The Great Movies III

This was not obvious to Crumb, a legendary underground artist from San Francisco whose "Keep on Truckin"' image had become a r96os icon, and whose cover for Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills album was a classic even apart from the music it enclosed. Crumb had little interest in success, turned down countless offers to license "Keep on Truckin',"turned down an offer to host Saturday Night Live with his band, drew compulsively all the time, produced small-press graphic novels of startling, often pornographic, weirdness, and listened to his old records.

Zwigoff told me he "called in every favor he owed me" to persuade Crumb to be in his film: he spent nine years on the documentary "while averaging an income of about $zoo a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself." I am apparently responsible for the urban legend that Zwigoff told Crumb, "Make this film or I will shoot myself."That never happened, but it may be true that Zwigoff's life was saved because he did make the film.

Among documentaries about artists, Crumb (1994) is unusual in having access to the key players and biographical artifacts of Crumb's entire life. Crumb himself is entirely forthcoming on camera, uninhibited, honest. We meet both of his wives, who talk cheerfully about the way their images and secrets were incorporated, sometimes directly, into Crumb's work. We see the high school yearbook portraits of classmates immortalized into grotesques and sadists, sometimes under their own names. Most crucially, we enter Crumb's boyhood home in New Jersey, still occupied by his mother and his brother Charles, and in San Francisco we visit his brother Max. His two sisters refuse to participate.

We leave the film convinced there are no secrets still concealed in this family. We know that Robert's central sexual fantasy was to ride bareback on women with overdeveloped rumps; that Charles remained a virgin and recluse, rarely leaving his bedroom, his erotic imagination forever fixed on Bobby Driscoll in the 1960 film Treasure Island; that Max lived in monkish isolation, slept on a bed of nails, and regularly passed a thirty-foot cloth ribbon through his body; that their alcoholic father broke Robert's collarbone when he was a boy, and that the parents fought between themselves so fiercely that their faces were often covered with scratches and bruises. Photographs of the family circa 1950 find parents and five children posed in their Sunday best on a suburban lawn, looking as if they are awaiting the arrival of Diane Arbus.

Charles was the first artist in the family. He hand-drew comic books, and encouraged Robert and Max to draw, against their will at first. Handmade comics from the period survive and are seen in the film; Robert seems to have saved everything, and Charles did, too, although after his death by overdose, his mother threw out most of his work before Robert could rescue it. Max accumulates little, as befits a monk, but his paintings now draw high prices in galleries. Ironic that Robert and Max gained fame as artists while Charles remained in his room, reading stacks of paperback novels and filling notebooks with endless entries, some of them words, some only elaborate typographical patterns. In an extraordinary scene involving Robert, Charles, and their mother, Beatrice, she sprawls almost flat on a sofa, but like her sons is funny, articulate, and very strange.

Art may have saved Crumb from madness, turning private neurosis into public validation. Zwigoff is unsparing in showing Crumb's more transgressive work; the camera follows panel by panel through comic books as Crumb narrates stories of incest, necrophilia, scatology, assault, mayhem, and sexual couplings as unlikely as they are alarming. To call some of his images sexist, racist, and depraved is putting it mildly.

Zwigoff is fair enough to provide an articulate objection to Crumb's work: good, sane Deirdre English, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, is not shocked as much as saddened and repelled by Crumb's work, which treats women as objects, commodities, victims, mindless (sometimes even headless) conveniences. In defense of Crumb, the art critic Hughes finds a vision of suffering and yearning, of barriers ignored, of inhibitions disregarded, of a psyche turning itself out naked upon the page. Certainly it is true that Crumb's men are treated no better than his women: all are disgusting creatures driven by animalistic lust and depraved need.