Trash Humpers and the Search for the Sublime in the Age of Viral Video

Adam Trainer

Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers was shot, edited and released in 2009. Captured on VHS and edited on two VCRs using the linear editing techniques utilized for dubbing home video, the film was conceptualised, executed and released in a matter of months. One look at the film and it’s easy to see how it might be possible, and perhaps even necessary for Trash Humpers to undergo such a protracted production. With little to no regard for conventional compositional structure, editing technique, narrative order or production values of any sort (except the latex masks worn by the four main characters – the ‘trash humpers’ of the title), the film has the appearance of a haunted home movie. Following the movements of four vagrants, all wearing masks to offer the illusion of old age but occupying a physicality belonging to much younger subjects, the film tracks the trash humpers through encounters with a number of other individuals, and through situational vignettes that are grotesque, violent, playful and destructive.

Trash Humpers also looks very much as though it took little time to make. The haphazard nature of the film’s content has an improvised randomness to it. Like quickly invented skits captured for posterity on home video the action of the film appears unscripted and chaotic. Trash Humpers was shot over a two-week period when Korine and the other trash humpers – played by his wife Rachel, Brian Kotzer and Travis Nicholson – lived in and around the places that the film was shot in Nashville. The film’s randomness and anarchic compositional style are intentionally indebted to the overarching process used to conceptualise and execute the film. Shot linearly and edited using the crudest of materials and equipment, the film is a direct and deliberate result of its production techniques. However, these techniques are tethered conceptually to the film’s central conceit as a recovered artifact, supposedly removed from the context provided by exposition, character development or plot structure. It is in this respect, as a faux-found object, that conceptual links can be made between Trash Humpers and the millions of found texts that exist on user-generated video sites such as YouTube. Like much of the content on these sites Trash Humpers is both amateur in its aesthetic approach, as well as being inherently self-aware in its concept and execution. Although it may not have been conceptualized as such, Trash Humpers raises a number of questions about the democratisation of media; a process that has given rise to the proliferation of user-generated online video culture.

When compared to the production and distribution mechanisms of both mainstream and independent film, Trash Humpers took next to no time to make its way from conceptualization to its audience. Korine’s home-movie aesthetic allowed him to remove the film from the production and distribution systems he had reportedly become frustrated with. Korine’s first film (1997) is estimated to have cost $1.3m (USD) a modest budget even by independent standards, but one which necessitates all of the industrial conditions and limitations required by professional film production. Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) – made under the label of the Dogme 95 manifesto, had a similar budget. However, Korine’s third feature length work of fiction filmmaking, Mister Lonely (2007), released some nine years later, had a budget of over $9m (USD). Korine has admitted that he found the production processes surrounding a film of that scale to be “stifling — the bureaucracy, the financing, the scheduling, etc.” and that he had wanted “to make films as fast as it took to think them up” (Korine in Tully 2009). With Trash Humpers he succeeded – the film reportedly took four months from the start of shooting to its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was backed up by a comprehensive online marketing strategy, including a website, facebook page and twitter feed, though information about and explanation for the film was limited leading up to its release. Only the trailer was available, which due to the film’s supposed anti-narrative approach offered nothing in the way of exposition. Instead the trailer consists of various excerpts from the film cut together with little regard for context or explanation.

Little else is arguably required however. The film offers no explanation for itself – it is deliberately vague both structurally, as well as in the motivations and actions of its characters, and in the context or back-story of the characters themselves. The trash humpers display very few individual traits. Korine’s character Hervé is slightly more vocal than the others – he appears to be the ringleader, often encouraging the others in their vandalism and social repugnance. Momma, played by Korine’s wife Rachel, is the only female trash humper and is at times either instructive or vocally critical towards the others. She also kidnaps an infant at the end of the film, and as such displays perhaps the most humanistic (albeit still disturbing) behavior of any of the four main characters throughout. Aside from these differences, the trash humpers remain purposefully vague in their motivations, and largely indistinct from one another in their characters. A number of questions might be posed about these characters – are they symbols, metaphors, or some kind of twisted archetype? As the camera is a diegetic presence in the film we are forced to regard the trash humpers as documentarians and commentators on their surroundings, presenting a dialogue on the boundaries of society – boundaries that they themselves flirt with crossing. Similarly we can think of user-generated amateur video as a new form of documentary. In many viral videos the main ‘characters’ are often positioned in relation to situations or scenes upon which they themselves are commenting as well as taking part, with direct-to-camera address often coming from the person behind the camera. Similarly, in Korine’s film the trash humpers exist as both narrators and directors of the situations occurring around them.

As obvious social outsiders the trash humpers are in a position to offer an alternative filmic voice– to document the liminal spaces that they occupy and to provide a marginalized perspective. But their coldness and anti-humanistic nature casts them in opposition to any insight they might provide about the characters and spaces that they document. The irony of Korine’s film is the dehumanistic way in which the supporting characters are depicted. Much like the title characters they are forced to perform and pander to the camera – they dance, play instruments, repeat catchphrases and tell jokes. They are never allowed to merely be – they remain on a hamster wheel of the creators’ invention, and one that these creators (the trash humpers) force themselves onto as well. It is here that comparisons can be made to the interactivity, addictiveness and meta-theoretical nature of online environments, and in particular the user-generated video sites that harbour the kind of amateur content that Trash Humpers resembles.

Trash Humpers shares a number of elements with Korine’s other features. It incorporates the structural randomness and absurdity of Gummo (1997), as well as that film’s preoccupation with lower and working class culture.

Both films were shot in Nashville, and both feature a series of characters that typify a ‘white trash’ aesthetic, or rather an aesthetic of poor, marginal whiteness as described by Newitz and Wray (1997). Both films focus on cluttered, rundown urban and domestic locations and their inhabitants, who are evidently uneducated, usually lower and working class, often overweight or otherwise physically grotesque, and in the case of Gummo, occasionally developmentally disabled. Gummo is a structureless and stylistically vivid trawl through the urban wasteland of middle America. Made up of short vignettes, the film’s white trash mise-en-scène is revealed through snapshots of individuals, random incidents and relationships, including ignorant obnoxious hicks, sexual predators, delinquent youth and hopeless, broken adults. This is depicted through a mélange of visual formats, from bright, pixilated video and grainy film stock to still photographs with words and slogans etched into their surface. The rough hew of these seemingly sewn together rag strips of footage give off the same cluttered impression as many of the spaces in Gummo, from the domestic hallways piled with clothes and bric-a-brac to the concrete verandas lined with cane lounge suites, kitchen chairs and their inhabitants. In its characters and locations, but especially through its aesthetic vocabulary, Gummo creates a vivid cinematic depiction of the lower and working class occupants of a seemingly overpopulated, under-educated, media saturated and morally corrupted contemporary America.

Trash Humpers offers a documentation of the same lived experience, but through both structure and form it also elicits the schizophrenic, non-narrative experience of user-generated amateur video content. Whilst Gummo is a more overtly stylized film, Trash Humpers is figurative in its depiction of the socio-cultural conditions with which it is concerned. It is set amongst the same filth and detritus – cluttered, neglected domestic spaces piled high with clothes and personal belongings, vacant buildings, freeway underpasses and the dirty, often useless natural spaces that fill the gaps between industrial and residential usage. Its characters share much of the same listlessness, hopelessness and crazed misanthropy as Korine’s first film, but their stories are told in an even more haphazard and disconnected manner. Stylistically Trash Humpers is even more disconnected from cinematic traditions – like a home-movie homage to Gummo, or at least to the same cultural milieu.

Some similarities can also be made to Korine’s second film Julien Donkey-Boy (1999). Both were shot on video, both utilise hand-held cinematography, and although Julien Donkey-Boy is more traditional both structurally and cinematically (it adheres for the most part to cinematographic and stylistic rules in terms of framing and editing), certain sections are reminiscent of the handheld, quasi-amateur or home-movie look of Trash Humpers. All three films also share a visual noisiness. Whilst this is achieved in Gummo through the use of varied visual media (film, video & photographic stills), in Julien Donkey-Boy and Trash Humpers video has been chosen purposefully, both as a means to shoot quickly, and as a way of achieving a visual aesthetic linked with notions of intimacy and authenticity, and through the traditional aesthetic hierarchy associated with artistic and technological discourses, as well as to amateurism.

Following on from Bourdieu’s notion of aesthetic judgments as acts of social positioning (1984), the aesthetics of visual (and video) quality also have a hierarchy imposed on them in terms of their cultural worth. Both Benjamin (1968) and Baudrillard (1994) have commented on the loss of value that exists as the result of reproduction, denoting the distance between an image and its degraded reproduction as a signifier of reduced cultural worth. This hierarchy summons questions of authenticity, validity, usefulness and relationship to truth. In a world where digital sheen and hi-definition video is quickly becoming democratised and all-pervasive, muddy, blurry or noisy video footage holds depleted cultural capital – viewers are less willing to accept or negotiate it because of the increasing ease with which high definition video can be captured and shared. As Tirrell points out “Degradation therefore only makes sense if one imposes a hierarchy in which an arbitrary original functions as the archetype to which other objects are expected to conform.” (2010: 148) If the visual quality of an image is not of a particular standard then it devalues a work’s perceived professionalism, and hence its worth. When any contemporary consumer can afford a high-resolution digital camera, the use of imperfect analog technology denotes either low-socio economic or socio-cultural capital, or an attempt to invest in the creative and aesthetic tenets of noise and visual degradation.

One of the primary places that we find ‘imperfect’ or visually degraded video footage is in viral videos and other amateur footage, including surveillance footage. Because it is everywhere, this footage also comes to us in news footage. Some of the most iconic images of news events in a post-digital world are those which first make their way to us not as professionally shot network captured footage, but as shaky, hand-held footage from amateur video. Pixelated, degraded digital footage is also readily available in illegal pirated copies of otherwise legitimate media, and in online streaming video. Adding another layer of removal from the hyper-crisp digital sheen in which we increasingly accept visual information is the hazy blur of analog video, which adds not only another layer of degradation and noise to images, but also a historical context – tying Korine’s film aesthetically to the last two decades of the last century. Trash Humpers revels in this analog blur – like an unearthed artifact, a long-lost, long-forgotten, perhaps never seen piece of personal detritus. Visual noise offers the images a further unsettling or ominous tone by obscuring them, blurring them, and shedding them of their definition. Korine himself has noted that “[t]here was a strange beauty in the analog. You almost have to squint to see things through the grain and the mist. There’s something sinister about it.” (Bilge 2009) There is no doubt that the low visual quality of the film offers the situations themselves a sense of uncleanliness, filth, depravity and desperation. But they also make sense in this visual context – more so than they might if represented in high-definition digital or film stock.

Another notable aesthetic result of Trash Humpers is the absence of modern or contemporary technology in the film. There are very few markers of temporal setting – no mobile phones or computers – no technology that operate as a way of locating the film specifically in time. At one point the trash humpers smash a television and a stereo, but they’re clearly disused pieces of personal technology – the kind of broken garage sale junk that could have been sitting disused for years or even decades. This is the kind of contextual liminality that also encroaches on much viral video content – stripped of traditional tropes of narrative or character, these videos become signifiers of everywhere-ness and everyone-ness, resulting in a vagueness of form mirroring that which it displays aesthetically. The quotidian sets and locations of YouTube content have been described as a result of “the conditions created by the available space and technical equipment” (Peters and Seir, 2009: 192-193), and Trash Humpers carries through with this randomness – this documentation of the everyday urban and suburban spaces in which we carry out our lives. But in addition to the parking lots, cheap hotel rooms and living spaces (albeit often cluttered and noticeably dilapidated ones), Korine has also shot Trash Humpers in disused and unused locations such as abandoned houses, empty lots, the sides of roads, freeway overpasses and other liminal urban spaces. As outsiders, evidenced in both their physicality and behavior, the trash humpers are natural occupants of these forgotten or unused locales. Their misanthropic behavior belongs to urban wasteland, and their haggard elderly appearance offers an odd but strangely fitting physicality.

Regardless of whether their masks are meant as diegetic or mimetic disguises, the trash humpers remain anonymous throughout the film, and although their accomplices, victims and bystanders are able to be identified, they’re never named (except for the cranially-conjoined twins Mac and Plak) and mostly articulated through a performative subjectivity – from the beat poet dressed as a French maid, to the mutton-chopped trumpet wielding bed smoker, to the ‘redneck’ racist joke tellers who appear towards the film’s conclusion. Peters and Seir discuss viral video’s potential to offer “the multiplication of possibilities for public self-thematization” (2009: 188), and in Trash Humpers we are never offered conclusive proof that the title characters are fictional. Aside from their character names, which are rarely used on-screen, and through the device of having all four trash humpers act intermittently as camera person, it could be asserted that the film is a documentation of this self-thematization, the same self-aware performativity that thrives through shared user-generated content and the various uses and ways of spreading it. Trash Humpers takes this community-construction to an anomalous end by situating itself within a small group of outsiders and offering up questions regarding the possible connectivity (or lack thereof) and community creation that could possibly take place with and through this content. The film also offers clues to but no conclusive depiction or explanation of a social context that exists outside of, in opposition to, and at times in gleeful refusal of normality.

The film has been compared to the reality stunt program Jackass (and the related series of spin-off films) in its portrayal of vandalism and other destructive and supposedly juvenile or anti-social antics, its reliance on skit-based humour, and its episodic structure. These comparisons are also supported by the film’s self-reflexive performativity, and the filmic structure that this performativity takes – skit-based situations where meaning is derived from a random assortment of violent, inane, provocative or debased behaviour. Upon its release Jackass became subject to a critique of its own distinctive performance of a particular brand of millennial and post-millennial white and predominantly middle-class masculinity, tethered to notions of physical transgression, abjection and parody. In his analysis, Brayton refers to Jackass as a form of burlesque (2007), and Sweeney refers to the cast of Jackass a representing “the ‘average,’ bored, white male, who, for lack of anything better to do, attempts to outdo friends through physical exertion and body humor” (2007: 138). In much the same way, the trash humpers in Korine’s film perform to and for each other. There is less competition or bravado involved, or even a point or purpose to these behaviours, but Trash Humpers takes the stunt and skit-based performativity of Jackass to an extreme by having random acts of depravity enacted by physically grotesque social outsiders, instead of socially empowered predominantly white, middle-class males. But Korine’s film carries a resistive or oppositional aesthetic similar to that which characterises the Jackass milieu, the early films of John Waters, and the films of the New York ‘No Wave’ underground. Like these films Trash Humpers features an insatiable and infectious celebration of and revelry in trash as an aesthetic but also a behavioural and operational model.

Trash provides not only a visual and aesthetic entry point into Trash Humpers, but an ideological one as well. The film is obsessed not only with the physical impact of a lifestyle revolving around junk – the trash humpers derive their essence from it quite literally – but also with the junk that we amass as consumers (and vicariously as collectors) of information. As Pye points out, it is possible to think of trash “as an integral factor in the construction of value systems” (2010: 4), and the ways in which we deal with the trash and clutter of our lives is integrally linked so socialization and status. The film offers a depiction of trash as used and disused (or misused), as no longer of use, and as tangible and aesthetic clutter. But this aesthetic clutter is also available, and prevalent, in the online world. In a cultural landscape where the stereotype of online citizens scrabbling to absorb the next viral video is becoming increasingly prevalent, where countless blogs constantly re-upload and re-share amateur video footage from far flung locations, we are endlessly inundated with cultural artifacts with little to no immediate purpose other than to titillate, amuse, distract or amaze. The supposed worthlessness of viral videos is highly debatable, and much of the writing around it concerns its various social uses and shifting cultural import. But the clichés of self-important, vacuous vlog rants and baby animal videos are still incredibly pervasive in user-generated online video content. We are increasingly inundated with information that can be described as trivial, and additionally we are increasingly driven by the pursuit of this triviality. Trash Humpers provides a visual and thematic metaphor for this state – an insatiable lust for trash – for cultural detritus – for that which supposedly has no redeeming use or value other than to waste our time and provide us with base pleasure. But the experience of viral video has wide sociological implications.

The YouTube phenomenon has been well documented as a tool for the democratisation of the media (Lee, 2007; Burgess & Green, 2008), but in addition to providing a voice for those who may have previously been marginalized, it enables anybody and everybody to voice their opinion or perspective on those whose videos go viral. A number of viral videos and the internet memes that surround them are based around content that makes meaning from the marginality of its subjects. Their eccentricity or oddness, or the unintentional humor of their actions becomes the source of a video’s infamy and popularity, but it also provides a hook for commentary. There is an anti-humanistic indifference and misanthropy that characterizes much of the commentary surrounding viral videos. Mimetic tags such as ‘epic fail’ proffer a culture of schadenfreude. Many viral videos become as popular as they do arguably because their subjects are unaware or unconcerned with the (supposedly unintentional) humour of their actions or behavior. Burgess notes that viral videos act less as texts or messages and more as “mediating mechanisms via which cultural practices are originated, adopted and (sometimes) retained within social networks” (Burgess 2008: 2) (emphasis in original). Many of these cultural practices are increasingly vicious - a culture where cruelty and humour at another’s expense are encouraged and rewarded. Like much of the brutal cultural commentary that abounds on social networking and user-generated video websites, Trash Humpers could be viewed as nasty. The malevolent view that its protagonists take towards their subjects – the supporting characters – some of whom they mistreat and others they murder, offers an exaggerated parallel to the participatory culture of misanthropy that abounds on websites such as YouTube.

In a culture where we are increasingly time poor and information rich, smaller portions of information make practical sense. Skit or situation-based videos are amongst the most common of viral videos, and the most common to go viral. The supposed triviality of much of this information – the almost certain probability that it will have no immediate bearing on our lives and is therefore relegated to the realm of trivial amusement, bring to mind Postman’s assertions of popular culture based around irrelevance and incoherence (1984). Much of Trash Humpers is offered within this framework. As characters completely detached from the standard humanistic traits that usually allow audiences to relate to them, and without any appeal to the audience to do so, the trash humpers are both irrelevant (to most audiences) in their depiction, as well as being incoherent in their actions. The trash humpers are neither relatable characters with believable motivations nor archetypes with whom we are automatically prompted to side with or against. Similarly, in viral videos – as with the amateur footage that features in the numerous television home video programs, a form of contextual shorthand is utilized by presenting recognizable situations. However, Korine’s film removes almost all of the recognizable or relatable elements of these plot set-ups. There is no narrative shorthand at work here. Situations are sutured and grafted onto one another randomly.

When considering viral video culture, as with Trash Humpers, we need to look to the potential for connectivity on a purely emotional and visceral level. The democratisation of authorship through online video blog culture and the proliferation of video-sharing websites such as YouTube is a new frontier for history, and the way in which we interpret and interact with it – be it personal, popular or history in the more official, linear sense. The desire to capture, catalog and make available the minutiae of one’s life to whomever is interested, taps into the notion of the very human desire of wanting to matter – leaving an imprint – something of value either for ourselves or for one another, either those we know or complete strangers (Wesch 2009). Korine’s desire for Trash Humpers to be viewed as a discarded home movie offers some kind of dialogue with this concept. There has to be some kind of motivation for the recording of even the most mundane moment – that it offers some worth, even if that worth is vain or self-centered in nature, and therefore of primary importance only to its creator. And similarly to viral videos – those five second or ten minute videos posted and reposted randomly online and devoured by up to millions of viewers – much of the activity of Trash Humpers is offered outside of context. We jump at random between scenes, with no exposition provided and often no sense of closure to a scene. Korine has offered that the film was at times edited blindfolded to enforce this sense of randomness. Without context we are also not able to know who this video is meant for, what purpose it is meant to serve, and as per YouTube culture why it has been pushed out of the realm of the private or personal, and into the public. Korine explained that he meant for the film to resemble a found object, and that he had contemplated not distributing the film by traditional means at all, but leaving it randomly to be found by whomever may happen upon it. A random search in a user-generated online environment such as YouTube can deliver similar results – decontextualised and often perplexing content that may be personal in nature, may be difficult to understand in terms of its purpose or intent, and may or may not ‘deliver’ entertainment, narrative, information or any other traditional textual end or usage.

The self-aware author has become the standard definition for video bloggers or vloggers, and vlogging itself is a very public, if at times very personal performance (Wesch 2009). Trash Humpers shares this self-aware performativity. In almost every scene the trash humpers are aware of the camera’s presence – they address it, react to it, and enact stylized and distinctive performative actions for it – dances, jokes, anecdotes, stunts and acts of vandalism. Korine has long been fascinated with vaudeville, and elements of vaudevillian humour and performance have been incorporated into much of his previous work, most notably Gummo. The vaudevillian penchant for brief performances, direct address, intensified emotional effect and an aim towards spectacle are traits all shared with YouTube content (Jenkins 2006). More than a contemporary take on vaudevillian performativity, YouTube videos pit amateur performers and everyday citizens as self-aware actor/director/producers, as is Korine with Trash Humpers. And similarly, an individual may conceptualise, shoot, edit and upload a video to the web in a matter of minutes. The film’s relatively condensed production time mimics this instantaneity, and through its content comments on the assumption that user-generated video content is irrelevant and worthless. But in having its creators (as improvisers all four trash humpers are responsible for the film’s content) act as the film’s focus, Trash Humpers aligns itself with the self-awareness of viral video. The film plays with this notion of vanity and self-importance by having its title characters perform for the camera for almost all of its running time.

Like particular types of viral video or documentary, the camera is another character in Trash Humpers, and given the appearance on-screen of only three trash humpers at a time, we are to believe that the camera is a diegetic presence in the world of the film and is being handled by each of the trash humpers at various points. But like any cultural repository of user (and usually amateur) generated content, YouTube culture operates on the notion that in order to share content, a user first requires networks with which to share, and which are open receivers of that content. Trash Humpers asks who would care about the exploits of four figures who live outside of society – and whether there in fact would ever be an audience for such a work. Thus, the film also vicariously raises the question of just how much user-generated online video content goes unseen. If the creator is dislocated from society – and there are a number of indicators that the trash humpers are very much social outsiders – then in order for the viral video mission to work there either needs to be an audience that is aware of them, or an audience of others like them to validate, consume and respond to this film. However, this is the user-generated ideal – a community of receptive sharing and engaged critique. The reality is an endless and ever increasing glut of unseen (and never seen) footage and a space rife with trolling and virtual abuse.

Online video content also often trades in moments of contextual liminality. Whilst many viral videos are edited and re-edited to create endless variations on a single theme, much user-generated video content instead offers extended footage that has not been edited – the moments in between those events, and around which we search for in online video content. These are the silent moments before and between dialogue – the lens flares, the pauses, the set-ups and the aftermaths. Trash Humpers specializes in these moments – in many respects it is a film made up almost exclusively of them. There is a sense of expectation that runs through the film. Any content that may connote traditional dramatic action comes in short decontextualised bursts – acts of vandalism, random encounters and situations that begin part way through or finish before a scene can be given closure. In this way Trash Humpers mimics the schizophrenic and dislocated nature of viral video.

But these random moments, and the randomness incorporated into them also provide opportunities for reflection, and for engagement with and revelry in various aspects of the sublime. By focusing on the sublime as inherently corporeal and material – as opposed to supernatural – we can perceive it as having a state that is of the natural world but which transcends its physicality through a uniqueness, foreignness or strangeness – by some tangible betrayal of rationality. Trash Humpers engages with the Kantian notion of the grotesque as an inversion of the “terrifying sublime” (Clewis 2009: 36) by providing a number of images that verge on the frighteningly surreal, taking the mundane and everyday into obscure or perverse situations but by adding an inherently antisocial bent. From the titular activities of all four trash humpers, who also engage in sexual acts with trees and other inanimate objects, to the various acts of pointless vandalism and the numerous misanthropic encounters with random supporting characters, Trash Humpers pushes our perception of human interaction into new territory by providing a number of situations that defy ordinary human interaction in increasingly antagonistic and incendiary ways.

Lyotard’s interpretation of Kant’s sublime (1994) as leading to an aporia in human reason is similarly supported by Korine’s freaks in Trash Humpers. There is a gap in logic to many of their actions – their reactions to and commentary on what is going on around them is often childlike and simplistic, as well as often brutal and uncompromisingly narcissistic or mean. They taunt, torture, befriend and berate those they encounter, from the young boy with whom they bond via the desecration of a doll with a hammer, to conjoined twins Mac and Plak, who cook pancakes and are then forced to eat them topped with dishwashing liquid. The trash humpers lack developmental maturity and therefore refuse critical reasoning. Hence the film itself betrays reason through their behaviour, through the lack of context surrounding their actions and activities, and as documentarians of their lived experience through their depiction of the world. Lyotard’s notion of the sublime as betraying reason also translates to the look and feel of the film – the grain and noise of the analog image leaves out information in the form of detail, leaving only an approximation. Similarly, the magnetic erasure of visual information via disruption to a video cassette’s tracking (which is almost a constant throughout the film) removes detail and negates completeness. Whilst Benjamin points out that the repeated duplication of an image robs it of its “aura” (1968: 221), the recording of an image via hazy analog technology also imparts its own aura. In the grain and noise of analog video can be found a separate aura – one that complicates (and makes complex) an image by adding layers of noise to it. This is more in line with Deleuze’s reasoning of a copy as harbouring “a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction” (1990: 262). But there is still obscurification and incompleteness at the heart of the visual product. It is here that Lyotard’s assertion of the sublime as betraying reasoning situates itself in Korine’s film. It is impossible to attain ultimate reason or aesthetic balance when an image is incomplete, somehow obscured or, in the instance of the film’s deliberately haphazard approach to editing, merely excluded.

Similarly, the depiction of the human form via this noisy, electrically interfered medium, “suggests a liminal space of transmission between the subject and the object” … “which remains uncapturable within a symbolic network” (Nilson 2010: 177). Here the sublime takes on a more abstract and symbolic definition, operating around discourses of technology and representation, and suggests an abstracted, almost phantasmic state of being for those whose image is captured and re(p)layed on video. The noise and blur of analog video here interferes with the representation of the human form – the trash humpers and those they encounter throughout the film become ciphers, subject to “a field of unstable bits of fragmented information, at once the disintegration of all recognizable forms and the threat of new kinds of monstrous configurations.” (Nilson 2010: 180) The trash humpers are monstrous in their actions and appearance, but are also formed as monstrous through the aesthetic of analog video. Instead of the images being captured, as they would be on film, they are instead recorded – tracked or registered, but only ever in approximation. Spielmann has labeled video as a “reflexive” medium, because it is composed of electronic signals that “circulate between recording and reproduction equipment” (2008: 1). But video’s modus operandi as quickly recorded and easily reproduced, transferred and shared translates to a circularity in its consumption and social status, especially when thinking about online video sharing. Viral video takes the reflexivity of video to another level by creating a feedback loop with the audience whereby the social reception and status of visual product becomes a malleable and transferable entity, capable of being reused and reinterpreted – never stable, but constantly in flux – reflexively moving back and forth like the electrical signals that create the experience of recording and reproduction.

Viral video transcends the everyday through relatability, recognition and the identification of shared human experience, or the willingness to relate to the depictions of the (often extraordinary) human experiences on display. Furthermore, through the sharing and spreading of user-generated content, viral videos allow for myriad meaning generation and cultural usage. Trash Humpers provides an extension of this connectivity, and a dialogue with it by offering situations that are relatable – they occur in a world that very closely resembles ours, and they offer a series of images and situations that run the gamut from mundane to surreal. But these situations exist outside of the ordinary. Through both their physicality and behaviour the film sets up its protagonists as fundamentally othered, removing them from the everyday and placing them in their own liminal filmic world. Just as YouTube offers videos of the everyday in contexts that remove it from such, Korine’s film similarly trades in both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Often operating in the spaces between these two states, it is here that Trash Humpers offers a warped commentary on the emotional immediacy and situational relatability of viral video – in the ambiguous moments that occur when the everyday transforms into the sublime.