EDITH KURZWEIL
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he counted on parents and children going to see it together. And when
asked about why he had chosen the nineteen-year-old Korine to write
the script, he explained that he wanted to make a film that showed
youngsters as they are among themselves, without adults.
The Italian reporter Roberto Nepoti's verdict: "The youngster is
bad, but the director is worse." The film is horrible, he goes on, not so
much for what it shows - a group of seemingly normal New York
adolescents' day of sex, violence, and drugs - but because written by a
teenager, this sequence of stupidity, cruelty, and insensibility is sold as au–
thentic juvenile sociology. "In
Kids,
an odious seventeen-year-old de–
flowers his younger girlfriends and spreads AIDS.. . . This is a sham doc–
ument that doesn't have a morsel of authentic knowledge of the nature
or causes of the phenomena, a 'snuff movie' in which the most fragile
. corpses are among the interpreters and among the spectators."
Whether this judgment is meant to discourage Italian kids from see–
ing this film as exemplary of teenage conduct, as an indictment of
American behavior in general, or as a more general moral issue is a moot
point. Still, unlike the
New York
article, it is clear that the Europeans see
this film as more than "relentless and brilliant and extremely disturbing."
However, for a variety of reasons, we have come to believe that disturb–
ing creations,
ipso facto,
are brilliant, that to look askance at depictions
of sexual violence is to be close-minded or reactionary. The
New York
article immediately goes on to expound, at length, on Clark's early life,
his former notoriety as a drug user, his criminal record, and his subse–
quent fascination with the illegal activities of kids. American readers al–
legedly expect this sort of portrait. That Clark describes Harmony as "his
own work in progress," a bright prankster who left his parents; home
soon after his
bar mitzvah,
is also predictable. For the majority in our
therapeutic society (or at least those on the two coasts) , in a loose ap–
plication of Freudian lore, take for granted that psyche is destiny. They
ignore that Freud and his contemporaries were responding to repressive
mores, whereas Clark and Korine are "benefiting" from an already per–
missive climate and are, as it were, normalizing what in Europe still is
considered deviant behavior.
Much of what Clark tells his interviewers deals with his concern
about the financial success of his film which, in turn, seems to revolve
around the rating it will receive. Predictably, he will argue that artists are
entitled to creative freedom. Thus he will be aligned with, and defended
by, the Democratic left and attacked by the Republican right. However,
he may well get into trouble with the likes of Andrea Dworkin and
Catherine McKinnon as promulgating pornography. But all such ideo-
