There are few directors working today that polarize viewers the way Harmony Korine does. He’s either an honest artist or an exploitive prick. Detractors argue with the same grit and fire as the supporters. While arguing over the beautifully-filmed, cat-killing Gummo or the schizophrenic, Warner Herzog-starring Julien Donkey-Boy, you start to get the sense that Korine is merely a rabble-rouser, meant to boil your blood and start a fight. With his latest effort, signs of growth permeate the Mister Lonely material.
"I basically started thinking in terms of images that really have nothing to do with anything. Just simple images. I started dreaming about nuns flying, falling out of airplanes and praying the whole way down and surviving. Then I started to fixate upon specific images and characters. One of them was the idea of a Michael Jackson impersonator walking the streets of Paris. I had these different images although they really didn’t have anything to do with one another. But I knew that there was something in there I was trying to get out, a unified idea, but I wasn’t sure how to say it,” Korine told DC’s. “It wasn’t my intention to make a movie about Madonna or Marilyn Monroe or Michael Jackson. I wanted to make a movie about the obsessive nature of people who impersonate others, living as icons in a communal setting. I wasn’t so much interested in the people they were impersonating, but more the character underneath. What type of human being looks at a celebrity icon and not only admires them like fans, but takes it a step further? For them, it’s not enough to just enjoy the celebrities they admire. They take a decision: ‘I am going to live through that person. I am going to take that character’s identity for myself and somehow sustain a living by pretending to be that person at different functions, like retirement homes or car shows.’”
Korine wrote the script with his brother Avi, and that might just be what Korine needs to break out of his instigating filmmaking. From those simple quotes, it seems that Korine is more focused on creating and exploring his themes rather than creating shock-value cinema. There is no doubt that Korine is a gifted filmmaker; it’s just a matter of using his power for good or evil.
“Because I spent time as a child in a commune, I always thought it would be really nice to do a movie about communal living. I didn’t think it would make much sense if it was just a Michael Jackson impersonator living on a hippie commune. But what if the whole commune was inhabited by a group of impersonators that wanted to start their own society, a place without judgment? Kind of like a working commune, like a traditional 70s hippie communal living experience, except transformed into a place for impersonators. I wanted to create an atmosphere where watching a Buckwheat impersonator ride a large pig would seem like a normal and everyday thing,” Korine continued.
…Or maybe the guy is drugged-out nuts. Either way, here are two surreal scenes from Mister Lonely for you to judge for yourself.
