Ken Park

Why wouldn't anyone else write about this?

But first, an announcement: the books are here!

After seemingly forever, these gorgeous square books are finally here, with a beautiful cover & illustrations by Edward Shenk and lovely interior design by Connor Stankard, along with contributions by other incredible writers, photographers, and artists. Reply to this if you’re interested in a copy, or get one at any NPCC event.

One of the most annoying parts of making these was trying to get someone to write about Larry Clark, and especially, about Ken Park (which we’re screening this Thursday at 7pm on 35mm with Ed Lachman in conversation, click to buy your tickets.) I spent weeks and weeks begging a filmmaker I admired to do it, as memorialized in this Edward Shenk illustration:

But he didn’t even like Ken Park, he said, finally just texting me, “Its a lame.movie. was an old harmomy script that the old boys dug up. Harmony was in bad shape at that time” [sic]. I got comments like that from most people I asked. I eventually found one guy who liked the film; but his essay was literally a string of every IMDb log-line for a Larry Clark film, appended by “We’re proud to be showing…” language. When I sort of awkwardly asked him what had happened (“There seems not to be a point of view here…”), he said that there was no point in writing about Larry Clark anymore: “Just hard to write about a dude you really care for who you don’t think any more should be written about.”

So eventually, I had my friend Jackson write about Kids; I wrote about Ken Park; and my best friend Katherine Dee wrote about Bully. We’re not actually showing Kids or Bully, but I wanted to celebrate the best of Larry Clark. Because why not write about him? Why act embarrassed, or bashful? Why be ashamed of saying why you love the thing you really love?

I’ll start with Ken Park. I love it.—A.M.

***

It would be easy to say Ken Park (2002) is pointless. To say Harmony Korine wrote a mediocre script and some old guys turned it into a half-baked Kids. It never came out (Larry Clark says it was the music rights), but who cares? It would be easy to say Larry Clark and Ed Lachman pruriently exploited teenage bodies, having them do nasty things in nasty ways, usually naked, but with no transcendental meaning to any of it. It would be easy to say it’s a bad story.

As Marta Figlerowicz theorized in her book Flat Protagonists: modern, fully developed narrative centers on change. In the traditional tale, nobody grows, but in the novel, they’re transformed. You start out one way—usually, kind of a jerk, callous, you fail the marshmallow test—and by the end of it, you’re better. You get married. You’re an adult, etc. 

But the characters in Ken Park aren’t growing up. The criticism is true: there’s not much of a point to anything they’re doing. Harmony’s script totally flouts the principles of Good Screenwriting, again and again: the characters have almost no motivation, and there’s little consequence to anything they do. The film starts with a restless sequence of a skateboarder, freckled to the point of looking mutilated. He skates to the park. He sets up his camcorder at the top of the half-pipe. He shoots himself in the head. And then no one mentions him for the whole movie until the last ten minutes, when three protagonists—who’ve been put through wicked shit by their parents, and seem on the verge of a nightmare dénouement—emerge into an orange-lit, chilled-out spit-roast, and sit around playing twenty questions about a “guy who’s not here anymore.”

Does this mirror the violence and aimlessness of American life? Or is this a satire of a socially engaged movie, raising the tension and horror and then getting bored and dropping the mic? There’s no punishment for evildoers, and there’s no trauma for their victims. There’s Harmony’s amorality, sense of nonsense, and impressionistic thirst for cool images and lightning heat—but the film lacks his energy, his motion. It’s a Mannerist Kids. It’s a twisted imagination as shot by two photographers, with faces in unimpeachable, subtle gradients as kids jerk off into the void. 

Is that really America? For people my age, whose reality principle was formed around 2008, sure. We’ve always known that banks trick grandmas into subprime mortgages and our government bombs Arabs for oil and we’re going to have shittier houses, crappier marriages, and sicker bodies than our parents.The future’s for assholes, and hope’s for stockbrokers. 

Maybe turn-of-the-millenium films like this are kind of like those French theory-fictions from the eighties and nineties: Baudrillard on Vegas, Foucault on California, Virilio on New York. For all those French guys who faked citations, America was a land of projection, a land at the end of history, irradiated and throbbing with undirected energy, post-history, post-politics, post-protest. America wasn’t like that, not yet, not when they were writing. But it became it.

Ken Park seems prescient in that way. It’s hard to imagine someone my age seriously complaining about nihilism. It’s the new default, I guess, and seems to be reaching some weird metastage with zoomers, whose hysterical kiddie aesthetics candy coat the ultra-black pill. The grandson’s rage in Ken Park is great because there’s no reason he should be so mad; it’s just that his grandparents get to play doubles and kiss, and he has to jerk off to women’s tennis and choke himself.

Larry Clark movies sure get called pornographic for movies that are so gross to look at. The bodies are like Moche pottery, technically fucking, obviously humanoid, but weird as shit. These aren’t erotic films; they’re anti-erotic. In Marquis de Sade novels, people chug coffee during the orgies, struggling to stay awake. It’s like that here, as it is in my favorite Larry Clark film, the casting-couch Impaled: sex is a Bataan Death March, and it’s not going to save you. And isn’t that right? Isn’t sex, and getting stoned, and scrolling, all just an ostensibly enjoyable, actually excruciating way to wait out the disaster?

The problem with Ken Park isn’t that it’s boring. The problem is that people do bad things but don’t get punished. In the era of the Code, characters couldn’t rob banks and get away with it; in the era of Content, characters can’t do anything and get away with it. But in the world of Ken Park, there is no God and there are no answers. If you go down on your girlfriend’s mom, and no one’s there to catch you, did you do anything wrong?

Sure, this isn’t a sociologically accurate study of the American suburbs. Most dads aren’t molesting their sons. Most weirdos aren’t murdering their grandparents. Most Christians aren’t marrying their daughters. 

But it is emotionally accurate. Teenagers feel more than we do, touch disaster and deliverance on a daily basis in a way that dims out for us as we learn to inhabit the emotionally regulated blankness of optimal mental health. Most films have an interpretive screen, an organizing principle, but here there’s pure, piercing sensation. There’s no system. Shit just sucks.

And yet beauty remains. 

Like when the sociopath grandma-killer runs out of the house, and, out of nowhere, starts jumping rope with some little black girls. They’re nice to him. He’s nice to them. He’s a child again, this gangly husk with the needy eyes and pinched mouth. An innocent.

Like in that final scene. Shawn’s been fucking the MILF, Peaches has been marrying her dad, and Claude’s been running away from his molestor dad—and out of nowhere, they’re suddenly boning to the sugary but unsettling rhythm of The Shaggs’ “Who Are Parents”: Parents are the ones who will alway understand/Parents are the ones who really care. 

There was a girl at my high school who got spit-roasted at a party. It ended with her crying in the cum-caked sheets and getting called a Romanian cum silo for four years. But here, the threesome is beautiful. The kids are sweet to each other, sweet and giving and easy, chatting on the couch with Peaches spread across the boys’ knees, sun falling across their faces.  No one gets punished for fucking. They’re free.

So free you know it’s a fantasy, a farce, a fake. Happiness isn’t just around the corner, and it’s not coming just because you waited ninety-six minutes. 

Sucks, man.