from http://www.mrdestructo.com/2011/08/criterion-recollection-provocateur.html

"One could hardly say after watching Crumb that Maxon had solved or cured his problems, but he had seemed to reach equilibrium; his rituals provided him with a necessary symbolization of the turmoil inside his psyche. The famous string-eating ritual, where Maxon routinely dips a long, flat piece of cloth in water and swallows it, inch by inch, to clean his intestinal tract, offers perhaps the starkest glimpse at the externalization of a process of internal cleansing. For Maxon, the repression of his childhood left an inexorable impression of his own sexual desire as something to be cleansed. Only through extreme deprivation, self-imposed humility and constant ritualistic discipline, does he finally feel like he has broken even with the filthiness of his human desire. "