A Forsley Feuilleton: Flavor Flav Is A Classically Trained Pianist, Tom Petty Has A Dirty Fish Tank, and Selena Gomez Is Starring In Harmony Korine’s New Flick

Dostoyevsky used to watch his wife shit, G.G. Allin voted for Jimmy Carter, Jerry Garcia tongue-kissed his older sister on her deathbed, Diana Ross hated the movie When Harry Met Sally, Elizabeth Taylor is a beer enthusiast, Kirk Douglas collects Pez dispensers. . . Flavor Flav is a classically trained pianist, Tom Petty has a dirty fish tank, and Selena Gomez is starring in Harmony Korine’s new flick.  All these rumors, except the last one, were written by Korine in A Crackup At The Race Riots.  The last one was written about Korine in a Hollywood tabloid.

Hollywood tabloids don’t fact-check, and Korine is liar, a prankster, a rumor-conjurer.  I doubt G.G. Allin voted for Jimmy Carter, just as I doubt Korine is making a flick starring that shiny prepackaged Disney toy named Gomez.  Korine is a self-mythologizing spinner of tall-tales and pop-culture hearsay.  After writing the pubescent-raping, skateboard-beating, AIDS-spreading realities of Kids, and then directing the glue-sniffing, cat-executing, Down Syndrome-pimping antics of Gummo, and the child-murdering, sister-pregnating, schizophrenic-darkness of Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine vanished – with a Groucho Marx t-shirt and a Black Metal soundtrack – into a cloud of his own rumors. 

He says he spent the following decade working as a lifeguard and a bricklayer – that he studied with a Haitian voodoo tap-dancer in Baton Rouge and joined a cult of fishermen in Peru.  There was Fight Harm, his collaborative project with David Blaine, who I consider the new Jesus Christ – Christ could walk on the holy water of Israel, but Blaine can levitate off the urineized concrete of New York – but I’ll write more about our new Savior in a different Forsley Feuilleton.  In Fight Harm Korine engaged random people in street fights while Blaine watched behind the camera.  According to the child-sized and malnourished director, it was supposed to be “a cross between a Buster Keaton vehicle and a snuff film”. . . but the random people Korine fought were New Yorkers.  He was hospitalized, and the projected was never completed.

According to legend – the legend of and by Korine – the director also wrote a script, What Makes Pistachio Nuts, during this time about a Trotskyite who lives in a Florida suburb and owns the world’s largest pig, a pig named Pistachio that everyone in town watches run up and down walls with its owner on its back making pro-Trotsky speeches.  But the script was lost in one of the two house fires Korine endured.  He probably endured this fire at the peak of a Meth binge while frantically running and pissing around the flames, or maybe at the end of a heroin binge while passed out dreaming about BBQ pork sandwiches.   .  I can imagine both scenarios, but I can’t image a scenario in which he wrote a script and then spent eleven-thousand dollars to recover this single sentence from his burnt computer: “The speech is pointless; the finger is speechless.”

It sounds like bullshit – the kind of bullshit a tweaked out delusional bull past his prime would shit out.  I think these stories, these rumors, are nothing more than symbolic revisions of a decade of drug addiction, rotting teeth, burning houses, homelessness, madness, and Chloe Sevignylessness.  But when a journalist that wasn’t me – I was busy trying to retrieve my Great Great American Novel manuscript from a UFO flown by Ambrose Bierce – asked Korine if it was all fantasy, he responded: “What’s the difference?  Whether you believe me or whether it’s the truth, what does it matter? Everything’s just a story.  It’s all a story.”

After telling the story of his decade-long hiatus, he told another story, Mister Lonley, in 2007.  The flick follows two impersonators – one a Michael Jackson and the other a Marilyn Monroe – who join a commune of celebrity impersonators in the Scottish Highlands.  Because of the over eight million budget and the bureaucracy that came with it, Korine complained that “so much energy is put into capitulating. . . it just chops your head off.”  So, in reaction, his next film, Trash Humpers, shot on VHS in the style of a home movie, has neither a real plot nor any real dialogue – only a group of old drunkards creeping around Nashville at night humping toilets.

So if the rumors are true and Korine’s new flick is starring the shiny prepackaged Disney toy named Selena Gomez, what is it a reaction to?  The financial and critical attacks Trash Humpers received?  I hope not. This Gomez flick is called Spring Breakers and follows a group of college girls gone wild: they rob a restaurant to pay for their vacation, get locked up, and then start doing things for a drug dealer, played by James Franco, named Alien.  I don’t know what kind of things Gomez will do for the Alien, but I have faith that Korine will direct her to do things she’s never done before, at least not in any of her past flicks: Wizards of Waverly Place, Princess Protection Program, and Another Cinderella Story.  Gomez herself said, “It’s going to be raw. . .”

And it better be as raw as Ol’ Dirt Dawg.  If I wanted to see her dancing and singing with clothes on, I’d bust out my Barney & Friends DVDs.  But I want to see a sequel to Kids.  I want Justin Beiber to cry.  I want to see Korine melt this wholesome Disney toy down and then reform it into a decadent sex toy so America’s youth can witness the dark perversions of this country’s psyche.  Korine said, “I’m the most American director making movies today,” and if the rumors are true, he will have the perfect opportunity to prove it.