Review of the 1994 Documentary “Crumb”
I’ve watched this documentary twice now, both times on the recommendation (not personal) of Dr. Jordan Peterson.
When I first saw it about a year and a half ago, I found it both depressing and somewhat unremarkable. Recently, at work, I was listening to another Peterson podcast where he again recommended it, calling it a kind of “study in loser psychology” and I felt compelled to give it a second chance. Sometimes you need to experience something in a different frame of mind to appreciate it. In my case, I made sure to wait until the morning to watch the whole thing, instead of watching it and then going to bed, when it would surely exacerbate my melancholic tendencies.
This film really focuses on two separate but intertwined topics: Robert Crumb’s artwork and comics, and his family and upbringing — namely his two brothers. He also has two sisters who “declined to be interviewed” for the film. Although after watching it, I kind of wondered what their take would be.
R. Crumb (as he signs his work) is portrayed as largely an outcast in school, rejected by the women that he lusts after, who later goes on to achieve massive success as a comic strip writer. He has weird sexual proclivities that feature largely in his comics. Honestly, it’s hard to see him really being successful ten years earlier. His comics would’ve just been simply too explicit for a 50’s audience.
This movie itself may not have been able to be made today. There are comics featured in the movie that contain explicitly racist elements such that one wonders how he was able to print them when he did. That’s the thing about art though — these are all products of his mind. They are not autobiographical, and they are not politically motivated. Offensive maybe, but not meant as any commentary on black people per se.
What is interesting to me is to see how women react to his artwork, revealing in an implicit sense, their own desire to be objectified and viewed sexually. His depictions of women are about as politically incorrect as you can get, yet many of the women throughout the film comment things like “he really understands women” or “finally, someone really gets it”. I’m not sure what he gets, but what he draws are overtly sexualized depictions of women with exaggerated buxom physical features.
They are “powerful” though. The sexual relations between men and women in his comics generally has women depicted as overpowering men in some way, for instance, having their legs wrapped around a presumably self-inspired scrawny-looking everyman. From this perspective, it does show women as powerful.
Women and men have different ways of having power in this world, despite the constant and unyielding refrain from the media that women are marginalized and discriminated against; what is never stated is that women have a different way of harnessing power. In the movie itself, we have one of Crumb’s former love interests who runs a pornography magazine, say openly that women use sex as their way of exerting power over men. I think it is from this sense that women sense self-empowerment emanating from Crumb’s comic strips.
However, I actually have a problem with Peterson’s characterization of this movie as being a study in loser psychology. What kind of loser has a happy marriage and is gainfully employed drawing comic strips, being as wealthy and as well-known as Crumb is?
It’s true that R. Crumb holds onto this kind of reject mentality, but despite that he started his own comic strip, kept persisting with his artwork and made money doing it. He has also had many love interests in his life, despite his seeming inferiority complex, AND the fact that it is acknowledged in the interviews during the film that he’s sexually just kind of a strange person, preferring at times to ride piggyback on top a woman to having sex (in one of the more whimsical parts of the film, during an art show, we see Robert do just that). Does that seem like something that would be appealing to women? And yet he has maintained a certain popularity with them, and has two seemingly happy children from two different marriages.
His two brothers might be a different story. This is partly where the depressingness of the movie comes in.
The youngest brother, Maxon, who looks like Jim from Desperately Seeking Susan, leads an independent life as a painter in San Francisco. He seems to excel in whatever kind of meditation involves ingesting a long piece of string and waiting for it to pass through you.
The eldest brother Charles, lives at home with his mother and his stacks of books around him. That’s not to say living with your mother is necessarily depressing, but in this case it is. In the closing notes of the film it is revealed that he committed suicide about a year after the film was finished. What was interesting to me was that he seemed like an intelligent guy, having possibly the superior command of language over either of his two brothers, but was somehow unable to get it together. There’s an unfortunate stereotype of the genius who is also crazy, which is usually erroneous because someone is genuinely intelligent usually can also get by in society and generally follow societal rules, even if he resents them, but in the case of Charles he seemed to have something off so that he couldn’t really be integrated into society.
The main interview with Charles takes place in his bedroom in the house he shares with his mother, Robert sitting across from him, while they reminisce and catch up on Charles’s current situation. During the interview, their mother is literally downstairs, presumably declining to be interviewed as did the sisters (who don’t live at home, to be clear). This reveals an unfortunate side of Robert’s personality where he laughs nervously at many of the depressing things that Charles talks about. It makes it seem like he would just rather not deal with him. It’s one thing to laugh nervously when you’re dealing with sadness or a sad situation, but it’s another to literally have someone revealing himself to you and seem to essentially not take it seriously. Not knowing any of these people, I can’t help but wonder if Charles would’ve been better off if Robert or Maxim had reached out to him more. I don’t know. The laughing was extremely off-putting though.
As to Jordan Peterson’s opinion of this being the best documentary that he’s ever seen — he’s viewing this from his own unique lens. The movie is extremely emotionally evocative, much more than it is compelling from a narrative standpoint. He is the type of person who has a high tolerance for dark or disheartening stories. It’s not that it’s too depressing to watch, but just that I’m the type of person who wants to feel uplifted by something, and if not, to at least feel enriched. This was a *good* documentary to be sure, but Crumb’s artwork a story in itself, and the movie kind of has his artwork as a backdrop to the film, which ends up essentially being a documentary about an anti-social artist and his dysfunctional relationships with women and his two brothers. I wish there could’ve been more focus on the whole reason the documentary was ever made to begin with, which is Robert Crumb’s comics.
That said, I’ve watched it twice, which is more than most documentaries I’ve watched.
