CRANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
HARMONY KORINE’S The Beach Bum, released earlier this year, isn’t a fully realized piece of work, but there is something rather touching in it. The film follows an unrepentant middle-aged party-animal poet played by Matthew McConaughey, known only as Moondog—the moniker an homage to the Viking-helmeted composer, musician, and poet who was a familiar sight on Manhattan’s 6th Avenue in the mid-’50s, a sterling example of the species that has been dubbed the “local eccentric.” Tricked up in Parrothead and Salt Life imagery, Korine’s movie is a paean to the art-maniac-as-sacred-beast, appearing at a moment when the idea of the artist (or anyone else) being privileged to stand outside of middle-class morality is distinctly out of vogue. Robert Crumb, who in 1994 could be the subject of a widely praised documentary portrait that explained his often unpleasant or provocative work as being pulled from a deep well of personal trauma, would today be resoundingly booed at the Ignatz Awards for cartooning.
For one invested in the health of the cultural ecosystem, this shunning of the sickos is cause for alarm. Art based in personal expression very often benefits from unfiltered—if not unexamined—self-exposure, while a censorious culture encourages work in which creators express only what they would like you to think that they think. Many different measures have been offered up to adjudge the success or greatness of societies and civilizations, but for my money—and, presumably, for Korine’s—there is none better than that of the quality and quantity of a society’s wackjobs and screwballs.
Perhaps the most comprehensive creative confirmations of this worldview that I know can be found in one of the least-known, least-screened bodies of work by an acknowledged major international filmmaker—the historical films of Roberto Rossellini. Made mostly for various national television services, they occupied the director of Rome Open City for the final 15 years of his life. In these histories, it is invariably the zealots, instigators, and outsiders who, monomaniacally pursuing their own preoccupations, drag forward the sum total of human understanding.
The project begins in 1962, when Rossellini, a nut of the first order himself, drew up what he called his Great Plan.
