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Gummo 2


(General content warning)


Gummo was a 1997 film directed by Harmony Korine, released when he was age 24. It was his second film, taking place in Xenia, Ohio, but filmed in Kentucky. It captured a Midwestern alienation that I understood, at least somewhat, growing up in Missouri and going to college in a small northwestern Missouri town. The placelessness and disconnection from the rest of the world. The vague absorption of national popular cultural symbols. More than anything, an indescribable weirdness. Most of the actors (including one of the leads) were non-professional and a lot of the footage was improvised and non-scripted.

Gummo (Wikipedia)


Gummo has a 36% aggregate rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Janet Maslin in a New York Times review called it "the worst film of the year [1997]." The film had a budget of $1.3 million and a box office of $116,000. I would describe it as my favorite Harmony Korine film, and maybe one of my favorite films of all time. I watched it twice, once in 2013, once in 2020. It is a film that many people I knew who spent a large amount of time in small town Missouri watched and enjoyed.


On YouTube, the first result for a search of "Gummo" is a music video by rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, which has (as of writing) 377 million views and peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. This was his first big track, one that propelled his popularity.

6IX9INE - GUMMO (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)


I could not find a video about Gummo (the film) with more than 2 million views. It seems self-evident that the song was named after the Harmony Korine film, but I can't find any direct confirmation of this from Tekashi 6ix9ine himself, only third party references on e.g. RapGenius. I find it strange and interesting why a rapper from Brooklyn would name his debut single after a 1997 cult film about midwestern poverty and also find it strange and interesting that no one else seems to be as interested in this question as I am.


Around the time I first saw Gummo, maybe 2014, I was also a member of a Facebook group whose name I don't recall, centered around weird DIY writing and film. In this group, I remember seeing a lot of bizarre, extremely niche content. I watched a 90 minute film on YouTube of a guy carrying a camera while he and his friends hung out in Minnesota, drove to Canada for a weekend, drank and did drugs. They apparently screened it in a small theater. I cannot find a link to it.


This brings me to the film that is title of this post: Gummo 2. One day in this group, I stumbled upon a post with a link to this video, with no comments and about three likes:

Gummo 2


This link is broken. I will describe it from memory.


One of the main plot points of Gummo involves the main characters beating up and kiling stray cats to sell the meat to a local butcher. Obviously, these are fake dead cats. The main character of Gummo 2 (which had no relation to anyone who worked on the original) was not a fake dead cat. It was a real, dead, rotting cat corpse, with white fur, mounted on wooden sticks and controlled by marionette strings. I do not remember much of the plot, which was incoherent, and involved time travel and a cardboard-cutout set that the main character ("Poop the Cat") interacted with. What I do remember, viscerally, is that as the film progressed, the cat lost its form from the stress of being a marionette puppet, getting worse every cut: its head slumped, its limbs tore apart, open wounds grew, until it was barely cat-shaped at all, all while the directors continued to voice high-pitched dialog. The film ended with a time lapse shot of the cat's corpse being consumed by flies and maggots. It was about twenty minutes long.


I tried to find this film a few weeks after watching it, and it was gone. I'm not sure if anyone other than me and the producers saw it -- if they did, there is no material evidence of it online. Since I've seen it, I've occasionally tried to Google for any information about what the fuck it was, and how the fuck it came to be. A few years ago, I found this sparse IMDB page:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3197806/


I also found a link to the film, but I did not rewatch it, except for a few moments to confirm it was what I thought it was. I tried to find the film for this post, but, fortunately for my readers, I think that it is gone from the internet again, or at least beyond my reach. From the IMDB page, I found both the directors on social media, but I have no interest in contacting them, and I hid this post from web search engine indexing, so if they ever see this, it will only be in the same incidental way that I saw their film.

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