WHY KIDS DIDN'T SEND SHOCKWAVES

Jack Mathews / Newsday / August 10, 1995

Since late July, the week after the opening of Larry Clark's Kids, I've had a letter sitting on my desk from a reader who'd just seen the film and was convinced it was going to have an immediate and devastating impact on American society.

"People are going to be shocked and disgusted and will respond in ways that will add misery and fear all across the United States," the man wrote. "I'm trying to remember a movie having such an impact in the past and cannot."

This wasn't one of those anonymous doomsday letters we all receive from time to time in this business, quoting selectively from the most portentous sections of the Bible and written with such a fury that the words and ideas skid sideways into the margins. The Kids writer provided his name and address and identified himself as a child welfare agency worker in New York City.

I'm not going to identify him here because I don't want to appear to be making light of his forecast, which included national curfews for teenagers, a reversal of Roe v. Wade, deeper cuts in social programs for youths and a rash of parent assaults - perhaps murders - on boys suspected of exploiting their daughters.

The fact is, though, that two months later, it is hard to remember a movie in the constantly recycled "What's the matter with kids today?" genre that's had less impact.

Kids is still playing in nearly 200 theaters, one in Suffolk, and has done a fair amount of business - about $7 million in grosses to date. But it has created virtually no political or social reverberations, and about the only national figure to take notice of it was Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti, venting fury over Miramax Films' cynical end run with regard to the NC-17 rating. (The distributor created a separate company to release the film unrated.)

If you recall the hoo-ha attending its arrival, Kids covers 24 hours in the lives of a group of scabrous teens in downtown Manhattan led by a swaggering punk known as the Virgin Surgeon. Seducing and deflowering young girls is his idea of safe sex, though a slipup at some point in his past has already infected him with the AIDS virus, which he is unknowingly passing along to his conquests.

When the movie premiered at May's Cannes Film Festival, Miramax trumpeted it as the year's most important film event, suggesting moral purpose behind its rank images of young teens having sex, and a very uncomfortable Clark - a photojournalist with a past that makes the Virgin Surgeon look like Howdy Doody - defended it against charges of kiddie porn by insisting it was meant as a wake-up call for lackadaisical parents.

From that first screening in Cannes, Kids felt less like a wake-up call to me than an assault. It was like being dragged into a room and forced to watch a young girl, 13 or 14, being conned into giving it up to some revolting creep and having it pointed out, as if by the bony finger of the ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, that if you don't know where your daughter is, this is where she will end up.

The bad boy / nice girl theme has been around since puberty, and virgins have been trophies just as long. Saved for kings, sacrificed to gods, sold by fathers, virginity has been a commodity in human history, and the loss of it a tragedy in modern literature. In novels and movies alike, boys have coerced girls into giving it up with the aid of sweet talk, drugs, alcohol and dreams, and left them with addictions, babies and disease.

The tales are frightening and real - particularly in Kids, where the disease is also a death sentence. And Clark, a reformed junkie who grew up seriously wayward in Tulsa, has rather brilliantly recreated the environment in which these tragedies may be most apt to occur. Like many critics, I found much to admire in the urgent, faux-documentary style of the movie; as a parent, I recoiled from it as if being shown footage of teenagers being crushed in a head-on collision.

Clark told interviewers that his message to parents was "Arm your kids with knowledge so they won't make these mistakes," but the message that comes through is "If you love your kids, lock them up." It was that reaction that the child welfare worker was responding to in his letter, and had enough parents seen the film, perhaps some of his predictions would have come true. But people have a way of scoping out the movies that are important for them to see, and Kids did not appear on many of their radar screens.

I was asked by CNN reporter Sherry Dean at the time of Kids' release if I thought parents should see it, and with apologies to Clark, whose intentions seemed more noble than his movie, I said yes, but not then. It would be wiser to wait until it comes out on video, when they can watch it at home with their children. That way, they will be able to fast-forward through the exploitative sex scenes and hit the pause button whenever it's necessary to add the moral context absent from the film.

Be prepared for a long night.