Garbageman: C.H.U.D. at 40

On the face of it, C.H.U.D. might look like a superficial protest against this schema – like a trite version of David and Goliath wherein the tenacity of a neighbourhood cop (and of his soup-chef accomplice) comes up against the cold-blooded “formulas” of the NRC. But in George’s attempt to photograph the city’s bums, there is, I think, an allegory of creating “poetry, spirituality in this dimension” – omnia in nihilo, “aesthetic dimension. . . in trash itself.”

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To be sure, Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984) is trash: schlocky, cheesy, excessive, grotesque, and sometimes silly. More importantly, it also seems to be obsessed with trash. After a brief title sequence – in which one of the eponymous (actually, pseudoeponymous) creatures drags Mrs. Bosch (Laure Mattos) through a steaming NYC manhole – the film kicks off with a lingering, intimate close-up on a ride-on street-sweeper ploughing through a sea of rubbish: beer cans, soft-drink cups, fast-food wrappers, newspapers, playbills, shopping bags, receipts, then one of Mrs. Bosch’s shoes. Eventually, the focus shifts from literal trash to metaphorical “trash”: the next shots aren’t of actual litter but of society’s “detritus” – the city’s homeless population, its bums. Taking their pictures (in fact, trying to retake their pictures) is George Cooper (John Heard) – a risqué fashion photographer who’s sick of being a fashion photographer because he’s figured out that that gig too is trash. As he puts it, ranting to his girlfriend and model, Lauren (Kim Greist):

I’m not upset because you’re posing nude, Lauren. Posing nude comes with the territory. I’m upset because these people are using your body and draping it with the carcass of some helpless little field mouse to sell some worthless perfume that probably smells like sheep shit. . . . They know it. They made it. They can smell. They know what’s in it, and they know what it takes to sell it.

But George’s attempt to transform himself from Terry Richardson into Jacob Riis is complicated by the fact that many of his original sitters have gone missing. Spurred to investigate by the disappearance of his wife, NYPD Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) teams up with A. J. “The Reverend” (Daniel Stern), who organises the local soup kitchen; together, they steal a bunch of George’s photographs, discover radioactivity in the city’s old sewers, demand a meeting with Wilson (George Martin) from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, then glimpse a confidential folder labelled “C.H.U.D.” “C.H.U.D.,” confesses Wilson, stands for “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”: both Mrs. Bosch and the missing bums have been gobbled up by a gang of subterranean radioactive mutants. But this is a misleading confession, a screen that conceals as much as it reveals. On further investigation, Captain Bosch and A. J. discover that “C.H.U.D.” actually stands for “Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal”: the mutants only exist in the first place because the U.S. government has been using the sewers as a dumping ground for its radioactive waste. At the film’s climax, Captain Bosch accuses Wilson personally:

You know, you’re nothing but the government garbage man. You take industrial waste – you take toxic sludge from every research project – and dump it under the streets of our city.

The ultimate revelation of C.H.U.D. is that it’s trash all the way up, that every layer of the cake is keeping itself in place by pushing waste onto those beneath. The bad news here is that society is built on garbage; the good news is that there’s plenty of garbage.

The important word in Captain Bosch’s accusation is “but”: “you’re nothing but the government garbageman.” Growing up, I longed to be a garbageman and reckoned it a worthwhile, fascinating, and respectable profession. My parents insisted that I attend university, but there I only trained to become another kind of garbageman (today, I’m a schoolteacher and B-Movie critic – which is to say, I still just grade and assess trash). For Captain Bosch, though, “garbageman” is an insult, someone who doesn’t just shift garbage but who is garbage. On the face of it, the equation here appears to be “you are what you dispose of” – Wilson is identified not with the final end-goal of his labour (nuclear energy) but with its undesired side effect (nuclear waste – and hence, all waste). But C.H.U.D. also intimates toward a subtler logic. Exactly midway through the theatrical cut, the following conversation unfolds:

Lauren: I’m pregnant. . . . Dr. Bremner called this afternoon. It’s official. I’m pregnant.

George: You’re gonna have a baby?

Lauren: Mm-hmm. That is one of the side effects of being pregnant.

Of course, Lauren is being facetious here: she knows full well that having a baby is the end-goal of being pregnant rather than one of its “side effects.” But Lauren and George haven’t yet made the decision to proceed with the pregnancy, and having a baby hasn’t yet been established as their end-goal (in fact, they’re about to start discussing the “alternative” – the possibility of an abortion). What Lauren’s humour plays on is the fact that “side effects” and “end-goals” are often inseparable – that the differences between the two are contingent and subjective, matters of particular circumstance and personal taste. Side effects, in other words, are really just effects. But how far can we take the joke? Are the catastrophes of nuclear waste and the triumphs of nuclear energy simply part and parcel of one another? Deep down, C.H.U.D. seems less obsessed with trash as such than with the Bataillean dream of “General Economy” – wherein wealth and waste, effect and side effect, are indistinguishable.1

For most of C.H.U.D., this dream is kept buried. After his rant against the perfume manufacturers, George is only cooled down – and only persuaded to continue taking pictures for them – when Lauren assures him: “It’s a goof. It’s a joke. It doesn’t matter. You don’t care about them. You’re doing this for me. We’re gonna bamboozle these guys for big bucks and go home. OK?” Lauren thus leads George to believe that he isn’t directly complicit in the perfume manufacturers’ garbage disposal operation and that he’s simply tricking them into believing that perfume sales are fundamentally different from garbage disposal (or, more accurately, Lauren thus leads George to believe that he’s simply enabling the perfume manufacturers to behave as though they don’t know that perfume sales are fundamentally different from garbage disposal). The rub is that it’s George who’s ultimately bamboozled here. In being led to believe that he’s tricking the perfume manufacturers, George himself is tricked into continuing to take the pictures for them. He knows full well that perfume sales are garbage disposal and that he’s entirely complicit in the operation; Lauren has simply enabled him to behave as though he doesn’t know. The whole scene is an orgy of disavowal: wealth and waste are clearly indistinguishable, but everyone is frantically making space for everyone else to act as if they’ve never noticed.

Even Central Park is a participant in this orgy. In C.H.U.D., NYC’s inhabitants know full well that the city is a polluted, litter-strewn, graffitied, crime-ridden wasteland (indeed, they are confronted daily with the evidence). But the presence of a luscious green space in the middle of Manhattan allows them to behave as though they don’t know – in particular, it allows George to take Lauren picnicking on the lawn and to fantasise about raising children with her (I’m tempted to add that by taking Lauren picnicking on the lawn, George allows Central Park to fantasise, in turn, about being a legitimate green space and not simply the “side effect” of the destruction of Seneca Village – though perhaps this’d be taking things too far). The pressing question is this: could George’s fantasy ever materialise? In the director’s cut, the film concludes with him and Lauren embracing – the heterosexual love story has conquered all, and the couple, it seems, will indeed go on to start that family. But so much is wrong with this conclusion that it feels not simply cheesy but downright ironic: there’s still nuclear waste under NYC, and either the mutants are still roaming around or else the NRC has succeeded in asphyxiating them by filling the sewers with gas – which is to say, it has also succeeded in asphyxiating all of the city’s subterranean homeless. Doubtless for this reason, the theatrical cut concludes instead with a gang of mutants arriving at a seedy diner, ready to unleash terror on the city – that is, with no happy ending in sight. In either cut, the implication – whether understood or explicit – is the same: for George, Lauren is simply a projection – a dream-image of a mother-to-be whose job is to enable him to behave as though he doesn’t know that it isn’t viable to start a family. It’s a role that Kim Greist would essentially reprise the following year in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).

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On the film’s release, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in the New York Times that “C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious theses about government or the environment.”2 Certainly, it doesn’t bother to repeat what in Astra Taylor’s Examined Life (2008) Slavoj Žižek describes as:

the idea that we . . . in our artificial technological environment, are alienated from immediate natural environments; that we should not forget that we humans are part of the living earth; that we should not forget that we are not abstract engineers, theorists who just exploit nature; that we are part of nature; that nature is our unfathomable dead ground.3

Perhaps this idea is conspicuously absent from C.H.U.D. Many reviews, including Van Gelder’s, call A. J. a “hippie” (indeed, he is poorly kempt, ends most of his sentences with “man,” and harbours a vague distrust of authority); but his speech – like everyone else’s in C.H.U.D. – is weirdly void of the usual eco-pieties. Either way, this film’s project, I think, is more urgent. Žižek continues:

I think that what we should do to confront properly the threat of ecological catastrophe is not all this New Age stuff to break out of this technological manipulative world and to found our roots in nature, but on the contrary to cut off even more these roots in nature. We need more alienation from our lifeworld, from our – as it were – spontaneous nature. We should become more artificial.

We should develop, I think, a much more terrifying new abstract materialism, a kind of mathematical universe where there is nothing, there are just formulas, technical forms, and so on, and the difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality in this dimension, to recreate if not beauty then aesthetic dimension . . . in trash itself. That’s the true love of the world. . . . The true ecologist loves [trash].4

What “universe” do this film’s characters think that they inhabit? A “mathematical universe where there is nothing”? This “abstract materialism” mightn’t feature directly in C.H.U.D., but it lurks, I think, in the wings – in the minds of those from whom Wilson takes his orders: the off-screen authorities for whom nuclear waste is simply the matter left over when the neutron-absorbing atoms become too many to continue to sustain a chain reaction, and for whom NYC’s old sewers are simply cavities of sufficient volume and sufficient distance from a sufficient proportion of the biosphere. On the face of it, C.H.U.D. might look like a superficial protest against this schema – like a trite version of David and Goliath wherein the tenacity of a neighbourhood cop (and of his soup-chef accomplice) comes up against the cold-blooded “formulas” of the NRC. But in George’s attempt to photograph the city’s bums, there is, I think, an allegory of creating “poetry, spirituality in this dimension” – omnia in nihilo, “aesthetic dimension. . . in trash itself.” And you don’t have to squint too hard to see in George’s camera a proxy for Cheek’s. C.H.U.D.’s obsession with trash, it seems, is nothing short of an attempt to reclaim God’s greater glory from garbage (A. J.’s nickname – “The Reverend” – is not completely ironic). Little wonder that Cheek’s only other directing credit is for a PBS documentary on the formation of the Christian church from the wreckage of Roman Judaea.

But George comes in for some serious criticism. Leaving Central Park, he and Lauren are accosted by a freelance reporter called Murphy (J. C. Quinn), who claims:

George Cooper, prominent fashion photographer. . . . suddenly just chucks it all and drops out of sight. Resurfaces six months later with an award-winning pictorial essay on derelicts who hang out in the sewers. . . . Look, everybody wants to be rich and famous, but given the choice, most people prefer to be rich. It’s really rare to find someone who prefers fame.

Murphy’s accusation is a damning one: George has been profiting off other people’s misfortune – only, his profit is in cultural rather than economic capital, cool rather than cash. Lauren rushes to his defence, insisting, “He just wanted to do something relevant.” But this only seems to prove the point. “Relevant!” scoffs Murphy, “That’s a bad word. It went off the OK word list years ago.” His suggestion is that even the couple’s diction has been calculated (or miscalculated) to be cool. Murphy doesn’t say it outright, but the tenor of his allegation is this: George might’ve switched to photographing “trash,” but he still remains the “prominent fashion photographer”; he isn’t driven by philanthropy but by trends; he isn’t interested in combating deprivation but in aestheticising it; he only makes poverty porn. George’s (and, by extension, Cheek’s) response to Murphy should have been something along the lines of, “Of course I’m still the prominent fashion photographer – fashion was ‘trash’ all along; of course I make poverty porn – porn, in my hands, is High Art (‘poetry, spirituality’).” Then again, George doesn’t have to respond at all: Cheek makes the point for him by having the mutants eat Murphy alive. It’s a wonderful moment – one of trash cinema’s trashiest takedowns of its naysayers.

If C.H.U.D. is remembered at all today, it’s usually remembered for those mutants. Indeed, they’ve appeared, or been referenced, in numerous films such as The Chilling (1989), Donnie Darko (2001), and Candy (2006); numerous television series such as The Simpsons, The Flash, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Clerks II, Castle, Archer, Futurama, Pushing Daisies, Outer Banks, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Rick and Morty, South Park, Angel, Frisky Dingo, Macgyver, Stan against Evil, and SpongeBob SquarePants; and numerous video games including Tony Hawk’s Underground, Far Cry 3, Messiah, Mortal Kombat 11, and Dangeresque. Online, they’ve even become a metaphor for a particularly cretinous species of right-wing troll. But C.H.U.D. is more substantial than its monstrous imagery. Its “relevance” – its pertinence to today’s ecology movements – lies in its radical, uninhibited, unsentimental, un-idealising, and perhaps completely insane “love of the world.”

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All images are screenshots from the film.