This is a documentary that basically runs as an extended interview with underground comic legend R. Crumb. For those not familiar with his work, he basically created underground comics in the 60s. Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Keep on Truckin', are all on Crumb's resume. His stuff is very strange indeed. Sexually explicit, socially subversion, sometimes just downright nuts. He went from being a weirdo artist on the fringe of society to attending gallery openings and lecturing at art schools. This film punctuates the narrative with showcases of his stuff, most of which is howlingly funny, sickeningly strange, or unsettlingly intriguing.

But to say the film is only about the life and work of this one man is to short it on it's depth and power. The film explores the entire history of Crumb, his whole life, and a large part of that was and is his family.
Let it be said that R. Crumb is a very strange man. Quite possibly off his nut entirely. But when the film begins to explore his upbringing, begins to interview his family, we see why, and we also begin to realize that Crumb may be more sane than any of us.

Take his brothers. One of them is certifiably insane. In and out of instituions. He has a bed of nails that he made himself from nails he found on the street. He is a panhandler. He enjoys cleansing his large intestine from time to time (hey, who doesn't). Then there is the older brother, who is in his 50s and still lives with his mother. He has never held a job since he was 18. He doesn't bathe, he doesn't go outside, he just sits in his room and reads Hegel and Schoepenhaur for recreation and occasionaly tries to kill himself. And then there is the mother, a hophead who "fights with invisible enemies". The are a motley crew to say the least.
What makes these seeming side-notes so potent is what it has to say about people in general, about the power of nurture over nature. These people all grew out of an incredibly abusive and perverse background. To deal with it, they each went quite a little mad. The strangeness of R. Crumb is in retaliation to the strangeness and hostility he was raised in. When shown against the backdrop of his family, everything R.Crumb does begins to seem perfectly natural. As bizarre a man as he is, he is the stable one of the family. If everyone on earth were insane, the sane would be the deviants. It is that theme, that paradox, that forms the core of the movie. The most sane way of dealing with an insane world is to go insane yourself. Chew on that for awhile.

Another thing that makes this film so intriguing is that all of the Crumbs are brilliant in their own eccentric ways. They wax intellectual about the whoredom of corporate America, discuss the meaning of humanity and art's place in it, and loathe the pervasive advertising that has become a cancer to our society. We learn that R. Crumb is moving to the south of France (he bought a house there by giving the owner a briefcase of his scetchpads). Crumb muses "I can't wait to get out of this fucking place." Some of the themes Crumb broaches are similar to Fight Club and movies in that vein. Crumb may be the deviant, but in his opinion, the normal people around him are the truly sick ones. He loathes the attractive, the popular, the accepted. He is the epitome of the high school nerd who hit it big, but he has not forgotten what life was like before he was famous. He is the zenith of the fringe, and he knows it. Fuck, he thrives on it.

But it is not a dry humorless documentary either. It is doused in perverse humor, interviews with R. Crumb's exs who discuss his strange fetishes (he digs piggyback rides), and the more we talk to the people that know him best, the more he begins to come into focus. At many times this movie is very funny. At others downright sad. But it is always fascinating and insightful. So many themes are at work here, this film has so much to say, that it gets overwhelming at times. And at the heart of it all is this very very strange human being, the gangly and goofy looking R. Crumb, who in the beginning of the film appears to be absolutly mad, but by the end seems the only sane person left in America.

[note: you may have seen this before way back when. I am taking the week off from writing. Will return next Friday with something new. Thank you for your support. ]