Kids, Larry Clark, 1995

It's been a while since I've watched Kids though the opening scene is still fresh in my mind, seventeen-year-old Telly played by Leo Fitzpatrick coerces and rapes a twelve-year-old girl then proceeds to boast about it towards his friends. I think this is a perfect scene, in the sense that this act sets the tone for the entire remainder of the film. Kids is about contrasting the vulgarity and often antagonistic experience of becoming an adult in a world that has no obligation to care for you with our perceived ideal of the "innocence of youth" particularly that which was often disseminated through mainstream media. Shot in a documentary esc style we follow our characters as if we're guests invited to study an inner city ecosystem. Fittingly many of the actors in the film are people Clark simply stumbled upon while wandering around New York, I think that fact lends itself to the viewer questioning whether what we see is scripted or not. It's very unsentimental when labeling this as a coming-of-age film. I'm reminded of the infamous scene at the end of Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny which exists in a similar vein of challenging the idea that media should coddle the viewer, the hypocrisy of watching a movie or listening to music about people surviving as a means of escaping real life is something that has always interested me. Back to Kids, if you were to try to establish a central theme I believe it would revolve around sex. It's the act that our characters spend the entire runtime either chasing or ruminating on. This is no accident. The height of the Aids crisis was still very well in living memory for many in the mid-90s. Compounded with the fact that the nineties was the host of a rampant pop culture upheaval of youth across the country, dismantling previously accepted forms of "disobedience" established in the 80s and before. Kids spends its entire length telling you what you don't want to hear and I think that's such a commendable act as it's become all too common to think that if you smother an ideal or group of people for long enough they'll eventually disappear, which is true to an extent yet what Clark showcases and has worked towards for his entire career is the consequences of what happens when you become invisible. It was easier for our government to deal with a monumental health crisis by demonizing youth as opposed to allowing dialogue no matter how uncomfortable it made you. (Week 9)