To be all the forthcoming in Holland, I gotta admit that very little will put The Duke off a flick quicker than seeing the name David Lynch appear in the titles. Cabin Fever had to work awful hard to shake the stinky aftertaste of that executive producer credit, as far as The Duke was concerned. Just as well it had plenty of the shaving-and-then-skin-falls-off to keep a man occupied.
Crumb, Terry Zwigoff's profoundly disturbing portrait of Fritz The Cat creator Robert Crumb, opens with the words "David Lynch Presents", and by roughly an hour or so into the proceedings, it's become fairly easy to work out what might have attracted the nasty motherfucker to the project in the first place.
Robert Crumb is not, it becomes apparent, a particularly nice fella. A fantastic artist most certainly. A highly inventive satirist, for sure. But a man with a loathing for humanity also, a man who openly admits to his hostility towards women, who looks upon and fondles his female acquaintances like they were indeed the mindless slabs of meat what crop up in his comics.
It's hard not to feel repulsed, for example, when Crumb shows up at a shoot for a porn-mag, examining the arses of the women assembled to pose with him, sending some home if their bodies aren't to his liking, slapping their behinds and running his hands up and down their thighs for to test their worthiness.
But then, perhaps Crumb is no different to any number of other artists, whatever the medium, other than that he is prepared to invite his audience along for to observe these disgusting episodes first hand.
I'm sure someone could have talked Picasso into slapping a stripper's arse or two, or telling us all about the five-a-day wank habits.
History of Art, motherfucker.
Robert Crumb as a person is, it could be noted, a tad wanting in the emotional department. As a subject, though, he is continuously captivating.
Zwigoff's film is a masterpiece, but one what is, on occasion, very, very hard to watch. For six years he followed the artist, observing as Crumb doodled in crowded streets, or in bars, as he gave his similarly-gifted son some tips with regards the "drawing", and as he explains his hatred of the Fritz The Cat animated film, an "embarrassment", to a packed lecture theater.
Just as Nick Broomfield's films on Aileen Wuornos went some way towards revealing just how brilliant Charlize Theron was in Monster, so Zwigoff's film will increase your admiration for James Urbaniac's performance as Robert Crumb in American Splendor. Urbaniac nailed his target, and in his own way, so does Terry Zwigoff.
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