Larry Clarke’s movie KIDS centres around the life of a young teenager, Telly. This character’s life revolves around sex and his young age makes this quite unnerving to watch. He is not only obsessed with sex, but particularly sex with virgins. No strings attatched relationships, he shamelessly lulls young, virgingal, innocent girls into a false sense of security. Giving the impression that he will stay in a relationship with these girls he instead uses and abusses them and disguards them. Unfortunately this seems to be quite a fair representation of teenagers today. Whether they have copied behaviour from films or people like this, or whether they simple believe that treating people in this way is acceptable. The youth of today appear to have indifferent views about relationships. It seems that having notches on your bedpost is more important than having a loving environment in which to enjoy sex in.
The teenagers in the film use drugs, mainly canabis, ectasy and what appears to be ketamine or rohypnol in one of the final scenes. Regrettably, again this is not unexpected behaviour of teenagers today. Recreational drug use is very common in today’s society, whether people realise it or not. Kids experiment. Unfortunately the age that kids want to experiment with more “adult” or perhaps more dangerous things is getting younger. So I think that the film was quite a good representation of today’s society in that way. Unfortunately these kids don’t seem to have had any sex education as Teddy does not use protection. So not only are these girls unprotected against pregnancy, but both the girls and the boys are not protected from any STI’S, and it appears that protection is exactly what these kids need. Not only against HIV which Teddy and his “virgins” contract, but against this adult world of drug, drink and sex in general.
The very shocking scene of the movie showed rape. Which I don’t really see how it fitted into the film. Teddy having HIV was shocking enough, but one of the other characters raping Jenny while she slept was an extreme shock. I don’t know why the director, Larry Clark, thought it was integral, and the film ends on an ambiguous note with the character coming to his senses and asking the question “what have I done?” Perhaps Clark posed a wake up call to the entire of society. Get protected, use drugs responsibly, maybe even a wake up call to drug dealers to sell their drugs more responsibly i.e. not to children. Regrettably I don’t think many people would have seen it as much of a wake up call, definitely not the drug dealers! But I think it was a good informative film for those people in society that do not realise the gritty issues. Sadly this is the same reason why I think it’s an unpleasant film. Innocence is bliss!
The very shocking scene of the movie showed rape. Which I don’t really see how it fitted into the film. Teddy having HIV was shocking enough, but one of the other characters raping Jenny while she slept was an extreme shock. I don’t know why the director, Larry Clark, thought it was integral, and the film ends on an ambiguous note with the character coming to his senses and asking the question “what have I done?” Perhaps Clark posed a wake up call to the entire of society. Get protected, use drugs responsibly, maybe even a wake up call to drug dealers to sell their drugs more responsibly i.e. not to children. Regrettably I don’t think many people would have seen it as much of a wake up call, definitely not the drug dealers! But I think it was a good informative film for those people in society that do not realise the gritty issues. Sadly this is the same reason why I think it’s an unpleasant film. Innocence is bliss!
For more information Larry Clark and his view on the movie go to: http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,2256529,00.html
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