Kids. - movie reviews

Christian Century, August 2, 1995 by James M. Wall

LATELY I HAVEN'T had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week's Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times." That's how E. B. White opened a short essay in Harper's magazine in October 1938. White predicted with chilling accuracy the way the proliferation of information via television can diminish our lives rather than enrich them. "I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky." A speaker at a recent Nashville conference on media and the family quoted that passage of White's (discovered, I later learned, on an Internet collection of quotations) and suggested that television was rapidly becoming a disturbance.

Television was very much in its infancy when White wrote his essay. He recalled having attended "a television demonstration at which it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that a person sitting in one room could observe the nonsense taking place in another." Nevertheless, the experience was striking enough ("By paying attention I could see the whites of a pretty woman's eyes") to convince White that television was "tremendously important--more so than the ebb and flow of armies."

We have clearly failed the test that White described. We have allowed market forces to control television--and the rest of our modern communications media--to such a degree that the lowest common denominator of interest prevails. A free society rises or falls on the exercise of a collective responsibility. When we fail to respond to the needs and vulnerabilities of our citizens, we revert to the law of the jungle, permitting only the powerful to determine how we shall live.

Anger over the absence of responsibility surfaced at the Nashville conference, but the usual media industry voices were heard as well, pushing, as is their custom, individual rights over community responsibility. After attending the conference I decided that the obsession with individual rights--the right to make money or to write, say or do what I please--should be exposed for what it is: a form of fundamentalism that accepts one worldview as absolute and rejects all others as encroachments on the true faith.

My insight was reinforced when I saw Kids, a movie that follows a group of young teenagers through a day and night of sex, drugs and violence. Kids is director Larry Clark's first movie, but it is not his first venture into depicting the empty hedonism of young teenagers. In 1971 he published a book of photographs of young people in his hometown of Tulsa "shooting up, having sex, messing around, playing tough guys," as one writer describes it. His film continues that theme in a style of a photographer with a convincing script. The picture is unsparing in its depiction of a group of children without any interest other than getting enough sex and drugs to keep them out of touch with reality. (One particularly despairing sequence centers on four young boys who look to be around 11, sitting together on a sofa, smoking dope.)

Telly, a central character, prides himself on his ability to seduce virgins. Two of his conquests are shown at length, complete with a piteous plea from one girl who cries, "It hurts." Jennie, one of Telly's earlier victims, discovers that she is HIV positive. She wanders about the city, looking for Telly to tell him about her condition. At one party she takes pills that leave her barely awake. Stumbling into a bedroom, she finds Telly engaged in his latest conquest. She watches for a time and then falls onto a sofa. The film ends when a friend of Telly's finds her asleep and rapes her.

This is raw stuff when it involves adults, and is ugly and horrifying when it involves children. Which brings us back to the issue of responsibility. The rating board of the Motion Picture Association of America correctly gave the picture an NC-17 rating, the designation for pictures forbidden to anyone under 17. That rating has its economic cost to the filmmakers, since most theaters and major video chains refuse to handle NC-17 films.

Kids, made as an independent production, was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival, where it elicited some praise and some disgust. Miramax Films, a subsidiary of the Disney company, obtained distribution rights to Kids, fully aware that it would probably be rated NC-17 and thus be unreleasable by Miramax since Disney will not distribute an NC-17 picture.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who run Miramax, entered Kids in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and began an extensive campaign to convince critics that Kids is an important work of art that should be given the more profitable R rating, which allows parents to take their youngsters to the film and also opens up the video and cable television markets. (R-rated films on cable's various movie channels are easily available to children of any age who know how to program their VCRs, or whose parents don't care what they watch on cable.)