Kids 1995

[7.7/10] The original mission of South Park, per its creators, was not to make grand statements about free speech and the news of the day, or even to make scads of poo and fart jokes. It was to dispel the notion that children are innocent little angels, and show the reality that they have the same good and bad, the same mix of decency and general crappiness, that their grown-up counterparts do.

Kids, which premiered just a couple of years before South Park, is that idea aged up and taken to the extreme. It is a disquieting, disheartening film, that depicts teenage men and women as perpretrators and victims of a depraved ecosystem of sex and drugs and disease. Within the confines of 1990s New York City, it predicts an impending crash, where the young people of the day are doomed to drift or rot or just hurt each other before they’re old enough to appreciate or at least countenance the consequences of their actions.

That catch is that there’s a dichotomy to Kids. At times, the film is laudable for its frankness in depicting the dynamic between young people, a time when we take our first steps toward seeing ourselves as sexual beings and experience the bit of freedom that quasi-adulthood confers. There’s something recognizable and potent in the film’s best stretch, where it cuts between a group of young men discussing sex and contrasts it with a group of young women having an equal and opposite discussion.

There’s a layer of truth there. The young men speak with bluster about conquests and in gradiose, fantastical tones about how badly the women in their lives want them and how masterful they are at their game. The young women contradict almost every line of that bluster, speaking frankly with one another about what they want and what they like in a way that doesn't begin to line up with the teenage boys’ fantastical descriptions of what can generously be termed their romantic lives.

Director Larry Clark goes for a cinema verite approach to the film, one that makes the camera feel like just another kid sitting in on these conversations. That helps lend an air of realness to the proceedings. But more than that, the conversations themselves have the ring of truth, the way that young adults compare notes and tentatively or bombastically speak to one another about sex and relationships. The dynamics to these relationships, particularly within these different, gendered social groups, feel true.

But the other half of the dichotomy comes in the form of a presentation that feels strangely sensationalized, despite the fly-on-the-wall approach to the film’s aesthetic. Look, I wasn’t a teenager in New York City in 1995. I can’t say one way or another how accurate the film’s depiction of rampant sexual assault, drug use, STIs, and latchkey kids using and abusing one another with seemingly no supervision.

And yet, there’s part of this film that feels very Reefer Madness, or even like the first part of Chick tract. I don’t know how many Middle American homes watched Kids, but despite its frankness and a lack of judgment in its documentary-esque style, there’s a sense that its aimed at a conservative crowd, there to convince the viewer that there’s a debaucherous underbelly of modern youth culture that’s going to result in a generation of drunken, drugged out burnouts and predators if we don’t wake up and do something about it.

A quarter-century later, it’s easy to view Kids as likely exaggerated and even a bit alarmist. To the extent it tries to represent reality, the parade of horribles it strings together, the depths of depravity it unveils, start to strain credulity and seem like a funhouse mirror version of polite society’s worst fears for the younger generation rather than a no-punches-pulled depiction of what teenagerhood is really like.

But whether it’s a reflection of real life degeneracy, or a hyper-fictionalized compilation of a bunch of worst case scenarios, it’s also an utterly gutting film. I’m a little too young to be scandalized by the notion of teenagers having sex or drinking or smoking pot. But it’s hard not to be pierced by the images of sexual assault, of ambivalence toward other people’s possible deaths, of the wanton transmission of then-fatal diseases under the guise of true affection.

The haunting specter of Kids is AIDS. The film lulls you into a false sense of security, making the viewer think this is a standard, if more frankly-depicted, story of juvenile delinquent behavior. Then it reveals that Jennie, the comparatively chaste girl in her cohort, contracted HIV from Telly, the sexually boastful young man who brags to his friend about trying to protect himself by only sleeping with virgins.

From there, the film truly becomes a horror movie, one where Telly and his compatriots casually and even playfully assault their distaff counterparts, steal, drink, smoke, and basically find any excuse to indulge their basest urges by whatever means necessary. The fact that their recklessness spreads a terminal illness adds an air of disturbingness to each interaction and moment.

That’s particularly true given the offputting level of intimacy, consented to and inflicted, throughout the film. Kids opens with what becomes its recurring motif -- a close up image of two young people making out, exchanging saliva and other fluids that, unbeknownst to them (or maybe willfully) could inflect one or both of them with AIDS.

The film focuses on these moments, showing Telly in particular not only sleeping with young women in the guise of some deeper connection masking a mercenary effort at conquest, but also spitting in open wounds, embracing friends and potential paramours, sweating and dripping and imposing other forms of contact on those around him. Kids depicts a community beyond simple depravity, but one where the worst comes from the fact that everything is shared: bottles, joints, and even sexual partners, to the point that when one member of that community is tainted, soon enough they all will be.

In that, Kids plays like a 1990s version of Lord of the Flies. Before South Park ever graced the airwaves with its cynical, transgressive take on how crass and crude young men can be, this movie took that notion several steps further. It shows teenage boys in particular as amoral predators, doing anything for sex or for a high with no other impulse or purpose or regard for what it may cost them or others. And it shows teenage girls as their accomplices and victims, harmed, sometimes fatally, in the distance between what they want and what these cruel, heedless wolves have to offer them. The youth of this movie are no angels. They are, instead, the worst of humanity laid bare, meant to scare us and shake us about the future they represent, if they have a future at all.