Bored and Boringer: avant-garde and trash in Harmony Korine's Gummo

Abstract

While bearing all the formal stamps of the realist avant-garde, Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) is animated not by the powerful, oppositional emotions of ‘shock’ or ‘anger’, but by a morally and politically devalued ‘boredom' – a vacuous, trivial affect long associated with the consumer culture that the avant-garde traditionally pits itself against. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gummo was widely greeted as an avant-garde failure. Contending, however, that recent radical shifts in the status and dominion of emotion convert boredom from consumer culture's signature affect to consumer culture's emotional trash, this article re-reads Gummo’s tedium as a function not of the film's avant-garde failure but of its effort to repurpose the avant-garde for changed economic and social co-ordinates. Exploring the convergence of emotional and literal trash through a semiotic analysis of the film's junk-filled, over-stuffed frames, I will suggest that precisely as a trivial, vacuous and a-political feeling – as our emotional trash or affective waste – boredom possesses an unexpected utility to a newly configured avant-garde project.