The Chumscrubber

—Overview
—Spiritual Connections

The idyllic suburb of Hillside is decorated with banners heralding “Carefree living.� The sad thing is that it is true. Here is a suburb in which everyone is so self-absorbed that they don’t care about anything or anyone else.

The Chumscrubber is something of a light-hearted, noirish look at this suburban life. It walks the edge between comedy and tragedy. Certainly the characters and events are laughable, but they also have a solid bite.

The film is primarily divided into a world of adults and a world of children (teens actually). The adults are all portrayed in a somewhat cartoonish manner. They all have one dimension – a mother selling herbal dietary supplements, another mother planning her perfect wedding, a father who is a psychiatrist who writes popular self-help books using his son as illustrations. The young people are more realistically portrayed, but they are just as self-centered as their parents. The various family stories of all the adults and teens interlock in the manner of Magnolia.

The two worlds are connected, but separate; they are similar, yet different. In the beginning of the movie we see this complementary and disparate nature when we learn that the teens all get “feel good� pills from Troy, and then we see Mrs. Stiffle packaging and selling her Veggie Force supplements to boost energy and provide “a new life system.� Everyone is looking for a way to feel better. They never consider that actually addressing life could bring them happiness; instead they look for the magic pill, be it drugs, supplements, fame, power, money, or any of the other ways we try to compensate for our lack of happiness.

The plot begins with Dean going over to visit his best friend Troy (the school’s drug dealer). At Troy’s house his mother is hosting a party. When Dean gets to Troy’s room, he discovers that Troy has hung himself. He leaves without telling anyone because he doesn’t think anyone would care. (This is, after all, the community of carefree living.)

Soon some of those who helped Troy dispense all the feel good pills, come to Dean to force him to retrieve the drugs. For leverage they kidnap Dean’s brother Charley. Well, they try, and then end up not with Dean’s brother, but another Charley. This is a pretty lightweight kidnapping. It’s more like just letting a younger kid hang out with them. But as time goes on, the kidnapping slowly takes on a darker feel.

At various times, the teens all mention to adults that there is a kidnapping going on. But all the adults treat it as a joke. They can’t allow their lives to be sidetracked by anything so mundane. Over and over, the adults fail to communicate with the young people. The teens, by the same measure, fail to communicate by trusting in their parents to ignore them.

Although this film can be seen as a commentary on the need for adults and youth to be able to communicate, it is really more of an indictment of the self-centered world in which we live. Maybe life isn’t meant to be “carefree.� Maybe life is meant for us to care about others.

Back in the 60s Melvina Reynolds wrote the song “Little Boxes� (popularized by Pete Seeger) about suburbia. The song made the point that it wasn’t just the boxes (houses) made of “ticky tacky�. One verse went:

And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there's doctors and there's lawyers, and there's business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

To be sure, The Chumscrubber exaggerates the situation. But we know when we watch the exaggeration, that there is a truth underlying it all. As long as we allow ourselves and our communities to be self-absorbed, we may think we are on our way to happiness, but in reality we are merely fooling ourselves with false ideas of happiness. Only when we finally come into honest relationships with others (as eventually happens between Dean and Troy’s mother – both of whom are seeking to avoid grief) that we can find real happiness.

Oh yeah, the title. All through the film, the youth are reading comics or playing video games featuring a character called “The Chumscrubber�. This is a post-apocalyptic zombie-like character who wakes up one day to discover his head has come off his body. He travels around carrying his head, fighting the other monsters. He says of his existence, “I’m not dead, but what kind of life is this.� Indeed. The film calls us to consider if we are in effect zombies wandering the world fighting off other demons, but not really living any kind of real life.

—Overview
—Spiritual Connections