lacked an equivalent. Crumb could conceivably be considered the Brueghel of the entire century when one considers that it’s both the folk arts, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of the 1910s to the 1950s, that form so much of the grist for Crumb’s mill. The reputation confirmed by Hughes is otherwise well earned as the comics are viciously satirical, often blatant and disgusting attacks on hypocrisy, conformity, commercialism, ignorance, religion, degraded sexuality and racism – a real horror show of America.

They’re complicated because aside from the use and re-appropriation of racist and stereotypical iconography, Crumb is also a self-admitted pervert and reactionary who’s sometimes a nihilist, and often a misogynist. His work frequently walks a tightrope between confession and commentary – a masturbatory condoning and an outright condemnation of various depravities (Hughes, for one, is bemused to hear that Crumb will sometimes wank to his own work). The power of Crumb’s works remains because it’s the relentless outpouring of a mind balanced between obsessive, and often disturbing concerns, but also from its intellectual awareness that pushes concurrently towards self-criticism and social criticism. Crumb’s work has a personal and a generalised revelatory power because time might well have caught up to, or even surpassed Crumb’s fantasies in the last thirty years.

One of the most outrageous strips we’re shown is called “A Bitchin’ Bod”, and it’s discussed at length because it so disturbed Crumb that he abandoned it – until his wife argued in favour of its completion (we could have described the comic strip here, but the graphic nature and context of it would get us in trouble with Google). What does it tell us then, about the present that this vision that once appalled even Crumb has become semi-accepted and, at the very least, snickered about but not entirely rejected? The interplay of revenge and power fantasies also don’t stray too far from the reasons given for a genuine crime described in the film, that was committed by Robert’s brother Maxon.

So there is much to learn from Zwigoff’s movie, which perhaps explains its continued presence on “Best Documentary” lists. It’s even been hailed by the likes of Jordan Peterson, who brought his own “analysis” to bear on the contextual material for which the film is probably best remembered, as it’s essentially a series of portraits of Robert’s mother, brothers (Charles and the aforementioned Maxon), and in absentia, their father (the two Crumb sisters declined to be interviewed). What’s presented is a familiar enough tale of suburban repression, rendered more haunting by the particular and specific detail recalled by the boys. Their mother’s amphetamine addiction triggered by her desire to keep her weight down for her husband, their father’s frequent beatings and aggression (including breaking Robert’s collarbone at the age of five), and also Robert’s own thinly-veiled eccentricity. This finally manifested itself in the form of a book on workplace motivation, which opened with a portrait of the author wearing a beaming, vacuous corporate grin that was very much at odds with the face that otherwise glowered intensely and threateningly out of family pictures.

Of the three brothers, Robert emerged as the most functional and successful. Maxon became a painter who was well-represented in American galleries, but he’s also a self-confessed (in the documentary), reformed molester of women who continues to live in a squalid bedsit, begging on the streets, and spending hours a day sitting on his homemade bed of nails. Charles Jr. committed suicide a year after being filmed by Zwigoff, and before that he was a shut-in who lived with their mother – despite once being the dominant force amongst the siblings who forced his brothers to begin their own creative undertakings. Nursing an obsession with child actor Bobby Driscoll throughout his adolescence, Charles became a recluse who existed on a diet of tranquillisers and antidepressants, his once prodigious artistic output reduced to haunting notebooks full of ineligible, nonsensical squiggles that bear no resemblance to any known language.

All three showed varying degrees of self-awareness of their situation through the foibles and gallows humour directed at them (and each other). They also seem to be able to identify the family trauma that gave birth to their irrepressible neuroses and disorders, but it seems like all three will never be able to leave those memories behind. By his own admission, Robert was only saved from an equally bleak fate by achieving a level of fame that would allow him a platform where he could survive and exorcise his demons by unleashing his id on paper.

Zwigoff’s film is a masterpiece – a meditation on an important American artist that’s told as a series of concurrent essays and reports that are disguised as something like a biopic. The documentary is even structured and presented like a familiar mainstream documentary, but it’s thrillingly radical in its associative and rigorous examinations that refuse to end or come to any recognisable conclusion, instead leaving questions hanging and judgements suspended. Where the American dream has supposedly turned sour in recent years, this film and Crumb’s art argue that this was ever the case, and that the gloss of mid-century suburbia and post-Reagan yuppie-entrepreneurship was a veneer. This “concealing layer” has been haphazardly coated over the vertiginously descending and self-perpetuating nightmare of a curdled country that’s unwilling or unable to diagnose and treat the very sickness it was breeding.

This is bracing stuff – a glimpse of the abyss that refuses the Manichaean promise of a battle against the darkness that, like Lynch (who ‘presents’ the film, but in reality had little to do with it), has been divested of the philosophical comforts of Buddhism and transcendental meditation. Crumb’s work reads, in this light, like a cry in the night, but one that leaves us wondering how much the man crying adores the very sound of anguish he is projecting, and to what extent he considers it utterly unanswerable.

Billy’s Archive – Crumb (1994)