Over-Exposure: Terry Zwigoff's Crumb

Crumb (1994).

Directed by Terry Zwigoff.

Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Documentary films complicate the task of psychoanalytic film criticism; they are renderings of fact, not fiction. They try not to traffic in the realm of fantasy, except as a subject, as they strive to disturb the viewer with difficult truths. Yet their aesthetic effect is under the influence of their film-maker's subjectivity. Conscious as well as unconscious identifications, transferences, countertransferences, and resistances inevitably complicate the film-maker's interpretation of events, and shape the presentation.

Terry Zwigoff's Crumb seems no exception. The film is, by design, a psychobiography, a film portrait of the famed underground cartoonist and sketch artist R. (for Robert) Crumb. Robert burst into American consciousness in the late 1960s with his hallucinogen inspired stream-of-consciousness cartoon style. With its own terrifying cuteness, Robert's art aims to skewer psychosocial and psycho-sexual hypocrisy. For better or for worse, his art is raw, honest and astonishingly revealing. In an interview after completion of the film, Zwigoff emphasised that he wanted to be as honest about Robert as Robert is in his own work, and added that if erred it was on the side of harshness (Sragow, 1995, ‘The man behind the man in Crumb. The New York Times, 23 April, Section H, pp. 13 & 20). A former psychology major and close friend of the artist, Zwigoff was in his own therapy as he exposed his famous friend on film. Zwigoff takes us into Robert's life, past as well as present, and into the heart of his deeply troubled family. His film is a disturbing meditation on creativity, trauma, character pathology, perversion, and the variability of psychopathology expressed in three brothers: Robert, his older brother Charles, and his younger brother Maxon. Two sisters would not participate. Robert found viewing the film ‘excruciating’ (Crumb & Crumb, 1995, p. 96, ‘Head for the hills!