We leave the film convinced there are no secrets still concealed in this family. We know that Robert's central sexual fantasy was to ride bareback on women with overdeveloped rumps; that Charles remained a virgin and recluse, rarely leaving his bedroom, his erotic imagination forever fixed on Bobby Driscoll in the 1960 film "Treasure Island"; that Max lived in monkish isolation, slept on a bed of nails and regularly passed a 30-foot cloth ribbon through his body; that their alcoholic father broke Robert's collarbone when he was a boy, and that the parents fought between themselves so fiercely that their faces were often covered with scratches and bruises. Photographs of the family circa 1950 find parents and five children posed in their Sunday best on a suburban lawn, looking as if they are awaiting the arrival of Diane Arbus.
Charles was the first artist in the family. He hand-drew comic books, and encouraged Robert and Max to draw, against their will at first. Handmade comics from the period survive and are seen in the film; Robert seems to have saved everything, and Charles did, too, although after his death by overdose, his mother threw out most of his work before Robert could rescue it. Max accumulates little, as befits a monk, but his paintings now draw high prices in galleries. Ironic that Robert and Max gained fame as artists while Charles remained in his room, reading stacks of paperback novels and filling notebooks with endless entries, some of them words, some only elaborate typographical patterns. In an extraordinary scene involving Robert, Charles and their mother, Beatrice, she sprawls almost flat on a sofa, but like her sons is funny, articulate, and very strange.
Art may have saved Crumb from madness, turning private neurosis into public validation. Zwigoff is unsparing in showing Crumb's more transgressive work; the camera follows panel by panel through comic books as Crumb narrates stories of incest, necrophilia, scatology, assault, mayhem and sexual couplings as unlikely as they are alarming. To call some of his images sexist, racist and depraved is putting it mildly.
Zwigoff is fair enough to provide an articulate objection to Crumb's work: Good sane Deirdre English, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, is not shocked as much as saddened and repelled by Crumb's work, which treats women as objects, commodities, victims, mindless (sometimes even headless) conveniences. In defense of Crumb, the art critic Hughes finds a vision of suffering and yearning, of barriers ignored, of inhibitions disregarded, of a psyche turning itself out naked upon the page. Certainly it is true that Crumb's men are treated no better than his women: all are disgusting creatures driven by animalistic lust and depraved need.
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