Zach Vasquez
There is a reason that Terry Zwigoff’s brilliant documentary Crumb (1995) isn’t called R. Crumb, despite the fact that its central figure is the legendary comic artist who bears that name. Although the film started out as an intimate, yet straightforward study of the man and his work, over the course of the six years that Zwigoff shot it, it became a movie about the Crumb family, their shared genius and their shared psychoses. Thirty years later, Crumb stands as not just one of the great American documentaries, but one of the great family sagas in film.
The most successful and influential member of the underground comix scene of the ‘60s, Crumb was, at the time the film’s release (and much to his vocal chagrin), most recognized for his iconic ‘Keep on trucking’ illustration, creating the character Fritz the Cat, and designing the album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills. But he was also infamous for his sexually obscene (at times outright pornographic), misanthropically grotesque, and violently transgressive satirical and biographical comic books.
The acclaim and fame (at least by fringe artist standards of the time) that his work received proved a blessing and a curse for the nerdy, socially awkward, yet undeniably charismatic Crumb. It raised him out of squalor and brought him the level of female attention he so desperately sought his entire life, even as it confirmed his belief in the unrepentant shallowness of America, which is one of the main reasons he and his family—wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, herself a comic artist, and their young daughter Sophie—spend much of the film preparing to decampe to France.
But it’s not just the culture and politics of America that Crumb is fleeing. It’s also his family.
We observe him interacting with his two brothers: the elder Charles and the younger Maxon (two Crumb sisters vehemently refused to participate in the documentary), as well as his widowed mother Beatrice. As essential as the sections discussing the political and cultural import of Crumb’s work are, it’s these family sections that give the movie it’s disturbing, surreal power, separating it from just about every other artist documentary there is (save perhaps for 2004’s In the Realms of the Unreal, about the reclusive Henry Darger, whose work, life, and struggles with mental illness share more than a little in common with the brothers Crumb).
Raised by a tyrannical, abusive father and an unstable, amphetamines-addicted mother, the brothers, all of whom were treated as outcasts and losers by their community, shared an obsession with art from an early age, the elder Charles focusing their energy on comic books. However, it wasn’t solace they found in this artistic pursuit, but an outlet upon which to pour their obsessions—particularly their sexual obsessions.
There is no artist who has been as open about his perversions and fetishes as R. Crumb. In one of the most infamous scenes from the doc, he talks about how he lusted after Bugs Bunny as a child, to the point where he’d cut out an illustration of the character and pawed it so much he had to ask his mother to iron it. It’s funny watching the scenes of Crumb interacting with women—ex-girlfriends, magazine reporters, porn models—in a post-Me Too world. He is called out several times by women for his depiction of them in his work, and he denies none of it: “I can’t defend myself…I have hostilities towards women, I admit it. It ruthlessly forces itself out of me on paper. Maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken away.”
(To be fair, many of the women interviewed in the film also talk about the paradoxically empowering nature of his art, particularly in how he emphasizes size and strength in his representation of the female form.)
And yet, R. Crumb’s neuroses, sexual and otherwise, are nothing compared to his two brothers. Maxon—who would go on to achieve a small level of recognition in the years following the documentary’s release for his own art and writing—lives in a flop house in San Francisco’s notoriously dingy Tenderloin District, practices self-flagellation and asceticism (he sits for hours on a homemade bed of nails and passes a string through his body once a month), earns his keep by street begging, and suffers from seizures brought on by sexual arousal. In one of the film’s most startling moments, he casually recounts one of several times he’s sexually assaulted women on the street. (R. Crumb reacts to his brother’s confessionary tale the same way he does to everything else, with constant nervous laughter.)
Even more haunting are the interviews with Charles, a virgin shut-in who still lives at home with their mother. Toothless, unwashed, and strung out on anti-psychotic meds, he spends his days re-reading classic literature and wallowing in suicidal depression. He admits to harboring homicidal resentments towards Robert—not out of jealousy over his success as an artist, but born from some deeper, darker place (to say this family harbors an Oedipal complex is putting it lightly).
The most jaw-dropping scene comes when R. Crumb—who has cataloged his own work, starting from childhood, with the same obsessiveness that he collects blues, jazz, and bluegrass records—finds the last comic book that Charles illustrated. One of many pieces of fan fiction based on the 1950 live action Disney adaptation of Treasure Island, we watch, page by page, as Charles’s obsession with filling in every bit of empty space increasingly takes over until he finally gives in to full on graphomania. It’s a truly terrifying scene and one of the starkest examples of psychosis ever captured on film. (Charles also admits that his fascination with Treasure Island stems from his continuing sexual infatuation with the young boy who starred in it.)
In his review for the SF Gate, critic Edward Guthmann described the Crumbs as “emblems of some fundamental failure in the American family—a deep, corrosive, indistinguishable sorrow.” He also likened Zwigoff’s film to another classic documentary about a family gone to seed: the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975). But whereas the subjects of that film are entirely deluded about their lives and station, leading to more credible accusations of exploitation on behalf of its directors, the Crumbs are self-reflective to an astonishing, almost frightening degree. It’s that mix of genius and madness that gives their story an almost Dostoevsky-like power.
Since the release of Crumb, both the film and the man have been fully canonized in their respective scenes (though God help us if the Tik Tok crowd ever stumbled upon Crumb’s work). Unfortunately, with that canonization comes unwelcome attention. Conservative guru/shyster Jordan Peterson has constantly praised the film, using it as an example of how financial success can help awkward men transcend what he considers the “female dominance hierarchy.” This is so obviously an idiotic read of the film it’s hardly worth arguing, but I will grant that it is easy to view Crumb as an optimistic story about a man who was able to extricate himself from hereditary damnation through the power of art. The first words Crumb speaks in film are “If I don’t draw for a while I get really crazy, depressed and suicidal.”
However, he is quick to add: “But when I do draw, I get suicidal anyway.”
It’s equally telling that Zwigoff chooses to end the film on an unrelentingly dark note, informing us through onscreen text that within a year of them completing shooting, Charles finally succeeded in taking his own life. It’s clear through the interviews with Charles, as well as the glimpses into his artwork, that he was as intelligent and talented as Robert, if not more so.
And yet, in the end, it wasn’t enough. Art won’t save you.
“Crumb” is available for digital rental or purchase, and is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
