Couch Festival – May 2005
The Kids Are Not Alright
By Jennifer Hearne

This month when it comes to kids, I just got a wake up call.  Literally. 

I just got a 6 A.M. phone call from the heartlands informing me that two of my headstrong Midwestern nieces are being shipped to my Southern California doorstep for the summer. Seems they are too much teen for their mama to handle.  It's been awhile since my own high school days, so I dutifully headed for the film vault to fish out some flicks tailor-made for troubled teens. But after all my research, I'm not so sure the films I found about kids are suitable viewing for kids.

Unexpectedly, my efforts to bridge the generation gap have led me to a renewed appreciation for the filmmakers who, with every passing decade, have been holding up bigger and bigger mirrors to the inner lives of kids.  Subsequently the reflections that matter most to me this month are the ones that have been trying to show us that The Kids Are Not Alright.

In Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore asked Marilyn Manson what he would say to the kids of Columbine.  Manson's thoughtful response was, "I wouldn't say a single word. I would listen to what they have to say. And that's what no one did."  On that note, top billing this month goes to the films that take an unflinching look at youth gone wild.

Prior to the fifties, movies about kids largely focused on youth not as they were but as parents wanted them to be.  As teens became significant ticket buyers a new genre of film evolved to satisfy this booming demographic.  Films began to offer viewpoints geared towards younger audiences - 1955's Rebel Without A Cause and The Blackboard Jungle offered an early empathy for teen angst.  Then along came The Bad Seed in 1956 and for the first time, mainstream audiences had to confront a new breed of problem child - more than unruly, the child as murderous villain had arrived.  

This disturbing new reality was one New Zealanders had already faced in 1954 when two Christchurch teenagers acted out the unthinkable.  The story of Pauline Parker, found guilty of matricide, along with her best friend and accomplice, Juliet Hulme, shocked the world but went untold onscreen until 1994's Heavenly Creatures.  Conceived and directed by Peter Jackson, Heavenly Creatures chronicled the surprisingly entertaining events that led up to the unusual case.  Relying on material straight from Pauline Parker's diary, Jackson offered us two high strung and engaging girls; gifted and misunderstood, with an almost homosexual dependence on each other. When the "unwholesome attachment" is threatened by their parents, their psychotic break with reality results in the killing of Pauline's mother.  Jackson brilliantly explores their skewed perspectives by giving faces to the inhabitants of Borovnia, Pauline and Juliet's elaborate fantasy world.  We are masterfully led in and out of their madness with ease - as a result, Pauline and Juliet come off as genius misfits, complex but very likable - when the murder is actually committed we can't believe they've actually gone through with it.  Perhaps more chilling than the renewed interest Heavenly Creatures brought to this case was the subsequent discovery that Juliet Hulme is still alive and world famous; her public knows her now as Anne Perry, the mystery writer.     

With the 60s came huge breakthroughs in all artistic mediums that fueled the youth revolution.  By the seventies teen violence was becoming more and more extreme as seen in 1972's A Clockwork Orange, 1973's Badlands and 1975's Switchblade Sisters.  Teen prostitution became topical via 1976's Taxi Driver and 1978's Pretty Baby.  My favorite onscreen statement of that decade however is probably the one that received the least attention, 1979's Over The Edge.

Over The Edge is noteworthy, not because it was Matt Dillon's film debut, but because its message was a warning to the herds of parents trading city life for planned communities without a thought as to how their kids were being affected by these unnatural new environments that gave them nowhere to go and nothing to do.  Based on a real life instance of teen anarchy, the writers of Over The Edge actually interviewed the kids who'd been involved in the Foster City, CA incident before completing their script - at the time Foster City held the record for the highest rate of teen vandalism in the United States.  Unknowns were cast as the film's leads in order to give the project more credibility. The excellent and timely soundtrack, fueled by artists like Cheap Trick, The Cars and Van Halen, gave audible clues that this was a film for the kids, not against them. The result was a wholly believable and frightening look at what happens to the fictional community of New Granada - a suburb that planned everything except adequate outlets for its stranded teen population.

Unfortunately Over The Edge was shelved for two years - finally released in '81, it was so hard to categorize that it never garnered the publicity it deserved. Today its status as a cult classic endures partly because the truth it told was prophetic but also because it is often lauded as Kurt Cobain's favorite film.

Ignoring the important release of the 1981 German film Christiane F, about a fourteen year old junkie who becomes a prostitute to pay for her habit, the 1980s seemed to mark the beginning of an artistic step backward in American film culture.  Despite the dawn of music television, a clear trend toward artistic conservatism took hold.  Yuppies epitomized the new American dream and it was more fashionable to be a consumer than a thinker.  Kids were responding to movies where the central themes dealt with partying, getting popular or getting laid.  Compared to previous decades, our box office genre of choice in the 80s seemed to be "teen lite."  Even "teen dark" films like 1989's Heathers were based on the premise that American kids enjoyed a certain standard of middle class, suburban living.  Documentary and independent filmmakers kept their eyes and ears to the ground and became the new, real mirrors of the culture.  Of this period, Streetwise, a 1985 documentary stands out as one of the most important teen films of all time.

Twenty years after its debut, Streetwise's unprecedented focus on America's throwaway youth is still haunting.  Streetwise began as famed photographer Mary Ellen Mark's photo essay about Seattle's street kids.  Incongruous with a decade that celebrated greed and the pursuit of wealth, the faces of Mark's subjects were disturbing enough to inspire Mark and husband Martin Bell to film a forgotten world right under our noses; a world where hell really is for children. The daily hardships that homeless kids endure are graphically depicted - by thirteen, most of them have a working knowledge of panhandling, dumpster diving, hustling, addiction and prostitution.  Mark's children have everything going against them but are not easy to stereotype - the streets appear to be home to just as many products of good homes as there are of bad homes, or no homes, leaving us to wonder when the American dream became such a nightmare.  

Picking up the thread, 2001's Children Underground informs us that throwaway youth are not exclusive to the United States. A subway in Bucharest is the setting for this harrowing look at five of the thousands of Romanian children who'd prefer to beg on the streets than go home. Focusing on the same situations brought up in Streetwise, Children Underground’s director Edet Belzberg holds the Romanian government accountable for the fallout of her nation's ban on abortion and birth control.  Her principal subjects are a family of sorts; the oldest, Cristina, liberated herself from an orphanage and knows she will be safe only if people think she is male. To this end she shaves her head, moves and speaks like a boy and disciplines the younger kids like a tyrannical mother hen. She especially looks out for Macarena, a 14 year old who sniffs Aurolac whenever she can.  In a rare moment of lucidity, Macarena says she gets high to forget how hungry she is. Mihai, the middle child in the "family" is a repeat runaway, a boy who admits his family loves him but finds the violence of the streets more tolerable than living with his father.  Before film's end we learn that he is deliberately thrown from a window by older street children resulting in a coma that ironically qualifies him for government funded shelter. The youngest children, Ana and Marian are siblings aged 10 and 7, still young and cute enough for social workers to take an interest in reforming them.  When Ana and Marian are taken to shelter by a nun who rejects Macarena, the 14 year old cries because she is too old.  She bitterly complains to Belzberg that Ana will get a bath and new clothes, not her.  Not surprising is the terrible wisdom the kids have earned from the street - they've been to hell and back - but when we see how often they use paint to escape reality we can only wonder if there is any hope at all for them.  And mourn the loss of their potential. Both films raise a myriad of questions but the most important might be the one we're ashamed to ask: when these street people cease to be kids will we still give a shit about them?  That is, if we even care about them now.

Fans of absurd teen comedies might have happily spent their lives in denial if the 1990s hadn't exploded with films like 1991's My Own Private Idaho, 1995's Basketball Diaries and 1998's American History X.  But themes of drugs and violence were becoming cliché until 1995's Kids made the AIDS crisis the most important teen issue of the decade. Tracing the HIV epidemic to its new carriers: careless sexually active kids, screenwriter Harmony Korine made it clear that the new teen (even preteen!) problem was mortality. 

When 1997's Gummo followed with its bleak landscape of bizarre American children lacking in direction or conscience, Korine's fans celebrated his realism while his harshest critics simultaneously denounced his nihilism.  Given Korine's remarkable achievements while still a youth - he had penned Kids by age twenty two - I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. But no matter what your perceptions of his messages are - whether he's showing us a worst case scenario or a situation that, by the time you are aware of it is already out of control, the bottom line is that he IS showing it to us and it is up to us to decide what to do with his information.

1996's Freeway also marked a changing of the guard with its extreme, outstanding take on the Red Riding Hood story.  Vanessa Lutz, an amoral teenager who lacks impulse control is on her way to Grandma's (because mom was arrested for prostitution and Vanessa wants to avoid getting lost in the foster care system where she has already been repeatedly molested), but before she can get there she will have to outsmart the I-5 serial killer, Bob Wolverton.  Her boyfriend Chopper cannot travel with her but he gives her the gift of his gun, leaving himself defenseless. He is shot in a drive by just moments after Vanessa departs.  Bob, posing as a child therapist, picks Vanessa up after her car predictably breaks down on the freeway.  When Bob tries to kill Vanessa, she capably defends herself and leaves him for dead.  But because he is a professional and she is a "garbage person," Vanessa is sent to juvenile hall.  In spite of her illiteracy and lack of positive role models, Vanessa is street smart and resourceful.  She manages to fend off lesbian and chola aggression and escape to Grandma's after all.  Unfortunately Bob has gotten there first and Grandma has been stripped and strangled.  By movie's end, however, the cops who finally see Vanessa's side of the story arrive in time to have the last laugh with her.  

As a social statement about all the negativity and hypocrisy that modern kids take in stride, Freeway is hilarious, feminist, sharp as knives edgy and explicit.  Reese Witherspoon takes on the character of Vanessa with a blend of humor and pathos so balanced that we "get" the brilliance of this modern fractured fairy tale.  As the predatory Bob, Keifer Sutherland is perfectly cast as the duplicitous villain while Brooke Shields showed us what a good sport she could be with her appearance as Bob's squeaky clean Orange County wife, the kind of woman who wants to see teen delinquents like Vanessa Lutz locked up for life, all the while oblivious to the shed full of kiddie porn Bob locks up in their outwardly pristine shed.       

Keeping with our theme this month, the most volatile film of the new millennium might be 2002's City of God.  Based on Paulo Lin's biography about his childhood in the Rio De Janeiro slums, the City of God sets the bar for youth violence - be forewarned that this is a film that spotlights kids shooting kids.  When the film's young narrator, Rocket, describes his Brazilian mean streets you wonder how anyone could survive there without succumbing to a life of crime.  Rocket's story is ultimately optimistic - in spite of all that he has lived through Rocket's motto seems to be "if you can't beat them, take photos of them" - Rocket's ticket out of the hell of poverty, youth mortality and drug lords will be his camera.    

I'm not without a sense of humor this month - it's just that I feel about mindless teen films the way I do about dog shit - it stinks and you really have to watch where you step.  But in the yawning backyard of mainstream filmdom, it doesn't look as if we'll ever be able to shovel it all out.  I guess I don't really mind where the studios let their dogs shit as long as it's not on my couch.

With that in mind, I'm grateful to be living in this age of information where there's never been a better time to tune in to what kids have to say.  When the nieces arrive this summer things won't be so heavy - sure, we'll be paying a lot of attention to what John Hughes, Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling have to say - middle and upper class voices are just as important as lower class.  But economics aside, when it comes to bumps in the road, it is folly to ignore the increasing numbers of filmmakers who are portraying kids as they are, not as we wish they would be.  For this reason, our final couch entry might be the most relevant teen film yet.  

When it comes to sordid depictions of derailed youth (see My Own Private Idaho and To Die For), Gus Van Sant is always quick to fashion edgy current events into social statements.  In 2003's Elephant he is still at the top of his game. Because it is hard to describe Elephant without exposing it's plot, it simply seems fairer to suggest that with this movie, Gus Van Sant has brought a metaphorical elephant into your living room and you are left to wonder how it got there and what to do with it.  At only 81 minutes, Van Sant is not asking for a lot of your time, just your attention. Any messages or conclusions in this film are deliberately enigmatic. With the camera following different groups of kids on a single, ordinary high school day the viewer is prompted to just watch what's happening without any expectations. The images of Van Sant's children are both beautiful and grim; when we see flocks of them moving through the hallways and listen to what they are saying we aren't sure if we are observing friend or foe. The classical music we hear should be reassuring but only adds to the sense of impending dread. When we finally figure out where the plot is heading, we aren't sure if we're watching drama or horror.

Knowing how Elephant ends prompts me to compare it to “Wheat Field With Crows,” a significant painting by Van Gogh, one in which we are looking at a golden landscape marred by harbingers of death. About his later works, Van Gogh said "They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and loneliness."  I get the impression that with Elephant, Gus Van Sant might be saying exactly the same thing.

Next month: with June comes Father's Day - we'll be asking the big screen WHO'S YOUR DADDY? - a look at famous father figures in film.