My son, who's much more attuned to the relationship between art and rebellion than I am, turned me onto this powerful film. Of course I remember Robert Crumb's artwork--especially "Mr. Natural"--from the late 60s and early 70s, but I knew absolutely nothing about his life. Watching this incredible documentary not only helps me better appreciate Crumb's message. It also makes me want to go back and re-examine as much of his oeuvres as I can get my hands on.



If there's one clear message from "Crumb," it's that R. Crumb is one of the most thorough-going outsiders American culture has ever produced. Time, place, upbringing, biology, and talent all contribute to his rebelliousness. The family in which he was raised gives new meaning to the term "dysfunctional": a speed-queen for a mother (diet pills), an aloof, judgmental father, two brothers who are incredibly broken (one a manic-depressive who commits suicide a year after the film was completed, another a jittery, genuinely creepy sexual predator). The time and place, the 60s in San Francisco, encouraged rebellion against the "incredibly boring" (as Crumb describes it) and spiritually dead white middle-class ethos of the 50s. And the talent for drawing, which Crumb shares with his two whacked-out brothers, and which has been inherited by Crumb's two children, gave him an outlet for expressing his rage at what he saw (and still sees) as the hypocrisy and shallowness of American culture.



But Crumb's status as an outsider goes way beyond his satiric savaging of a "Leave It to Beaver" 50s ethos on the one hand and the contemporary yuppie/Starbuck's one on the other. Crumb's art also rebels against some of the sacred cows of the liberal/progressive/bohemian set. His sexual art gestures at a rawness--and self-confessed hostility to women--that has such a shocking in-your-face honesty that it's often (mistakenly, in my view) rejected as misogynistic. Similarly, his artwork that focuses on the black experience in this country take the "Sambo" stereotypes to such an extreme, presumably under the presumption that racism is so engrained in his white readers that subtlety just won't work, that many reject them (again, mistakenly) as exemplifying the very racism Crumb is lampooning.



Finally, it's worth pointing out that Crumb's embrace of the outsider identity has an integrity not seen since, perhaps, Thoreau. As the film documents, Crumb has had several opportunities to go mainstream--doing the cover of "Rolling Stone," collaborating in Hollywoodish cinema animation, appearances on "Saturday Night Live," and so on--all of which would've brought him big bucks and respectability. But he turned them all down, well recognizing the cost of accepting them. Moreover, his ultimate act of rebellion against the American ethos was becoming an expatriot in the mid-90s. He and his family moved to the south of France, where they still live. It takes a great deal of courage, and an equal amount of integrity, to walk the talk. Crumb's done it all his life.