No documentary has left me shaken to my core in terms of constructing a window into another life that is so separate from me, yet humanistic and and detailed. Crumb (1994) destroys the hackneyed trope of the misunderstood artist by peeling back the layers of the mystique and acclaim in revealing a raw, unresolved nerve that’s pulsated into grand works of twisted beauty.
At the beginning of Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s documentary detailing famed comic artist Robert Crumb, a beautiful montage of Crumb’s art is set to “The Last Kind Words” by Blues singer/writer Geeshie Wiley. It’s an alarming sequence, as it is the first time we’re plunged into the disturbing and macabre imagery of Crumb and his worldviews.
There are black-and-white surrealist forms of naked women deformed and mangled by scared, pathetic men. A frightened human-like goblin is trapped inside a room full of wires and pipes with a text bubble at the bottom saying, “The little guy that lives inside my brain.” There are women shaped like gargoyles and little men entering inside a giant woman through the butt and out of her mouth.
Why detail these uncomfortable images? These are one of many montages sprinkled throughout the film that detail not only Crumb’s exaggerated psyche concerning women and himself but perhaps how art becomes an avenue for a broken individual who would’ve drifted into the dark insidious underbelly of toxic masculinity. Zwigoff’s film is not a puff piece, nor a space where he can extricate himself from criticisms and controversies. His art is magnificent in being so exaggerated and specifically detailed; the inherent ideas drawn come from a particular trauma that’s morphed Robert into the infamous artist people revere and detest.
“What are you trying to get at in your work” Zwigoff asks, to which an uninterested Crumb snidely says, “I don’t know.” From there, we hear less of Zwigoff’s voice and he allows his camera to capture the nuts and bolts of who Crumb is, and how he is the way he is, including how he beautifully draws the world and the sickly heinous images embedded in his brain.
After thirty years, Crumb remains one of my favorite documentaries. There’s a lingering aroma of sadness and unvarnished vulnerability rampant, and the filmmaking and intimate access make it an engrossing piece of art. Documentaries based on noted celebrities of a certain subgroup tend to have their form of self-flagellation that endears the subject to a wider audience or rectifies past wrongs to set the record straight. Terry Zwigoff accomplishes neither goal.
Even though Zwigoff was personally acquainted with the Crumbs, his film is less interested in taking sides regarding moral conundrums and societal impacts. He focuses his camera on the Crumb’s internal dynamics. Robert’s relationship with himself, his family, his work, and how his work reverberates a type of Crumb worldview that’s unconscious but distinctly loud.
His piercing, intimate examination of one of the greatest underground comic artists is a disturbing dissection of American trauma breeding a particular anger of a repressed sexual anxiety and the deleterious effects prominent on a young, underdeveloped mind.
For all the deranged and bizarre images Crumb pours onto paper, it calls to the stereotype of how art can save the doomed artist from themself. A common trope born to box in the “misunderstood artist” like Crumb, yet Zwigoff’s film smartly avoids this pitfall by contrasting the successful and stabilized life of Robert with his two brothers, who are just as integral to Robert’s character. While all three brothers started as artists, often demeaning and abusing each other, it’s unsurprising that Robert would emerge as the slightly sane and stable one who could form a career and public persona.
His older brother, Charles, is shown as a dirty, unkempt manic-depressive recluse who lives with their mother and hasn’t left the house in decades. Charles forced Robert into comic drawing, and their younger brother, Maxon, simply bore the brunt of their childhood sibling abuse. Max lives as a panhandler in San Francisco who meditates on a bed of nails and is prone to seizures if he thinks about sex. He spends his days drawing surrealistic oil paintings while living in squalid conditions.
All three siblings lived under the tyrannical rule of an overbearing, abusive father and a mother addicted to amphetamines. Robert recounts his menacing father (a man who survived WWII and expected his boys to be models of citizenship) and comments that, despite how talented Charles was, he suffered the most abuse from his father. His disturbed erotic fixation with Bobby Driscoll in Treasure Island (1960) led him to be emotionally stunted and unable to function in the real world. One of the more sobering moments of the film comes near the end, as Robert displays Charles’s last works showing an increasing alienation of the world and his slow disinterest in drawing. His art becomes less explicit and devolves into what Robert describes as “loony writing” where text bubbles overcrowd the visuals.
Max, the youngest sibling, could never live up to their expectations. In the film, he still resents being labeled as “Supply Boy” by Charles when they were kids. It’s clear Robert fared the best by directing his emotional traumas and childhood abuse into his art. Art did not merely save Robert; art was the avenue through which he could comprehend the inner calamity of his neurosis.
Robert is not painted in a glamorous fashion. He comes across as the bullied nerd who never grew out of his high school angst. One scene has him recounting stories of girls who had rejected him and drawing their portraits. His view of women never grows beyond that of a sexually charged teenager. It’s the type of behavior that is relegated to incels and men with a skewed perception of modern-day feminism, disregarding women’s agency.
There are comics he describes that feel they’re derived from a hostile view of women, painting them as sexual objects to be used and manipulated by pathetic, fragile men who resemble Robert. He places importance on drawing the female form as perfectly as he can, feeling this is where he “gets excited” while disregarding how he draws men as “they’re not important.”
Even Maxon casually admits on camera that his sexual compulsions have led him to a phase of molesting random women by pulling their shorts down. Zwigoff bluntly asks, “Were you actually raping these women,” to which Maxon responds with a nervous chuckle, “No, I never got that far into it.”
Zwigoff smartly invites female perspectives — such as Trina Robbins, a contemporary of Crumb within the underground comic scene — that point out the irresponsibility of painting violent sexual fantasies for the public to consume. Dierdre English, former editor of Mother Jones and prominent critic, believes his depictions of women as objects are a form of self-indulgence and that Crumb gets off on it.
Robert’s wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, counters that Robert is drawing the male anger, representing America’s mentality, and that not drawing it is pretending it doesn’t exist. Throughout the film, Robert exclaims his disdain for the capitalistic, consumer-friendly America born from the superficial dream of the happy-go-lucky 1950s nuclear family unit he never experienced. All of these tangents of dissatisfaction with post-war America feel like the confluence of events that lead to the micro-creation of three calcified broken brothers.
Crumb opens avenues but doesn’t allow resolution or confrontation for Robert. Zwigoff trusts his audience to know how they feel about Crumb and his works, and, regardless of the outcome, Robert couldn’t care less where you land. It should be noted that Zwigoff and Crumb were friends for many years, befriending each other for their mutual love of old blues records. It was a coincidence that Zwigoff learned of his family and believed they would make for an interesting documentary after he met Charles.
The legacy of Crumb has kept its subjects (both in front and behind the camera) in a state of ambivalence. Robert moved to France with his wife, Aline, at the end of the film (Robert still lives there, with Aline passing away in 2022); the end text explains that a year after filming Charles committed suicide in 1992; Maxon achieved some success with the film by selling his art pieces; and Terry Zwigoff would go on to make three more films, with his last being Art School Confidential (2006).
Robert continued to draw and publish while dealing with the newfound fame born from the film. In a 1998 book, “Crumb Family Comics,” Crumb remarks how “the film got more reviews and write-ups and articles in the space of a year than my comic work had gotten since I first became a known artist in 1968!”
Being one of the most acclaimed documentaries in 1994, it was a shock when the film wasn’t nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar. Another acclaimed documentary, Hoop Dreams (1994), suffered the same fate. After public outcry, notably from critic Roger Ebert, both films’ exclusions led to the Documentary branch enacting reform to how films would be viewed and nominated. Zwigoff wasn’t too surprised; he felt voters were probably disgusted with the film.
Thirty years later, it seems that the subculture of America’s identity would only grow into forms of certain manosphere groups. The Andrew Tate or Whatever podcasts prey on the same inadequate men that Robert would resemble, as their feelings toward women are weaponized to radicalize the same negative attitudes that are often found in Robert’s works. Jordan Peterson remarks it as his favorite documentary and identifies Robert’s attempts to stray away from his overbearing mother, never acknowledging the presence his father had in his life.
By the halfway point of the film, Robert describes his father as a “typical WWII generation man” who hated his entire family and would get into physical fights with his wife. A book his father wrote, “Training People Effectively,” the book jacket shows a picture of his father with a fixed smile, something Robert laughs at, as he believes it’s derived from a smiling disease signaling a deep depression. “He was a grim guy,” Robert emphasizes.
Crumb feels like a prelude to the caricature of women within a negative context within these communities. In 2024 we’re witnessing the sensibilities of Robert’s art come to life in popular media and spokespeople that champion it for the lonely adrift man unable to acclimate to the modern world.
The sibling relationship between Robert and his two brothers is sad and heartfelt. The tragedy present in the film is a showcase of familial trauma shackling three boys who never reached for help beyond the artistic life preservers they crafted. One by one, Charles and Maxon let go and sink into their delusional toxicities—Robert can only observe and hope he doesn’t lose his grip on reality.
Zwigoff’s film is a damning statement on how art can be used to hide the far more insidious subconscious of its artist and deconstruct the famed veneer of success. The film showcases a deeply troubled mind that simply lucked out by not succumbing like his brothers and choosing to channel his trauma through artistic expression. It’s not that the emperor has no clothes, but that the emperor is an insecure misanthrope with an inherent talent and drew his societal rejections as cartoonish horror shows.
One of the funniest lines in the film shows Robert describing how a woman saw one of his paintings as cute, to which Robert was astounded. “This isn’t cute, this is a nightmare.” Crumb is a piercing inspection into an American nightmare of lost male angst lashing out through art.
The last text explains why Roberts’ sisters, Carol and Sandra, declined to be interviewed.
Retrospective Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to Criterion and Sony Pictures via Film Daze