Larry Clark’s 1995 movie Kids shocked many. This tale of 24 hours in the life of a bunch of New York teens showed graphic sex, violence and drug-taking, and it was shot in a documentary style that made it all seem very realistic indeed.
And it was real. Clark began as a photographer, documenting the lives and doings of young people (including himself) in the Oklahoma where he grew up, and that included sex, drugs and violence. Kids was co-scripted by Harmony Korine, then 19, and much of the cast was made up of non-actors from Korine’s skateboarding milieu.
The result is an extremely powerful vision of teen life in the United States today — it shows how the wealthiest and most self-satisfied society on Earth has left its children bored and floating aimlessly in a moral vacuum. The ”pursuit of happiness” of the American Constitution is a canard.
Clark films such as Kids, Bully, and now Ken Park do not analyse, but simply present the reality of these kids’ lives. But Clark is clear in interviews about their social and cultural context. Outrage is otiose: when Ken Park showed at the Durban Film Festival a month or two ago, a piece appeared almost immediately in a local newspaper, denouncing it as another cause (not a symptom, note) of a supposed decay of moral values.
But that decay, particularly in the US, has been happening for a while. Which is not to say it was Eden once. And it has more to do with capitalism and money than sex. In a world now ruled by money above all else, in a culture of consumer-driven selfishness, young people have to discover their moral compasses afresh. Their parents are no help.
One could cross-refer here to George W Bush, lavishly paid hitman of the oil barons, but in Clark’s case what’s most interesting is the way he contests mainstream Hollywood’s view of the world, where you can have as much sex and violence as you like as long as it’s prettily shot and packaged with a join-the-dots moral lesson. As Clark has pointed out, there was nothing in the teen comedy Clueless that wasn’t in Kids, except that Clueless was stylised and tarted up and vacuum-packed to be cuter, cleaner, less threatening and more ”moral”.
Clark is interested in moral ambiguity. He may deplore much of what the teens in his movies do, such as killing a schoolmate in Bully (based on a real Florida case), but he is also able to empathise with them, to try to show them as they are, in all their complexity, their beauty and their ugliness.
Ken Park makes, with Kids and Bully, something of a trilogy. Asked where the invisible parents were in Kids, Clark said they’d be in his next film. They are only a little more present in Bully, but Ken Park puts them at the centre of the picture. And the result is even more devastating than Kids or Bully.
Clint Eastwood’s new movie, the acclaimed Mystic River (see facing page), has child abuse as the primal trauma. This is not giving any plot away, because Eastwood establishes that event with thrillerish economy within the movie’s first few minutes. It is the original sin from which all else in the film, decades later, flows. It is also something that does not have to be explained; Eastwood assumes we all know what is meant.
Clark, by contrast, is not interested in such a theatrical vision of child abuse. For all the cinematic restraint and emotional honesty for which Mystic River has been praised, child abuse is still presented like something from The Exorcist, an unexplained force out of the blue, external to the family, specifically sexual (indeed homosexual) and to do with dank, dark basements and the like.
Clark not only expands the definition of child abuse but puts it in the glare of daylight. In Ken Park, all parenting is a form of abuse. The kids may take drugs and have sex without any of the puritan guilt the US still holds dear, officially at least, but the parents — physically violent or just emotionally neglectful — are the villains of the piece.
All Clark’s sympathy is with the kids, however dof and confused they are. He identifies with them almost unreservedly as he follows several storylines revolving around the titular teen suicide. There’s the boy who’s having sex with his nominal girlfriend’s mom; there’s the girl with a religious father still romancing the memory of her dead mother — and more.
Kids and Bully were undoubtedly depressing; watching them, one tussled in one’s mind between feelings of sympathy and thoughts of ”How could they be so stupid?” There was no light. But in Ken Park, Clark produces what is in a way a gesture of redemption — the only one he is able honestly to add to the traumas that have gone before. The scene seems out of sequence with the rest of the film — is it really happening after everything else, or is it a flashback? Its location in time is indeterminate, yet it also feels like an apt conclusion, a coda perhaps that stands in contrast to the rest of the often very disquieting narrative.
It is an explicit teen sex scene, and will doubtless enrage many a so-called moralist like the Durban writer. Yet it is also very different to the other sex in the movie; it is a vision of gorgeous innocence and purity, a moment of grace, a reprieve from hypocritical adults — Clark’s version of a happy ending.