Kids

Insight on the News, Sept 4, 1995 by David Larimer

Apack of teens aged 13 to 17 roams aimlessly through the streets of New York. They live a life of pure predation, shoplifting malt liquor, using drugs and engaging in promiscuous sex. There's nary a parent in sight.

Shot in a day-in-the-life, documentary style complete with hand-held cameras and gritty photography, Kids, a near-apocalyptic vision of contemporary American adolescence, aims to blur the line between reality and entertainment. The movie has been called everything from "likely the best" movie of the year by Spin magazine to "loathsome" by the Washington Times. "Nihilistic might be an overstatement in terms of its moral content," says Tom Doherty, chairman of the department of film studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Experts on adolescent behavior suggest that "nihilistic" may not be too strong a word. "You and I didn't have friends who were dying of a sexually transmitted disease. You and I weren't being shot at on street corners," says James Feldman, a specialist in child maltreatment and parenting and director of public education for KidsPeace, a national, nonprofit youth crisis-prevention center. "It's not like it was."

A KidsPeace survey of more than 1,000 10- to 13-year-olds released this summer found that more than half fear contracting AIDS, being kidnapped or dying. Two-thirds admitted to buckling under peer pressure. Such are the topics bluntly confronted by Kids' first-time director, Larry Clark, and 21-year-old screenwriter Harmony Korine, who wrote the script at age 19. The film's antihero, 16-year-old Telly, is a self-described "virgin surgeon" who seeks to talk into bed as many girls as he can, regardless of their age. It's his idea of safe sex. Meanwhile, one of his partners discovers that she is HIV positive and desperately searches for Telly, hoping to stop him from spreading the disease further.

While Kids contains no nudity and little of the graphic violence of many R-rated films, it was given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. Excalibur Films, Kids' distributor, has opted to release the film unrated, limiting it primarily to showings at independent theaters in larger cities. Doherty agrees with the rating. "It's not unjustified," he says. "The film isn't as sexually explicit as you would have feared. But it's the tone, the consistency of the attitudes."

Kids seems calculated to shock its viewers, particularly parents, and it does. "It's aimed at adults," Doherty says. Certainly, the faux documentary approach offers a cinema-verite glimpse into fin de siecle adolescent world, with its seventies retro fashions, eclectic musical tastes and hip-hop dialects of a distinct subculture. But does its darkness go too far?

"I think Kids is a kind of caricature," Feldman remarks. "It's almost like an extreme Home Alone. [The characters] were presented as totally devoid of hope, of direction. If there's any reality to it at all, it may be that of the screenwriter or of his friends. But it's not representative of teenagers across the country."

The results of the KidsPeace survey report much the same sentiment: While children sense their vulnerability to the increasing level of danger in the world around them, they haven't succumbed to fear like their fictional counterparts in Kids. For example, the teenagers surveyed say their second-greatest fear is failing in school, a sentiment expressed by 57 percent of the participants. More than 90 percent responded that they always feel loved by their parents. Even the apparent negatives hide positives. After pointing out that a startling 47 percent of children surveyed named no role models, "you can take the other side of that and see that 53 percent did have role models, and of those, most of them [60 percent] were parents or other relatives," says Feldman.

Doherty does not anticipate that teenagers who see the film will be drawn to its depiction of amorality. "I told one of my students that I had just seen it and he said, 'That sucks,'" he recalls. Doherty, the author of Teenagers and Teen Pics, a study of the depiction of adolescents in youth-oriented films, says that despite the violent content of contemporary films, teenagers during the last 15 to 20 years seek out movies "to get maybe what they don't get at home -- that stern direction. Look at Star Wars, The Karate Kid." Even recent films such as Wayne's World or Clueless "have become almost chaste by comparison to a Porky's or Animal House," says Doherty.

While simply concluding that the kids are all right is "simplistic," Feldman stresses that "it's not all doom and gloom out there.... My concern would be that people walk away assuming that Kids is representative."