No Longer 'Kids': Larry Clark and Artistic Exploitation
By Mai Ly Hagan
Kids (1995), dir. Larry Clark
Two young faces pressed against each other completely fill the frame. In the opening moments, all we can hear is an oral exchange of spit and rabidity. When the scene cuts to a mid-shot we see that, behind the characters, is a childhood bedroom decorated with medals and stuffed animals. Telly, the film’s protagonist, gazes into the eyes of a girl while he persuades her into sex with a rehearsed series of assuagements: “Because I like you,” “I won’t hurt you,” and “If we fucked, I think you’d love it.” We end the scene with a close-up on Telly in the midst of pleasure as a grungy rock theme — “Daddy Never Understood” by Dinosaur Jr. 's Lou Barlow — begins to play, drowning out the girl’s complaints of pain, and cutting to the title screen: Kids.
Love it or hate it, it is impossible to deny the impact of Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids. There are few films that were able to erupt such a massive reaction, due to its gritty and “realistic” depiction of youth culture in New York City. It was a film that intended to shine a light on the dark underbelly of society, subsequently creating an uproar of responses from critics, parents, and fellow youth. The film’s depiction of social issues such as underage drug use, unsafe sex, and violence is set during the AIDs crisis and the rise of urban skater culture. Kids paints a fascinating portrait of American youth, one that resulted in much controversy. The film teeters between veneration and condemnation; some viewers interpreted it as normalizing reckless behaviors, while others came to view it as a cautionary tale. I would argue the film passes a non-judgemental gaze on its subject matter, immersing the audience in the world of these teenagers in a series of observations, often intentionally blurring the line between script and reality. Regardless of one’s stance, it is undoubtedly a film that we can’t stop talking about to this day. Kids is a visually-striking pseudo-documentary exploration of the psyche of troubled 90s youth, and the legacy of this film brings up a wider discussion of artistic intent and exploitation.
After the opening credits, Telly walks out of the girl’s apartment, greeting his best friend Cas with a victorious leer. We are immediately drawn into their world as Telly vulgarly recounts the experience, calling himself a “virgin surgeon” and offering his fingers for Cas to sniff. Harmony Korinne (who was 19 at the time of writing the script) used local and youthful dialect, giving the impression that the conversation could be completely ad-libbed by two young, native New Yorkers. The pair weave behind cars and pedestrians, as the camera steadily follows them. While the hand-held cinematography artfully incorporates the environment of New York City, momentarily gazing on the sights and strangers that they pass, this is a film solely concerned with occupying the minds of this group of youth. The kid's isolated worldview is exemplified when Caspar hands Telly his beer bottle and goes for a piss, brazenly occupying the street as pedestrians hurry past, with seemingly no consideration for his outer environment. While they may exist in the setting around them, these kids inhabit an exclusive mentality, one concerned with sex, drugs, and hedonism.
Isolation and miscommunication is a theme explored thoroughly in this film, best demonstrated by a scene in which two vastly different conversations about sex play out: one between a group of girls and the other between boys. The film flips between the two groups, revealing their wildly contradictory views. In one instance, Cas declares that girls love blow jobs, which cuts immediately to the group of girls passionately exclaiming their disgust for them. The conversation flows naturally, at times feeling more like a focus group than a scripted and acted production. Later on, the miscommunication is exemplified as the narrative bifurcates. Jennie, played by Chloё Sevigny, discovers that she is H.I.V. positive and could only have been infected by Telly. She embarks on a quest to find him and tell him what he’s done, thus kickstarting the main driving force of a film otherwise devoid of narrative. The film contrasts Jennie’s desperate search and reckoning with her own mortality with the antics of Telly and Cas. Jennie lays her head on a taxi window, solemnly gazing out at the street, while the driver looks at her through the rear-view mirror to offer her life advice. Concurrently, Telly yells at an apartment window for “Darcy,” his next virgin conquest. The divide between the two narratives paints a telling picture: where one party lives in jubilant ignorance while the other bears the burden of reality.
Chloë Sevigny as Jennie in Kids (1995)
At the core of these intersecting groups of youth is a touching sense of camaraderie built upon a hostile foundation. Telly and Cas find themselves smoking pot in Washington Square Park, where they engage in a series of dap-ups, drug deals, and blunt rolling tutorials. The segment in the park is as close to a documentary as the film gets, as the crew cast and filmed real Washington Square Park skaters in their natural habitat. “Obviously those kids were smoking dope in the park. There’s no illusion about that,” remarked cinematographer Eric Allen Edwards. The skate brotherhood has their own intricate rituals and shared culture, yet it also develops a cult-like behavior. At one point, Cas observes a gay couple walking across the part and begins yelling slurs, to which his peers join along in. Later on, Cas nearly hits a man while skateboarding resulting in an altercation. Cas’ friends rally behind him, beating the man nearly to death. While some critics claimed this represented rampant racial prejudice amongst youth, others saw it more as depicting an “us vs. them” mindset, as kids of all races clamor forth to defend one of their own, a fellow skater. Peter Travers in his Rolling Stone review claimed it reflected a deep mentality of violence, stating, “it's clear these rootless, macho skateboarders are simply itching for a fight. The depth of this malaise is much scarier than prejudice alone.”
What motivates these kids is beyond reason, rather something deep-set and primal. As Telly narrates at the end of the film: “When you’re young, not much matters. When you find something that you care about, then that’s all you got … Fuckin’ is what I love. Take that away from me and I’ve really got nothing.” These kids' antics are not a result of immorality, rather it compensates for a deeper absence of meaning. Roger Ebert said it best: “What you realize, thinking about Telly, is that life has given him nothing that interests him, except for sex, drugs and skateboards. His life is a kind of hell, briefly interrupted by orgasms.” You come to understand that these kids are capable of grand things, but have ultimately been systematically neglectedー by parents, by teachers, and other authoritiesー and have coped by turning to unscrupulous means.
This failure is best represented by Cas who, as Janet Maslin observed, “seems the one character in Kids with any hint of a future.” Justin Pierce plays him with a bright-eyed desperation of a good kid who only knows how to commit wrong, which is not too far from reality seeing as the role was written after him. Throughout the film, Cas clings to Telly’s side, taking after one of his few close connections. While we know little about Cas’ background beyond what occurs in the story’s 24 hours, his impulsive and self-destructive nature (whether it be huffing nitrous oxide or starting fights) appears to be the product of a desire for attention and to “prove himself.” Toward the end, when he sees Telly in a naked embrace with Darcy, Cas reacts with anger. “You fucking bastard,” he exclaims. Bereft of love but craving it, Cas turns to despicable means, in doing so shattering any image of hope or salvation that the audience might’ve retained for him.
The final shots of the film show the aftermath of a house party. The camera lingers on unconscious teenagers and kids, then taking us outside to morning scenes of Manhattan, and then going back to Telly and Darcy, asleep. Finally, we return to Cas lounging on a coach, his naked body obscured by abandoned bottles, staring into the camera where he remarks: “Jesus Christ, what happened?”
There is no question that Kids is a timeless artistic feat. Still, one cannot deny the film’s exploitation. The movie depicted social issues and subcultures in a way that felt so real it roused a population into consciousness, many assuming that what they had seen on screen was truly the case. As lead actor Leo Fitzpatrick stated, “It was in Miramax’s best interest to keep the movie feeling as much like a documentary as possible.” In the same interview, Fitzpatrick noted that many of the actors could not be further from their characters, “All these kids were basically acting. Because they weren’t even that sexual, they were like 15, 16 … I had had sex once, maybe.” But, for some audiences, they took what they saw on screen to be fact and, as a result, many of the children featured were classified as their cinematic counterparts.
Still from The Kids (2021), dir. Eddie Martin / Courtesy of Gunars Elmuts
The 2021 documentary The Kids reckons with the aftermath of the film, particularly with how the actors, especially in minor roles, were treated after the fact. The documentary was created by Eddie Martin and Hamilton Harris; the latter was an actor in the original film. Harris believed the film overplayed and exploited the lives of disadvantaged youth for the shock value. As Martin put it, “Larry always says, ‘I tell the truth and the truth can be shocking.’ Well, my response to that is — whose truth?” he says. “Is it the truth, and what are the costs of telling that truth to other people? [Kids] was marketed in a particular way that had an impact on those who were sold as particular characters. Twenty-six years have passed, so you can see the consequences of that.” The documentary interviews many of the stars, revealing that they were excluded from opportunities that they had been promised, such as tickets to Cannes film festival and compensation from profit made from photos taken during shooting. The Kids raises questions on what was done to support many of these young and vulnerable stars, and shows that many were left to fend for themselves.
While Kids certainly launched the careers of many talented youth, namely Chloë Sevigny, Harmony Korine, and Rosario Dawson, it left many others to be stranded, subject to national fame and attention without an outlet for support. Seeing how things played out for some of the stars, it is hard to look at the film as favorably as critics once did. The tragically young deaths of Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter were deep losses for all those involved in the making of the film, as well as representative of Hollywood’s failure to protect the lives which they profited from. There’s a deep irony that, in a haunting circumstance of “life imitates art,” some of the actors became victims to the very social issues the film sought to create dialogue around. It makes the film all the more real, and watching it all the more irreconcilable. Korine recounts Pierce and Hunter fondly: “They were stars before they were stars … They were street legends. And they were beautiful.”
Kids, looking nearly 30 years onward, is a film remembered in a wildly conflicting light. Call it visionary. Call it exploitative. Call it original. Call it inequitable. I’d argue it is all those things and much more. Kids is a firecracker that proves to be more than just a film; it has ricocheted itself into the cultural psyche. It is an ode to youth. A coming-of-age tale that never should’ve been told. It is a harbinger of its own cautionary tale. It’s a hyperbole of an undeniable truth. It’s a film that will be replicated again, solitary in its own beacon of lurid, controversial, and masterful cinema. ◆