Foreword: This essay serves as my final exam for my religion and ethics in film course, where we had to pick a film, religious or irreligious in content, and analyze ethical issues or ethical content within the film, using two academic sources. I chose my analysis to concern Larry Clark's controversial directorial debut Kids pretty randomly, having the films of Larry Clark in my head for the entire months of January and February, and went along with it. I wasn't totally sure how I was going to go about doing it, but much to my surprise, I think the end result is a favorable one. To date, at 2,965 words and nine pages, this is my longest essay to date. Enjoy.
Since the 1960’s, American director/photographer Larry Clark
has been adamant about profiling the truth and the brutally honest in the world
of teenagers. Growing up in 1950’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, Clark was a suburbanite, and
grew up around a great deal of drug use and illicit, teenage debauchery that he
has worked to profile in his photographs and his films for years now. Clark
claimed that these kinds of activities were said to be segregated to more urban
settings and that things like drug use, alcoholism, theft, burglary, and other
dangerous vices were not viewed as suburban issues; everything was too clean
and perfect in suburban America during that time for that kind of thing to
occur. With that, Clark took photos of himself and his friends abusing drugs, eventually
creating two photography books including most of the photographs, and
eventually branched out to film in the mid-1990’s. Clark’s directorial debut, Kids, which made a splash at independent
film festivals for being one of the rawest films to be released that year,
focused on the lives of young teenagers that spent their days aimlessly roaming
the streets of New York, taking part in everyday activities for them, such as
smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, and finding others to spend time with. The
film was unlike any conventional film on teenagers and teenage behavior, and
caused a great deal of controversy due to its illicit nature and graphic
portrayal of adolescents. What many overlooked or failed to note was why these teenagers were behaving the
way they were and how, not just their environments, but their lack of stable
homelives and families played a part in their ethical decision making and
behavior. Larry Clark’s Kids shows
how the kids in this film and the actions they commit are byproducts of not
just their environment, but their unstable homelives and absent parents,
leaving their ethical and moral judgment to come from their peers instead of
their caregivers.
Kids concerns two teenage males named
Telly and Casper. Telly is sixteen and loves to take the virginity of young
girls, embracing the idea that the girls are “fresh” and ostensibly free of any
potential for sexually-transmitted diseases. His pal Casper is the same age and
a heavy-drinker, shoplifting alcohol from convenient stores and encouraging
Telly’s lust for deflowering virgins. The film juxtaposes the events of Telly
and Casper with the events of another group of girls, with one of whom, Jennie,
discovering she’s HIV positive after her first and only sexual encounter ever,
which was with Telly. The film’s loose plot revolves around Jennie searching
for Telly to prevent him from infecting other young girls, while Telly, Casper,
and several other teenagers of the same age spend their day engaging in drug
use, drinking, and conversing about the day’s events.
Daniel Mudie
Cunningham of The Film Journal
provides the perspective on Kids that
takes note of Clark’s efforts to “cut through the bullshit and tell the truth,”
as stated by Clark himself, and looks at the film from an American Dream
context involving the absence of parental forces in the lives of these
children. “The film presents teenage disaffection and recklessness as the product
of an environment where the adults generally leave them alone. The parents
pursue an empty American Dream, while the kids gravitate around its grim
flipside,” Cunningham states, following up with, “their [the adolescents’] everyday
lives are framed by the here and now, and not bound to the reality of labor, or
an abstract concept of the future” (Cunningham 3). To begin with, Cunningham
asserts that the disaffection the teenage characters in the film exhibit is a
direct result of adults leaving them alone. One extremely brief scene in the
film has Telly arrive at home to pick up some extra money from his mother, who
is busy attending to the needs of an infant in the midst of a cluttered,
disorganized home. Right there, in that brief scene, we can see where Telly’s
mother’s mind is at; she is worried about the wellbeing of the infant child,
organizing the house into something that resembles neatness, and the stack of
bills waiting for her on the table. She has little time to nanny or be cautious
of every move her son is making (he’s a grown, young man now, isn’t he?), hence
why he has been able to carry out this life of random sexual encounters for so
long. Alas, as Cunningham states, while Telly’s mother is pursuing the age-old
idea of hard work equates to financial and social success, as she slaves away
at what she’s expected to do at home and to keep things afloat, Telly and his
friends pursue their own dream in the way they’ve seen others their age do.
This method includes momentary gratification and sex as a means of long-sought
passion, which I’ll discuss later. The teenagers focus on what will make them
happy and content in an impulsive, present sense rather than looking to define
their self-worth through monetary compensation from labor, education, or any
sense of the future. In another scene that illustrates this cyclical concept of
remaining in the same position your entire life, Telly and Casper hang with
several other individuals, some as old as their late twenties and some as young
as eight and nine, all in the same room, smoking marijuana, drinking, and
vulgarly detailing past and present sexual encounters. Here, everyone is an
equal, and Telly and Casper see what they pragmatically have to look forward to
if they keep down this path. The two of them talk to a person at least ten
years their superior in their same position, and the kids even younger than
them see what life is about and learn the very essence of what is valued in
their immediate circle of friends. All of this comes from a lack of sound
parental forces that traditionally guide and steer the young away from such
hazardous circumstances in favor of a more grounded, disciplined life.
Cunningham
also states in his analysis of Kids
that, “Women's bodies act like a sexual bridge between Telly and Casper,
rendering their relationship somewhat homoerotic” (Cunningham 3). While Cunningham
has recognized the biggest element of Kids,
which is the actions of the film’s characters stemming from a lack of parental
guidance, he obscures the sex element by focusing on a much more subtle,
homoerotic feature of the film. The idea here is that sex is the bridge not
only between Telly and Casper, but between all of the teenagers in the film.
They’ve come to lust after sex not as a traditional means of expressing love,
but expressing some kind of deeper feeling than they’ve come to gain from the amount
of drugs and alcohol they’ve consumed. The fact is that those aforementioned
vices have effects that are temporary and ordinarily effect one’s self only.
With sex, it involves two consenting parties pleasuring and opening themselves
up to one another in the most vulnerable, human way of expression. We are
commonly taught not only in schools, but by our own parents, that sexual
intercourse is an action that should occur between you and the one you love
safely and romantically. However, these kids have likely not been thought that
idea, and learn about the joys and wonders of sex through firsthand experience
and their peers. With that, sex in Kids
adheres to the idea of momentary gratification in some way, but more along the
lines of gratification in the most unadulterated, impacting sense by taking two
parties at their most vulnerable exploring and satisfying one another
dramatically. The kids in this film see that kind of event as something worth
desiring and pursuing. One character, the only African-American character in
the film, tries to force himself onto two girls later in the film after
persistently trying to see them kiss one another, and, at the end of the film,
Casper rapes an unconscious Jennie upon waking up one morning. Above all in the
film in terms of focus is Telly, however, who deflowers virgins as a hobby,
looking to coerce that next young, impressionable girl into a romantic
encounter that will leave an indelible mark on her and a more momentary one on
him. Sex in Kids is unlike any other
kind of dramatized sex in conventional, more mainstream films about
adolescents. Sex here is the purest form of expression in the sense that it
gives these kids something to live for; a kind of connection and affection that
they were deprived of in a parental sense that they must seek amongst their
peers, who have gone on to show them the conventions of their environment. One
could call this motivation to have sex misguided and faulty, but understanding
the lack of traditional ethical and moral judgment these kids have come to know
puts their actions in a larger, more grandiose perspective that this kind of
gratification is what they need in order to make their existence feel more like
living. Had their parents spent time to really drive home the idea of sexual
intercourse and romanticism to them, perhaps the characters in the film would
have a more traditional idea on the practice. However, they must go with what
they have learned from peers and have self-taught themselves, continuing on
with Kids being a film where ethical
and moral dilemmas come from such unconventional places.
When it comes to these kids being in
poor situations, the question of “why don’t they find a way out?” always comes
into play. One of the kneejerk reactions to seeing people in poverty, usually
from those who are comfortable in their life situation, is that they lack
motivation and the mindset to be successful; if they were to just put their
nose to the grindstone and work, they too could be successful, is a common
thought to a less-privileged culture or group of people. While the characters
in Kids are not living in absolute
poverty, they are still burdened with less glamorous and financially-rich
opportunities than others due to their neighborhood’s location and the working
class/working poor community surrounded by them, a confine which is difficult
to break away from. An idea Aree Jampaklay discusses in her essay “Parental
Absence and School Children’s Enrollment” is that of personal “wealth
maximization,” which basically comes down to increasing one’s net income or
standard of living by actively seeking better jobs, better opportunities, or a
complete relocation. Jampaklay connects this idea and the often stagnant
progression of the poor’s situation with education opportunities for children
in poor communities, saying that kind of opportunity is so rare because of the
family’s and community’s fixation on “the here and the now.” Jampaklay states,
“The primary concern is wealth maximization. Resource-constraint arguments argue
that limited resources constrain parents’ abilities to pursue altruistic goals
for their children. Poor families cannot act on calculations for future returns
if doing so jeopardizes immediate family welfare” (Jampaklay 2 - 3). With this,
he argues that limited opportunities and limited resources keep people in this
kind of mediocre lifestyle that they’ve grown accustomed to for so long.
Because of this, personal wealth maximization is difficult, as what works now
for families in this kind of situation is the plan that is normally stuck to
and executed because of the fact that it provides relief for present
situations. There’s no time/thought to save for the future when there are
enough bad things occurring in present time to make one funnel all their money
into keeping themselves afloat in their current situation. Furthermore, when
finances become tight, Jampaklay states, a child’s education becomes secondary to
what that child can provide for the family in terms of an income, leading
education to be a forgone principle in favor of, again, immediate income for
the present. The idea at hand here is that due to the impulsive nature of these
kids and the breakneck, hustle and bustle exhibited by their parents to keep
their own lives and well-beings afloat, while it’s hard to predict the future
of these kids, we can safely assume that nothing will change for them in the
long-run. The ethics and ideology they’ve been thought has come entirely from
the streets, and their parents have been consumed by trying to keep their own
ships above water that any hope for instilling some kind of core values for
these kids to take away is hereby lost. Parental absence has a great deal of
effects on children, but one of the most apparent is the lack of a financial
safety-net and the absence or shortchanging of educational opportunities,
leading the kids to self-educate in any way they can.
Finally, it’s time to specify just
what kind of “ethics and morals” the kids have been learning and following,
presumably since childhood, but specifically in the present (what occurs in the
film at hand). Just using specific examples in the film, we can say, in a basic
sense, the idea of almost never entirely being yourself is one common
connective link throughout the whole film. For example, the teenagers are often
seen drinking or smoking marijuana, which causes a change in one’s attitude and
current mindset, along with providing a release for a person in difficult
times. Because of this, it’s safe to assume that the actions of these kids under
the influence wouldn’t be the same actions they’d commit if they were
completely sober. In addition, one telling scene of the ethics in the
community, along with being a showcase of peer conformity, comes late in the
film, when an interracial gay couple walks down the street, quietly passing the
teenagers, and doing their best not to cause a scene. Immediately, the
teenagers see this couple and respond by hurling racist, sexist, and homophobic
insults to the couple in front of their peers and everyone within earshot. In a
film in which scene after scene seems more graphic and sexually-explicit than
the next, this scene is particularly troubling because of the victims being
passive, uninvolved pedestrians simply going about their day and not looking
for any kind of trouble, yet being met with vile hatred and disrespect.
Returning to Cunningham’s ideas about Kids,
he fittingly describes Telly, Casper, and the other teenagers’ desires to
vocalize their hatred and racism because it rests outside their immediate
reference points/comfort zone. Cunningham surmises, “Whiteness comes to expose
itself as an anxious state of affairs; anxious in the way it must be forever
affirmed through racist means. The racism in Kids merges with homophobia and sexism because often their taunts
reveal so much about their general attitudes to difference. [….] Their behavior
therefore speaks volumes about the way whiteness enforces its privilege through
the systematic oppression of the Other. And the Other to dominant whiteness, as
shown in Kids, is not simply
blackness, but rather any identity category lying outside their limited frame
of reference” (Cunningham 4). Cunningham articulates that there is a constant
notion to affirm the lives these kids have led and the culture they’ve been
engulfed by, so much so that they take out their close-minded views on the
innocent to affirm their own standings in life. In my opinion, perhaps if the
kids had one of those famous parental talks about difference, acceptance, and
respect for peers, this kind of event wouldn’t have happened (how frequently do
you see this kind of public display of racism, especially with young children?)
This kind of resistance to difference stems from three specific things: the lack
of knowledge on certain subcultures and groups of people, the immediate
kneejerk reaction to the aforementioned subcultures, due to a lack of
understanding and a lack of knowledge that came with the absence of parental
roles, and the encouragement and mutual feelings shared by one’s peers, who
influence that kind of spontaneous behavior. Combine that with the degradation
of sexual intercourse as a way of desperately trying to achieve momentary
pleasure and satisfaction, and the ethical and moral standard for which these
kids are living in and abiding by has been set.
In
summation, Larry Clark’s Kids is
enough of a landmark film if you choose to examine it for its content and hail
it because it dares go where few films about adolescents have gone before. However,
it’s important to understand that Clark has a method to his madness in terms of
exploring the lives of these kids with the intensity and the level of graphic
and illicit behavior he does, and that writing off his film because it’s
graphic, vulgar, or grotesque is a shamefully shallow critique. Clark’s Kids is more than a film about the
ugliness that can exist amongst adolescents, but the effects that little to no
parental involvement can have on kids, leading them to seek out their peers as
role models for ethical and moral behavior, which, as we can see with this
film, can lead one down a path of destruction. When it comes to lacking in
sound parental forces, we see that not only do a few things change in a person,
but their entire world and sense of right and wrong is predicated on the
actions or behaviors of somebody else, leading to fundamental human ideas and
actions like sex and relationships being used as desperate opportunities to
connect and empathize. The film, along with being a trashy masterpiece of
sorts, is also an important one for understanding a culture that has long been
without a distinctive, audible voice.
Work Cited:
Cunningham, Daniel Mudie (2002). “Larry Clark: Trashing the
White American Dream.” The Film Journal (pages
1 – 4).
Jampaklay, Aree (2006). “Parental Absence and Children’s
School Enrollment.” Asian Population
Studies (pages 1 – 5).
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