Gummo or Where Is the State?

★★★★☆

Two young boys are riding their bicycles with air rifles in their hands, soon they set eyes on a cat, they stop their bicycles in front of the cat, and shoot the cat. This is how the movie starts, we are faced with an experimental film that some of its viewers are disgusted by, some of them celebrate and love, some of them get depressed after watching it. The movie is about a universe where there is no other way but nihilism, where people “seem” to be happy, such as the first youth, domestic neglect, loneliness, adolescence, the “innocence” of children, both good and bad, the normality and banality of stupidity, etc. In this paper, we will go through the psychological aspects of the movie, legal issues, what can be done in the field and in theory, what are the current situations.

According to the description of the movie, a tornado hit the town and we watch the state of the town after this tornado. According to some psychological schools, it can be said that the image of the tornado is a deception and a false target to make a situation that can be dealt with seem undecipherable or to put the responsibility for something that has already happened on an exteriority. Or, from a Jungian point of view, one could argue that the tornado is a manifestation of unconscious anger and ego inflation (hubris). In the opening of the film with the destruction of the city, what we actually see secretly is the creation of a kind of triadic relational town-life. From a structuralist point of view, the town creates the tornado because the families are irresponsible, the tornado created the irresponsible families because it was too powerful and destroyed the town, the town is in too bad shape to recover on its own, the tornado destroys whether it is big or not because there are no families. The absurdly funny moments that only happen below the cliff, but because there is life in it, and the life that happens on the usual, but very erodible and unpredictable borders of life, make you feel that life in the city is normal or exists a little bit, but this “thing” that exists is also very disturbing.

The children sell the dead cats to the butcher and fight with the other kids who shoot the cats because they undermine the market. Despite being outsiders, there is not a single child in the movie who is not happy in their small apartment, under the “bad innocence” of their parents. A little girl who is insulted by her older sisters who are thought to be escorts, a male figure who hires his own disabled daughter or wife as an escort, our protagonist being the sidekick of his heroine in her cat shooting adventures, and her father spending his life with his son in alcohol, chair grabbing competitions, loneliness and lack of conversation... The film shows us through the window of “innocence” that love exists in spite of all this. The fact that our protagonist's mother brings him favorite pasta while he is being washed by his mother in a filthy bathroom, perhaps outside of all moral norms, may also lead us to think about income and education injustice, alienation, or the human desire to be influenced by the ease of natural evil and shape one's life accordingly, or what can happen when we become subjects who cannot escape the influence of the lack of consciousness or the tornadoes of life.

Since the tornado can be interpreted as a violent impact of all the evils of the unconscious, we can also interpret the film as a critique of modernity. On the other hand, if we take the modern as an unfinished project, as Habermas says, rather than from a postmodern perspective, we can look at what we can do or what we have. First of all, we need to understand that Kori's world is a deliberately created evil, even if the furthest thing we think the characters are away from in the movie is play, the one thing they can't say they haven't done is play. The fun of lonely children will be familiar to you in the movie, or the meet-cute scene where kids who don't know each other mix play and bullying. Once the world is broken, the belief that it can be fixed again is very weakened. on the other hand, whenever an impact is made and social policy is implemented, the belief that it will not be implemented again is also weakened, so the belief that change can be undermined gradually loses its power. So, whatever happens, we can think about various legal issues based on the provisions of international child law that we have.

Important international child law conventions to which the United States is a party include the following;

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography – 2000

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict – 2000

One of them is related to sexual crimes and various crimes against children, the other one is about not allowing children to fight in wars. In the context of the first convention, the use of the disabled girl as a prostitute in the film is in direct violation of this convention.

On the other hand, there is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) - 1989, to which there are various opinions that the United States should be a party, but to which the United States is not currently a party.

This convention contains various provisions to promote children's rights to education, life, health, and various other issues, and it also establishes international government monitoring groups to check that governments are keeping their promises.

As federal law, there is the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which deals specifically with federal government funding for these issues.

Child Protection Services (CPS) / Social Services is a service that is available for direct intervention via telephone lines.

Parental Responsibility / Custody is the most important issue, holding families responsible, both by governments, field workers and the public.

Various youth law and rights activities can also be important for the psychological development of young people and their participation in social life.

As for the specificity of the film, in the region where the film is set, there are also caravans and room-sized houses for rent within the settlements, and in a sociological context, one can see an “orderly ghettoization”. The building itself can also be the culprit (irregular urbanization, unlit streets, lack of common use and passage areas, and the resulting social isolation), in this sense, landscaping is also important. One can even go back to Bourdaui's theory of cultural capital, since this is the only place where people who have not been given a certain heritage, knowledge, location, various tools that would be useful in society can affordably live, in fact the movie can be read as a summary of “lack of cultural capital”.

At the same time, the city or town destroyed by the tornado can be a symbolism as well as a reflection of an American reality. America experiences very difficult tornadoes every period, and this is getting more and more severe every year, this is the slowly emerging but invisible result of the climate crisis process, the weakness of the policies related to this process can also be seen as a kind of nihilism, in the movie this nihilism is not shown through large populations or politicians, it is shown through the townspeople and their maladjustment, it is shown in a way that is mixed into life and cannot be captured, which is quite disturbing for our eyes that are looking for understanding and comprehension.

From a left perspective, the source of this situation can be shown as a living example of the class aspect of civilization or the principle that in order for others to live, others must not live. On the other hand, according to cultural theory, these areas may be places where culture is either too weak or too high. Or, with the disappearance of individual morality, or of morality itself, this point could be a meeting point for people who want to be forgotten, or it could be a clipping that shows us the re-reflection of a human model that has been living in the unconscious of man since the beginning of history (as in Kafka's town doctor, where the doctor is dressed in a costume and people dance around him). In his film, Korin presents us with portraits of human beings that oscillate between the civilized and the uncivilized, that can be interpreted from various places, but not understood from anywhere. 

In Jungian psychology, the frog is a figure of in-betweenness and adaptation, both neurotic and active because it can live both on land and in water, but also because it does not know its place, because it can also live in the darkest swamps of the soul. In order for this frog to turn into a prince, he must either be thrown against the wall and smashed by the princess (according to the tale, and find the anger within people, and therefore their boundaries and character), or when he is stung by the scorpion and falls into the water, he must learn to be reborn from the place where he drowned, or he must know that the scorpion will walk into him, knowing that he will die in the fire, and not incorporate him into his frog birth, or he must respect his birth from the fire (the teaching of suffering and identity change). According to Girard's scapegoat theory, these people, if they don't catch the change from where I'm talking about, will turn themselves into scapegoats through the doctrine of the need for scapegoats, which has been explained for a very long time, and they will live lives that are at times vindictive, at times irrational, unlimited and based on “forgetting all the qualities of life”, and in a way, they will become good children, a “good” part of the evil that the state brands itself as good in the inertia of the state, even for the sake of disregarding themselves.

At its core, Gummo is a drama of humanity and miscommunication. It reflects some of the contradictions and tragedies inherent in the lack of government, culture and being human. If we look at the legal implications, our main characters are juveniles who have been pushed to the crime, but they will not be considered delinquent and can only be prosecuted through correctional policies. Since the boy they attacked, who was wearing women's clothes, is on his way to finding his own sexual identity, legal policies on gender and raising social awareness will also be in his favor. Enlightenment state reason will not be enough against the intensity of sado-masochistic and innocent-manipulative characters in the townspeople, as Habermas says, policies that can help the townspeople through the completed modern, as Habermas says, to be able to sustain their own lives, to provide better opportunities for their children, to repair their towns, to establish schools, clothing and food banks suitable for the townsfolk, to replace the tornado with a warm breeze. Not just liberal, but Keynesian economic models, or through town markets and barter, perhaps in a semi-marxist setting, townspeople can understand how to provide for themselves and each other, and take responsibility for helping each other, and live more easily, and get out of the false belief that life is something to be lived without tornadoes.

Especially when the cure comes at the hands of politics, through ideological belief on the cultural-civilizational level, it can prevent people from working, that is, from facing reality, whereas with the right authority, this problem can be solved when human relations are as important as politics, after all, people neither want to be completely alone nor completely not working. By teaching children about children's rights in schools, and by the authorities using their authority to not leave children alone, children can participate in production and society, become self-sufficient and self-reliant individuals, knowing that there are environments outside of their own insecure environment that they can trust, otherwise the cyclone, like any trauma that is not corrected, healed and brought to a conscious level, will show itself again through the door.

With the arrival of the tornado, Gummo shows one side of the unconscious, destructiveness, but when its second side is combined with consciousness, constructiveness is revealed, why it came and what it needs.

Kağan Elbasan