One of Larry Clark’s Kids
There was a canon of the lowest common denominator when I was in high school.
This was stuff that you could count on being in most people’s collections most of the time. It varied in quality, but it was assumed everyone could tolerate it — or at least did. It was great for parties or when someone new gave you a ride home.
Eminem’s Marshall Mathers record was in it. Sublime was definitely a key part of it. Some classic rock would probably fit the bill.
Larry Clark’s Kids was part of the canon. It was ubiquitous and made up the cultural repertoire and atmosphere of the time. Sometimes this was literal: I entered more than one teenage bedroom that had it muted and playing on loop (of course it would have to be periodically rewound because this was the VHS era).
The film was part of a vocabulary we all knew. A number of scenes were iconic, including the famed Central Park fistfight that ends with a man being brutally beaten with a skateboard.
Everyone knew that scene. I remember once a rollerblader at whatever skate spot we were at trying to recruit me to jump in during an upcoming fight. His vision was that at the end I would hit his opponent across the face with my skateboard “just like in that movie” (I didn’t, and the two fought in the way people fight in real life — mostly pushing and yelling).
I’m convinced the scene’s lingering presence in our collective unconscious saved me from getting jumped at least once when I was leaving an underground parking garage that I’d been skating by myself (“Put that skateboard down! I don’t want that hit across my face,” one of the group had yelled. I responded by subtly brandishing it, and the situation ended the way most fights do — they walked away yelling, and I skated off while trying to maintain my dignity).
When I was home last month, it occurred to me how weird it was that the film had held that place in our lives. I ended up rewatching it for the first time in probably twenty years.
Kids is an ugly film, both in its themes and cinematography. There isn’t much plot — it follows a group of teenagers as they have sex, fight, and do drugs. To the extent that there is a narrative, it centers on Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) trying to locate Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), who she finds out had given her HIV after manipulating her into having sex the previous summer. Meanwhile, he tracks down virgins to sleep with and drinks forties with his buddy Casper (Justin Pierce).
In terms of cinematography, the film’s pseudo-documentary format feels creepy and unpleasant. Shots are held for long periods. The sex is not just unglamorous but often hideous. As virtually every commentator has noted, the entire film has a troubling voyeuristic undertone.
Kids isn’t Van Wilder or American Pie — two of the other party movies of the time. Even if those movies have the same troubling undertones, they at least present a facade of lightness and humor. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever having found Kids funny or particularly fun to watch.
Yet, everyone I knew seemed to have fun watching it — or at least voluntarily chose to watch this film about HIV, rape, and nitrous. How was that the case?
On a first pass, it’s easy to think of potential explanations: it provided access to 90s skateboarding culture, it fed into an exoticization of the big city, it yielded the titillation of watching your peers have sex and do drugs, etc. Keep in mind this was pre-Internet after all.
But it went beyond that.
During that period, I remember my older sister (who for a variety of reasons was from a very different socio-cultural world) bringing up one of the film’s leads, Casper, to me. “Yeah, he’s cool,” I’d said ironically. She’d just looked at me uncomprehendingly. The irony was lost. She seemed a little weirded out by me.
Of course the irony was lost, and of course she was weirded out — Casper is a rapist and morally bankrupt creep. Who the hell would he think he was cool?
A lot of people I knew. For more than a few, the film’s appeal went beyond voyeurism to identification if not borderline veneration of the film’s protagonists.
As many have noted, the film fails as sociology. I wasn’t surprised to find out that many of the street kids they’d cast as actors later came forward to say that they felt exploited by the film, that it hadn’t accurately reflected their lives, that it didn’t capture the emotional depth of their relationships, and that many were even virgins. A lot of the female leads initially didn’t want to be in the film.
Everything about Kids is clearly designed to convince you that it’s the real, unvarnished, and painful truth, but even the least discerning viewer will smell bullshit.
The main objection I remember hearing back then was that the level of the kids’ drinking seemed implausible. That is probably true, but ultimately, I think that critique stood in for a deeper skepticism.
The film’s preoccupation with the kids’ sleaziness eclipses any deeper insight it could have provided. The characters have no inner worlds, no personal histories, no social histories, no social context, and no shade of emotional depth or nuance (seen from this perspective, the scene where Telly gives change to a disabled beggar is a rare and interesting exception).
That made for a missed opportunity: if anything, Kids could have been more transgressive and confrontational if it hadn’t gone for the cheap thrills. Children can be dark and complex beings in a way that the surface-level shock of forties and blunts can’t begin to touch.
Again, it’s not surprising that in my day (or any day), most teenagers weren’t clamoring for greater emotional depth in the films they watched.
Instead, on my recent viewing, what struck me as surprising — but in retrospect shouldn’t have — was how morally conservative the film is.
As Henry Giroux rightly pointed out at the time, Kids is hobbled by its heavy-handed morality. The male protagonists are presented as moral monsters; the women are depicted as victims who pay the ultimate price for having been unchaste or otherwise reckless. Social problems are presented as matters of personal failing.
Further, as bell hooks pointed out in an interview with the Media Education Foundation in 1997, while the film presents the characters’ casual homophobia and misogyny in terms that are supposed to be bold and brave, the film often ends up unwittingly replicating those same troubling racial and gender stereotypes.
Now, whether you’re willing to buy people like Giroux’s or hooks’s reading of the film or not, I have the firm suspicion that from a viewer’s standpoint, the reason it was popular in my high school milieu was because its underlying conservatism, homophobia, and racism resonated with what people at least intuited if not explicitly thought to be right.
Clearly, the various forms of cruelty were the point: this is true both cinematically and thematically. It was an ugly, mean, and willfully obtuse film, and that is what people liked about it.
This point might be analogous to Clark’s own seemingly ambiguous response to the adolescent sexuality and violence he depicts. I’m not the first to get the impression that Clark exaggerates these things because he takes pleasure in being exposed to them.
In this way, the film succeeds as sociology despite itself. Its attempt at “making a statement” doesn’t get off the ground, but what it unwittingly revealed about at least some viewers is illuminating.
The question is what did it reveal? Even if the cruelty was the point, one wonders what was going on under the hood. Was it a matter of infinite moral regress?
I’m not quite sure, but my sense is a lot was going on. Part of the dynamic was likely the justification of the film’s celebration of cruelty that a reactionary ideology could provide (“they deserved it!”). I suspect another part of it was the strange sort of push-pull between the pleasure of seeing the characters engage in some version of one’s own dark and hedonistic desires at the same time that the guilt of those desires triggers one to condemn them. I think a similar dynamic sometimes happens when academically underperforming teenagers oddly express a passionate belief in the importance of academic success.
That’s just a start — doubtless more was at work.
I wish I could remember what I thought of all of this as it was happening. I do remember feeling that the film had correctly diagnosed something about some type of psychic crisis, but I don’t know if I could have articulated what it was all about. Clearly, I still can’t.
One wonders how much of the dynamics described above were grounded in a fairly universal drive to cruelty and how much of that was more specific to a certain thread of American culture (or perhaps the one cloaked in the other). Is what I observed with Kids the same impulse that twenty years later curdled into the culture wars of today?
Perhaps seen from that perspective, Larry Clark’s Tulsa might be the more telling of the two works. Tulsa traffics in the same basic territory as Kidswhile documenting Clark’s own adolescent methamphetamine milieu.
Tulsa suffers from many of the same exploitative schlock limitations as Kids, but its use of classic American iconography (guns, flags, etc.) arguably might put it more on the mark. Doubtless Clark had imagined Tulsa as a corrective to stifling 1950s conformity, or whatever, but maybe it was actually the best distillation of what that conformity really meant. Is this yet another case of Clark succeeding despite himself?
In the end, as with everything in Kids, perhaps Casper’s immortal final line rings truer than it should: