After writing the screenplay for Kids at nineteen, Harmony Korine appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and talked about his father’s friendship with the legendary tap dancing duo the Nicholas Brothers. Later, he told Roger Ebert that he had lost touch with his father but had recently spotted him on Canal Street selling turtles. After directing Gummo, a dirty collage of a film about backwater life, he told interviewers that he hoped the film would play in shopping malls, that his next project was an adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses starring Snoop Dogg (as Leopold Bloom), and that, during the shooting of the film, he had found “a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase.”

These anecdotes, whether true or whoppingly fat lies, are a part Harmony Korine’s unified vision. In both his life and work, Korine ignores coherent narrative, sense, and the line between fiction and truth, all in the pursuit of a purer form of entertainment, an experience untethered to culture or trends. His work is distinctly American in its subject matter, but has almost no relation to American cinema. Two recent films, Julien Donkey-Boy and Mister Lonely, contain some of the most elegant, lush images in memory, and yet Korine’s bleak vision of reality aches persistently at their core. This vision comes to a head in his new un-film, Trash Humpers, a disturbing and raw “home movie” about a gang of criminally insane elderly people who do terrible things to their neighbors (and hump trash). The primary actors were Korine and his wife, Rachel, who slept under bridges for character development. The entire film was edited with a couple of VCRs.