The film Gummo is intended to be a symbolic movie in which fantasy and reality intertwine. Initially, the film opens in a small town in Ohio after a tornado has swept through and destroyed it. Economically the small region is wrecked. Like the buildings around them, the social fabric that is holding the town together is coming apart at the seams. Whatever traditions and values this town has held in the past seem to no longer exist as the line between the sacred and the profane has been obscured beyond recognition. While it is difficult to know outright the attitudes and convictions of any social group, based on what the film shows there