We see examples of Charles’ and Robert’s comics from their childhood and teenage years, and get a glimpse at how these two remarkable young talents developed in parallel. So much of his life seems to be over, so many of his desires extinguished, that it seems inevitable that he will not last the duration of the movie. Despite appearing for what probably amounts to about twenty minutes of screen time, Charles dominates the film, an intelligent, witty and doomed ghost of a man who seems in a way to have already passed on. By both their accounts Charles forced Robert to draw comics with him from a very early age, and was a domineering and seemingly crazed and competitive presence in young Robert’s life. It’s a deeply ingrained habit, and it’s all because of my brother Charles.”īecause of the powerful presence of his brothers, particularly Robert’s older brother Charles, the movie almost inevitably focuses on Crumb’s childhood, seemingly the source of both his obsessions and prodigious skill. What’s gonna come out of this? I’ve enjoyed drawing, that’s all. You just have to have the courage or the… to take that chance. Which means that while I’m doing it I don’t know exactly what it’s about. It has to be something that I’m revealing to myself when I’m doing it, which is hard to explain. Robert Crumb’s drawings are unflinching in their taut, sweaty grotesquerie, but the man himself flinches-he laughs nervously, stutters, cringes, equivocates. “What are you trying to get at in your work?” someone, presumably Zwigoff, asks off-mic. “But sometimes when I’m drawing I feel suicidal too.” I start feeling really depressed, suicidal.” These are Crumb’s first words in the film, delivered in a quiet, distant voice. “If I don’t draw for a while I get really crazy. The shot continues, and lap dissolves into a pile of sketchbooks and records, and finally Robert himself, back to us and facing his stereo, knees to his chest, rocking slowly to the music.Ĭut to a drawing, and a hand with brush moving rapidly across the surface of the paper. His artwork is a need, the spools say, open-mouthed, eyes agog. From the very first shot the film suggests that Crumb creates because he must. The movie opens with gentle upright piano music and a close-up shot of a sculpted, hand painted statue of a woman’s muscular butt, and in a slow, shaky pan takes in row after row of wooden spools to which faces have been elaborately, lovingly drawn, remarkable objects that, it slowly becomes clear, seem to have no practical or commercial purpose. Crumb, a 1994 documentary directed by Terry Zwigoff, transformed Robert Crumb’s work permanently for me, by providing context, nuance and even ambiguity to work that had up to that point seemed alien and severe. I moved on and found work to read that didn’t make me physically ill.Ī few years later, a film about the cartoonist himself changed all of this. And when I did, finally, make it past the surface to the actual content, I found nothing to reassure my trembling stomach-even in the less overtly challenging short stories, I found the neurotic aggression overwhelming, overpowering. My disgust deepened after my first exposure to his comics-they seemed so tightly drawn, so cluttered and cramped that I felt anxious, trapped in neurosis. I don’t remember now what the specific image was, nor does it really matter at this point-it wasn’t the content that repulsed me, but the neurotic, shaky, compulsive lines, invading every form, erratic, descriptive of the hand that made them as much as the subjects themselves. I was a teenager the first time I saw a drawing by Robert Crumb, and I had an immediate, visceral reaction, a feeling of nausea, a slightly floating, psychic displacement from my physical self.
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