Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Fri Jun 23, 2006 12:12 pm 
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If teenagers’ lives seem boring to you, imagine how boring your lives are to teenagers.

It’s safe to call teenagers Larry Clark’s “fixation,” but how he approaches them and how they emerge from his scrutiny varies – though it’s usually compelling, sometimes shocking, and likely to polarize, gaining reactions from rapturous support to warnings that he’s a pervert and you ought to lock up your children. He has a voyeur’s eye even as a participant and since his fascination with teenage flesh lingers longer on the males you’d have to say the only difference between him and a gay man is that he’s not gay. Is this what makes his kind of photographer – lack of boundaries, lack of moral restraint? In Clark’s landmark Tulsa (1971), the photo book that made him a major influence and a museum collectible, he shot speed himself as he shot kids shooting speed in the town where he was born; guys just knew he had his camera in hand and couldn’t help them tie up. That was a rougher world he joined than the one he was born into – his mother was a traveling commercial baby photographer but “once the needle goes in it never comes out” and Clark continued to live a life of alcohol and drugs and sex with some cleaner periods through the Seventies and Eighties, always close to the younger generation and always with his camera in hand. His 1983 photo book Teenage Lust described sex and drugs among younger Tulsa teens and young male hustlers in the pre-Niketown Times Square.

Clark next shifted to Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan and photographed and befriended the skateboarders there and used them in his 1995 shocker Kids, his film debut, written by Harmony Korine. In Kids the violence was sexual: an HIV-positive kid deflowering girls without a condom. In Another Day in Paradise, Clark took a ride into Hollywood filming Melanie Griffith and James Woods as a sleazy couple involved in drugs and petty crime who adopt a homoerotic young sidekick. It’s too Hollywood: Kids was his landmark, his motion picture Tulsa. He went back to vérité with his 2001Bully, a south Florida true story about kids who ganged up and murdered one of their own. It’s gruesome. I’m skipping the made-for-TV comic-based Teenage Caveman: it’s reportedly a clinker and I didn’t see it. Ken Park was made a year later and dwells more on teenage sex (some with adults) and on family dysfunctionality than Clark’s other movies and it’s arguably as good as Kids and less dispiriting and it deserves to be seen, but due to music rights issues and shocked bourgeois sensibilities it has yet to be shown in American theaters. The new Clark movie Wassup Rockers happens in LA with Salvadoran and Guatemalan teenagers born into South Central, “the ghetto,” as one of the leaders of the seven, Kiko (Francisco Pedrasa) likes to tell outsiders. Again Clark has been hanging out with skateboarders, and this group of pals is based on guys he knew, who wear long hair and tight jeans and play loud punk rock and could be an Hispanic Ramones.

What’s different about Wassup Rockers is the characters aren’t “white.” They go to 90210 as unwelcome tourists. Clark says this is like The Warriors meets The Swimmer, because Jonathan (Jonathan Valasquez), Kiko, Sperm Ball (Milton Valesquez), et al. defend themselves in enemy territory and then escape pitching their skateboards over fences and then jumping over them. The situation is hardly benign. The crew loses two of their homies in the venture. There’s a nasty cop, a gay rapist, an older woman who “plays” with Kiko in a Jacuzzi, an Eastwood-like vigilante armed with a pistol. Latina maids save the remaining boys. Earlier, some Beverly Hills High girls who just love cute Jonathan invite the boys to their house, and the chat between one of them and Kiko is the movie’s most interesting moment. She asks him about his life and his relationship to his friends and in this Q&A they compare their lifestyles. Wassup Rockers has real mayhem, and moments that are farcical. But what’s unquestionably benign compared to the worlds of Bully and Kids or Paradise is the principals. They don’t seek, fights and don’t fight among themselves. They drink some beer once but they don’t smoke and don’t do any drugs on camera and when confronted by the nasty Beverly Hills cop’s attempts to provoke and humiliate them they’re so good natured they just giggle. The title Wassup Rockers is a hostile phrase addressed to them by blacks, who resent them for now being hip hop and think they’re gay or something because of their tight pants. These are not violent people. Sex is as much a part of their lives and in one scene Jonathan describes his first sex. This like most of the scenes is improvised and based on his real experience. There’s a sluttish girl – possibly based on a girl in Larry Clark’s neighborhood described in Teenage Lust – who has sex with all the boys but her predatory sexuality scares them. Clark isn’t as sleazy as people think- -- not sleazy enough to reshape his material into a false image. Kids remains his landmark, and Ken Park his deepest exploration, but Wassup Rockers is a happier trip. Some writers (who say these boys are “El Salvadoran”) have described the skateboarding sequences as “interminable.” I guess they don’t like skateboarding. Actually, no film has ever shown so well what skateboarding is really like if you’re not a Lord of Dogtown. If teenagers’ lives seem boring to you, imagine how boring your lives are to teenagers.

(Wassup Rockers opened in New York City on June 23, 2006.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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