Former Wellington Film Society VP, Harriet Wild, explores the impact and legacy of Larry Clark’s Kids, one of our November screenings this year.
“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”
This often-parodied public service announcement could be a tagline to Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), a film that in the nearly 30 years since has become shorthand for cinematic provocation. Upon its release, the film gained immediate notoriety: audiences and critics either lauded the film as unflinchingly authentic, exposing truths about coming of age in the 1990s, or derided it as exploitative and pornographic, a sort of parental nightmare fuel of teenage delinquency in a world overrun with crime, drugs, and HIV/AIDS.
The film follows a group of teenagers over a 24-hour period in New York City as they fight, skate, take drugs, make out, drink, and have sex. The script was cooked up by 19-year old NYU student Harmony Korine (who would direct Gummo (1997) and Spring Breakers (2012)), and directed by Clark, a middle-aged photographer who was seeking to make the definitive “American Teenage Movie, like the Great American Novel”.
As a result, Kids almost seems to have been engineered in a laboratory to maximise its status as fodder for endless societal hand-wringing, perfect for those who want to lament the indifferent depravity of teenagers. It is presented as a slick, no-holds-barred story of urban, (male) adolescence, using a quasi-documentary aesthetic to impress a confronting social commentary on its audience.
However, despite Kids’ apparent edginess, the film maintains conventional social hegemonies. Korine’s narrative and Clark’s lingering, almost leering, gaze make this a work primarily grounded in male experience. Kids is a film about disaffected, white young men. Young women serve to “straighten” the narrative, as fundamentally, the film is about male relationships – the teenage girls of Kids have little agency of their own. Cultural theorist bell hooks picks up this thread in Cultural Criticism and Transformation:
“Kids fascinated me as a film precisely because when you heard about it, it seemed like the perfect embodiment of the kind of postmodern, notions of journeying and dislocation and fragmentation and yet when you go to see it, it has simply such a conservative take on gender, on race, on the politics of HIV”.
Gender in Kids is strictly on the binary. Teenage boys have their overblown machismo, while the girls are reactive, compliant – and from the opening sequence – often horizontal. A scene where a group of girls discuss sex is designed to ‘level the score’ (see, girls and boys are both equally crass!), but more often, the gender dynamics can be summarised in an exchange between Telly, the ‘virgin surgeon’, and one of his ten conquests:
GIRL: Do you care about me?
TELLY: Of course I do.
It’s impossible to watch Kids now and not reflect on ‘now and then’. Many of the cultural shocks that have since shaped experiences of adolescence and New York City respectively were far on the horizon: the film takes place five years before the shootings at Columbine High School, and six years before September 11, 2001. It is also set nearly ten years prior to the mass uptake of social media platforms, and, in an ironic twist, cannabis use is now legal in New York State.
Partly because of our changed perspective, Kids remains a visceral watch. In 1995, Janet Maslin of the New York Times described Kids as “a wake-up call to the modern world” – a take that may seem quaint and slightly hyperbolic from the jaded, cynical standpoint of 2024. The film still has the power to shock us, but perhaps from the other direction than Korine and Clark intended.
Kids has had a great influence, especially on ensemble television dramas (which were also a recent phenomenon in the mid-90s). The British series Skins and, more recently, Euphoria have developed a more nuanced and intersectional approach to gender, sexuality, class, race, and drug use to that found in Kids. Perhaps it’s because these more recent shows sought to elicit audiences from ‘kids’ themselves, rather than just provoking a reaction from their elders.