Tropical Depression Movie Night
"Alone in the Woods: The Legend of Cambo," directed by Harmony Korine
For previous Tropical Depression Movie Night entries, see here and here. This week, here’s a short that I find arresting and ultimately delightful—at first I had mixed feelings, but then I embraced. Check it out below (strongly suggest watching before you read the post). Let me know what y’all think!
Harmony Korine made this eight-minute documentary film for Vice in 2015. It’s really something. I’d suggest watching before you read my little overview and thoughts!
Everything about this is dominated by Cambo, the redneck wild child who says he spent around two years living alone in the woods in Alabama during his troubled teenage years. He’s a survivalist with the gift of gab, a genuine American weirdo, barefoot and joyful, playfully paranoid, a deranged Peter Pan who likes to blow stuff up. As a performer (and he is, obviously, performing for the camera), he manages to live in the muddy space between unfiltered eccentricity and winking, in-on-the-joke delivery.
By way of background on how this came to be: At some point, Cambo became pals with the Alabama-born rapper Yelawolf. Rather than try to describe Yelawolf, I will just invite you to dive into a YouTube rabbit hole on him if you’re interested. There’s a lot going on there. Years back, Cambo happened to be dating Yelawolf’s sister. When Yelawolf first met him, Cambo was shirtless, shoeless, and filthy. The rapper asked him to meet him for lunch and Cambo showed up shirtless and shoeless and filthy as ever, plus he had a live possum on his shoulder. The two became close. (Slumerican is the name of Yelawolf’s record label. Cambo has it tattooed on his arm. Just below a Confederate flag tattoo—Cambo is a genuine original, but at least as a youngster he was, alas, unoriginal at times.) Yelawolf then introduced Cambo to Korine, presumably in part because Cambo seems like a character you might find in a Harmony Korine movie.
Korine got his big break writing Kids and later made wild party-shlock romps like Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum. As a stylist, he took his aesthetic in a very loud and busy direction. At his best, his neon maximalism sings—I really dug The Beach Bum. But he also has real instincts for a quieter, slower filmmaking. From the beginning, there was a remarkable tenderness in his attention, a gift he sometimes seems to have deliberately suppressed. When I was a teenager, I happened to take a summer workshop with Korine’s former high school teacher in Nashville, who showed us an early student film of his. It was as strange and brutal as his later work, but there was more breathing room in its filmic language—it was less thirsty for attention, more attuned to quiet notes, more lyrical in its humor and grace (there’s not a good way to see it online, unfortunately).
My tendency to reach for Terrance Mallick comparisons is overdetermined, but it does seem relevant here in Korine’s depiction of Cambo. For all of his bravado, Cambo seems to live a life full of quiet and the slow passing of time. He is comfortable with solitude. Sometimes he is hollering or shooting a gun; sometimes there is nothing much going on. Korine’s imagery and pace make room for the expanse of the woods. There is a rednecks-say-the-darndest-things fetishism here, for sure, but it does feel loving, even sweet. Cambo is a true weirdo and a juvenile goofball, but his affection for nature and adventure is genuine and contagious, and Korine’s style manages to brighten the outlines of that affection. As a portrait, the strokes are right. It is very funny. It is occasionally beautiful.
It also feels fresh. That’s a vague thing to say, but I know what I mean. There is nothing all that original about the material, but Cambo’s charm and oddity feel so one-of-a-kind that it tickles that feeling of the new that is one of my favorite experiences as a viewer.1
Part of that freshness, I suspect, has to do with the presentation as a documentary. There is a vividness to Cambo’s tale that wouldn’t fly in quite the same way as Korine’s forays into experimental fiction. I think the details presented here are probably mostly true, and what you are seeing here with Cambo is what you get in real life with Cambo. That said, Korine is a trickster and a bullshitter. Seems like Cambo is, too. Are all these words just Cambo talking? Maybe! But sometimes they sound like something Korine might write. That said, when I found other clips of Cambo that came later, his language sounds about the same. So I don’t know, maybe Korine found a kindred spirit and just turned on the camera and let Cambo talk.
Cambo eventually got a reality television show, “Going Cambo,” on the Roku channel, which aired for a couple seasons—he takes mostly urban guests into the Alabama woods to teach them his ways and hilarity ensures. I mention that because there is a way in which his presentation in the Vice documentary can feel like a self-conscious audition for monetizing his vibe. The documentary is short in a way that feels perfect but also gives Korine some slack. There might be some questions about the logistics of the tale we’re told and how the stuff we’re seeing came together, but the film reaches a sudden, delirious climax before we get too far into the particulars. Meantime, I’m just a city boy, but I maybe have questions about Cambo’s technique for cleaning catfish? They got the money shot, though.
But then I decided: Whatever. For one thing, it’s right there in the title, “The Legend of Cambo.” Cambo is, among other things, a genius at a very American sort of self-invention and mythmaking. He is a carnival barker for his own persona, and bless him for that. Korine can be heavy-handed, but he has a knack for twisting the knife on these questions. Is this a languid documentary portrait or a sizzle reel for someone hoping to become a redneck influencer? Maybe both!
Moreover, if you spend time with Cambo’s forays into social media and other videos online, you become more and more convinced that even if he’s aware of a bit, there is just no daylight between that bit and his authentic self, whatever that might mean. Cambo really is Cambo. He really does live this life, the life of Cambo. His manner and mode are Cambo. He is trudging barefoot through the swamp; he is climbing the bluffs; he is fooling with snakes; he is getting infections; he is hiding away in caves; he is dressing his kills in his own way; he is telling you that his way is the best way. He is at home in the woods and knows the crannies and critters. His stories are true, or if they’re not completely true, they are truly the stories that Cambo tells. He’s now moved to Pensacola. One of the videos online shows him being wheeled to the emergency room after he was bitten in the leg wrestling a gator.
Grace showed this film to her little brother, a fishing captain in the Florida backwaters who wears shirts and shoes in public but has some Cambo-adjacent proclivities. He texted: “The dude is dead ass serious is the funniest part. You really can’t make shit up like that lol.” He texted: “that shit is golden lmaoooo.” Good review, I concur.
Different tone, but there are perhaps some seeds here for The Beach Bum and the character Moondog.