Kids Will Be Kids
By Jim Carroll
It seems a grand mistake, almost aesthetically shameful, to play the game of deciphering moral intent in Kids, the
controversial film by renegade photographer Larry Clark, which will have finally reached all its intended theatres by mid -
September. The movie seems to exist without ulterior motive -- partly due to its documentary style, partly because of the
unique vision shared by Clark and his collaborator, Harmony Korine. "I always wanted to make the teenage movie that I felt
America never had," Clark has said. "The great American teenage movie, like the 'great American novel.'"
Kids indeed is masterful. The irony is that, for political reasons, the movie will probably have been interpreted by every
pundit and hack from New Hampshire to the Senate floor, Disney fled the project early because of the probability of an
NC - 17 rating -- the executives headed downstream in a flotilla of birch - bark canoes. Its subsidiary Miramax, the film's owner,
stuck by it through the heat, but still found some margin of distance by creating a separate company for its distribution. And if
Robert Dole found True Romance disturbing, he would do well to have medical technicians standing by for Kids. After all,
kids are our future.
Of course, that's the problem. It's not the sex scenes, or the drugs, or even the single scene of
ultra - violence [though it is one of the most shocking displays of brutality I've ever witnessed
onscreen]; it is the age of the performers that's got everyone so wigged out. The characters [all
played by nonprofessionals] range in age from about 10 to 16. At the press conference after the
film's debut at Cannes, reporters blistered the director and writer for exploitation, objectification
[a horrid Sin!] and gross exaggeration.
The film deals with the subculture of skateboarders who hang around New York City's
Washington Square Park by day and party by night, either at a disco or the apartment of anyone
whose parents happen to be out of town. They eschew hard drugs, opting for cigar - sized joints and "forties" of malt liquor.
These are real kids without any traces of Hollywood's nooky standards. They are horny and vital and have no need for the
kink and psychological paraphernalia of adult intimacy. No need for $500 worth of lace - shrouded fantasy from Victoria's
Secret, no need for acrobatics in whirlpools shaped like champagne glasses. Which is not to say there is no quirkiness among
the characters' sexual wants. The entire appetite of Telly, the male lead, is defined by a very devious fixation.
But how exaggerated are these kids? Passing the other day through Washington Square Park, where much of the film takes
place, I saw four drug buys go down -- and I was in a hurry. Teen promiscuity has become a cottage industry for talk shows
such as Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones et al., where 15 - year - old girls compete to be the one who has humped the most guys since
age 12.
The furor over the age of the kids in the film, though, provokes a mystifying question that recurs from one generation to the
next. At what point, and by what experience, do we adults find ourselves so insulated by the artifice and purblind
world - weariness of society that we not only lose the vision and freedom of youth -- and, admittedly, its recklessness and
misjudgments -- but, further, find ourselves so fearful of youth and its particular subcultures? What is the threshold of this
change? It seems to seize individuals at various ages and to widely different extents, but very few do not yield to it in one
form or another. Kafka saw it as a shell, which, in The Metamorphosis, overcame and transformed Gregor in a single night.
In The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy describes how youth's radiance is weakened by quotidian repetitions, ossifying into a
husk, repelling tolerance of anything new. The shell is strong in these times, hardened by the creature comforts of technology.
We drive to work within the still confines of our cars. We work inside high - rises of black glass, which literally absorb
sunlight. We relax later in front of tubes that slyly suck the life source from us as they harden the husk.
Nothing penetrates this encasement like the exotic, erotic energy of youth. It is otherworldly to those confined, and its threat
is massive. This is the power behind Kids, and the fear it evokes. No other film in the history of cinema is more honest to the
pure energy of youth culture.
Let's face it: Youth really hasn't changed that much since the mid - '60s and the so - called counterculture revolution. That
means the majority of the fearful shell - encased out there had a youth that was not all that different in its decadence than that
portrayed in Kids. This being the case, from one generation to the next, why is it so difficult for so many to realize that 95
percent of today's kids [including the cast of the film] will, sometime over the next decade, recede deeply within their own
shells? Some will be adorned with blue collars, others white -- but they'll join the citizen masses, cut off from their own
radiance.
One couldn't do better than Larry Clark as an example of a man without a shell, whose radiance of vision
at 52 years of age has not diminished. Perhaps he has never truly been socialized: In part because of his
obsession as an artist, in part because of his literally outlaw persona. He served three years in prison for
shooting someone in a rather heated dispute back in the mid '70s in Tulsa.
But it is the screenwriter Korine, at 20 still a kid himself, who interests me more. I began hearing about
him two years ago. People on the downtown streets started approaching me and telling me about this kid -- apparently a fan
of my work -- who was going around the art scene telling folks that I attended his birth, circa 1974, in some eucalyptus grove
in the Northern Californian town of Bolinas. The fact is, I was indeed living at that time in BoImas, a heavy - duty hippie enclave
consisting of a mesa, a bar, a laundromat and an agate - strewn beach on the Pacific. According to this kid's own lore, not
only had I attended this birth al fresco, but upon Korine's emergence, I had ceremoniously cut the cord between his mother
and himself. I had to really strain my memory on this claim.
Then began pleas, from a mutual friend of the kid's parents and mine, to read his work. I begged off; but about a year and a
half ago I received a screenplay in the mail from producer Cary Woods. It was titled Kids, and beneath that was handwritten
"By Harmony Korine, The Famous Writer." The guy from the nativity scene, I realized. I read the script in one sitting. It blew
me away. To possess such natural and yet refined talent at 18 [which is when he wrote the script] was extraordinary, of
course. The little weasel was right, I thought: I had cut his cord. Suddenly the whole scene was quite vivid in my memory.
We began an acquaintanceship by phone; then, one night on the set of a film I was involved with, he came up and introduced
himself in person. He didn't look a day over 14 with his mop haircut. He was short and subdued. His face bore the sharp
features of the diverse lineage he has claimed to me. His great - grand mother was, apparently, a Shaman of the Zuni Indian
Tribe. His mother was the free - spirited offspring of Norwegian and Mexican parents, her youth spent in the South among a
fundamentalist Christian sect. His father, born into a secular Jewish family of 14 siblings, pursued a career in acting in his
early twenties, doing mainly summer stock.
But the strangest part of Korine's background is his claim, in his official Miramax biography, that Huntz Hall, one of the stars
of the Bowery Boys movies, is his uncle. Most press persons consider this one of Korine's typical ruses, but I have reason to
give him the benefit of the doubt . . . . somewhat. In 1981, on a promotional tour of Europe for a record album, I actually met
Hall in a hotel bar and ended up in conversation. We were discussing a Jorge Luis Borges story about a young insomniac
cursed with the inability to forget anything, when Hall told me: "I have a young nephew much like that. He is only five or six
years old, and he seemingly can recite the dialogue to every Bowery Boys film verbatim. He gets on the phone with me and
goes on and on. Last call it was Angels With Dirty Faces."
"'Rocky dies yellow,'" I shot back.
"There you go," said Huntz. "But no kidding, the child is amazing .... or autistic."
Could this mnemonic nephew, whom Huntz Hall spoke so fondly of that night in Paris, be Harmony Korine? Why not?
Korine just doesn't buy into the system; by his words it is obvious. Perhaps this is why he amuses himself by constantly
reinventing his life. He is one of those select few who will move smoothly from one generation of kids to the next, knowing
that the only difference is fashion.
That's not completely true, of course. The violence of kids today, both quantitatively and qualitatively, has enormously
increased in ration beyond that of sex and drugs. [The movie's most brutal scene was inspired by an all - too - real event
Korine witnessed no more than 20 yards from where it was filmed.] The reasons for the increased violence have been
scrutinized ad nauseam, and I both don't understand them and understand them too well. For enormous sectors of the youth
population, parental guidance is either nil or manifested by abuse. For too many kids, nobody's home. And it's going to get
worse before getting better.
A friend who works as a substitute teacher in schools for "troubled" kids gave some eight and and nine - year - olds clay to
mold. Of the nine students, eight constructed guns [mainly Tec - 9s]. The remaining kid was slightly more imaginative: He
fashioned his clay into a beeper.
In the '60s and '?Os, the world was still slow enough for many kids to recognize their own misjudgments and recover. But
what will become of those kids that are economically disenfranchised from the high - speed technological future? They'll either
riot and loot in cyberspace or die of nonexposure in some virtual ditch right off the main hyper - drag. Their radiance will be
perverted, turned in on itself. As society speeds along at a vertiginous pace, moral boundaries become so subjective that they
are no longer binding.
Throughout Kids, the lead female character, Jennie [played by Chloë Sevigny], wanders trancelike on a quest to find Telly,
for a purpose that is never made entirely clear, nor resolved. It is unlikely that she herself knows. And it's doubtful that we,
the audience, know. The kids themselves sure don't have a clue. It's just too fast out there these days.
Enclosed in their husks and behind the many masks of the system and its time, not many adults will truly allow the freshness
of Kids to enter on its own terms, without their own moral impositions. The best one can do, after seeing this film, is to
sincerely try to answer the question posed by Casper, one of the most zonked - out characters, in Kids' final line: "Jesus
Christ, what happened?"
Harmony Korine
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