Trash Humpers

Trash Humpers, as the title suggests, is a film about people who have sex with rubbish. Three disfigured characters squeal, squark, sing and jeer as they perform strange acts in the discarded spaces of a suburban American town. In one scene they whoop with delight as they destroy a collection of abandoned televisions, in another they cycle with dolls attached by rope to the back of their bicycles, dragging the figures through the mud. There is also a murder and of course several scenes of wheelie bin love. Provocateur Harmony Korine, filming on VHS, paints a strange portrait of America. This is ‘anti’ cinema: anti-aesthetics, anti-narrative and crucially anti-morality. Mostly it is just repulsive but occasionally it’s beguiling, and at these points it feels like Korine is getting at something, showing us exactly what we don't want to see: something that challenges concepts of society, humanity and the boundaries of what we deem watchable.