Rosenbaum on Crumb


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Monday, August 16, 2010


Some Monday reading for you. The often enlightening and always at least thought-provoking (even at his most objectionable) Jonathan Rosenbaum has reprinted his 1995 essay on Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb. Here’s a sample:

Every American male knows the sound of that nervous tittering, and Robert Crumb’s comic world is not only suffused with it (his own adult sexual obsession is amazonian, big-assed, thick-legged women) but encircled by it. I can’t think of any other movie that’s dealt with this kind of laughter so directly. Cassavetes’s fictional film Faces probably came the closest, but there it was simply backslapping businessmen dealing with everyday sexual embarrassment. Crumb cuts deeper, letting us see the potential madness lurking beyond the simple nervousness of sexual panic — a madness disquietingly made to seem as American and almost as ordinary as that pie in the sky. This is one creepy movie, and it should come as no surprise that David Lynch, who helped to get it released, is mentioned at the top of the credits.

Rosenbaum has also written a new piece for the new Criterion DVD of the film, available here.

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2 Responses to “Rosenbaum on Crumb”
  1. dogbreath says:

    The DVD is great. There are a lot of outtakes with Crumb talking about comics which I guess were too nerdy / Inside Baseball to be kept in the film.

  2. concerned party says:

    Rosenbaum was my professor for one semester at school. He was nice to listen to. He didn’t grade my essays though, thank goodness. He woulda cut me to smithereens. He constantly parted his hair, and gave me a good 1-2-3 on Bresson.

    It’s awesome that he is most terrified by Charles’ graphomania, and how he doesn’t see this as redemptive in any way. Just scary.

    People don’t talk about those notebooks enough. I sometimes think, though they’re incredible documents, does the film blows them out of proportion? Or not enough? Darger, Ramirez, Yoakum, etc, are more heavy cases of American native/outsider I guess…

    Taking “outsiders” into account, It seems like it would be much easier to talk about Charles’ notebooks in an art-world context than a comix or film world context.

    They seem inherently beautiful, partly because of the terror in them, which makes me wonder why they take Rosenbaum aback to such a degree as to finish his article with them, instead of comparing them to something else art-historical as he does with Robert.

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