by MATTHEW HAYS

It is a question photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark says he’s heard too many times to count. After his directorial debut, Kids, hit screens in ’95 and caused an international sensation, enthusiasts asked, “Where are the parents?”

“I got that a lot,” says Clark, trying to chill out in a Toronto eatery while in the midst of a whirlwind festival tour. Clark is looking back on the bizarre genesis of his latest feature, Ken Park, something that actually predated Kids, the feature that first brought him to international acclaim on the film circuit.

That film, of course, exposed a side of teen life many didn’t want to see. Children were seen in unblinking glimpses of sexual scenarios, including rape, and many critics and audiences cried foul, saying Clark (and then-teenaged screenwriter Harmony Korine) were trading in prurient exploitation of the nastiest order. Clark shot back that the vignettes brought to life in Kids were in fact drawn from his own experiences with kids, and that Korine also had first-person experience with much of what they’d placed on the big screen.

Now, Clark and co-director Ed Lachman have answered that where-are-the-parents question with Ken Park. For Clark enthusiasts (and I count myself among them), the film is another thrilling gaze into a charged alternate—if arguably often distorted—reality. The kids in this film are held back emotionally, stunted, it seems, by their tortured older generation, a group of damaged, sometimes predatory parental figures who neglect, slap, screw and torment their own offspring. It’s not a pretty picture, but given Clark’s track record, that’s hardly a shocker.

Contentious content

What’s intriguing about this picture is that it doesn’t play like mere exploitation, despite the sleaze factor. Ken Park manages transcendent moments of poignance, offering its characters—both child and adult—enough range and dimension to make them startlingly ambiguous culprits. In the midst of all this, we get some in-your-face representations of oral sex, incest, auto-asphyxiation, masturbation, and some intensely violent scenes, among various other things. (Disney had nothing whatsoever to do with this film, if that question happened to be entering your mind.) The film follows an ensemble of characters, including the title’s namesake, as they attempt to survive through the brutal hell of existing in a soulless ’burb.

The film took a long time to get moving, and considering its content, that’s probably the only thing about Ken Park that’s not so shocking. Clark and Lachman met, pre-Kids, in Austria, at an art show where Clark was showing some of his photography. “There was a dinner where I got to sit next to Larry,” recalls Lachman. At the time, Clark was a celebrated photographer with no movie track record. Lachman was working successfully as a cinematographer, having shot such arthouse hits as Union City, Desperately Seeking Susan and True Stories. “I told him how important Tulsa [Clark’s landmark collection of photos of teenagers] had been to me. I told him that his books had always been like films to me, they told stories in between the images. I asked him if he’d ever wanted to make a film. And he said, ‘Yeah, man, I’ve always wanted to, but how do you do that?’ And I said, ‘It’s easy, just hang out with me!’ I asked if he’d ever kept a diary of his own experiences or about all these people he’d met. Then we found out we were both into skateboarding.”

Dream team

Soon enough, Clark brought Harmony Korine on board. The two had met, as legend has it, in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. “Oddly enough, I’d met Harmony as well, because he’d worked as a PA on Light Sleeper. He seemed like a great fit, so he wrote it. It’s been a long haul, with Larry having made several films in the meantime. But I have to say it was a dream collaboration, because Larry and I are both photographers. So much of the film is seen on an observational level, in a sense that it’s visual grammar that’s about behaviour.” Though he’s now describing it as a dream, the creation of Ken Park was often quite nightmarish, by many accounts. The team became so fraught with frustration over its making that Clark and Lachman actually ended up not speaking to one another—for several years. They eventually mended fences, intent upon finishing the project. Now there have been widely circulated stories suggesting Clark and Korine are no longer on speaking terms, something Lachman says isn’t so. “Korine is in England now, pursuing various other things,” the cinematographer-director tells me. “He did a great job on this film.”

While it seems a natural continuum in the Clark oeuvre, Ken Park does present a significant stylistic shift. “Kids was done in a documentary style,” says Clark. “A lot of people still think that film is a documentary, which is amazing. That was the way I wanted it to be, I wanted it to be as though the film was eavesdropping. This film was the opposite, in many respects. We wanted to shoot Ken Park like a European or old-school Hollywood film. There shouldn’t be any way for the audience to get off the hook, to dismiss the film as some shaky-camera Beatnik film. It should be a classical, beautiful film that will force the audience to confront the subject matter.”

Lachman agrees, saying hand-held camera work has been over-used. “I felt this so-called reality-based approach which has become fashionably called Dogma style has been overly misused even in Hollywood style stories to make the statement in a narrative form that their stories have an emotional realism. We see this style today in commercials and fashion photography, which I call ‘gritty chic.’ I find it offensive, since my background came out of documentaries where there was a pragmatic necessity to tell our stories this way with a small crew and camera. Form should never replace content or be used to create the credibility of content.”

Family affairs

Clark says this move away from hand-held camera work effectively forces audiences to face the proverbial music. “Then it comes down to the content,” he explains. “It’s about surviving the family, and we all have to survive the family. We all have to move on no matter what kind of family we’re from. At the end of the film the idea was to show that these kids have each other, and without that they probably wouldn’t survive.”

Whoa, wait a second: is Clark trying to suggest this film is ultimately uplifting? “Yes, I find the ending of the film uplifting. You see films about kids who are really damaged emotionally and physically and then what happens to them is such a bummer. I wanted to show that some of these kids are going to make it—not all of them, but some. The parents are using the kids in the most inappropriate ways, to use and abuse the kids due to their own insecurities and complexes. At the same time I wanted to humanize everyone, parents included.”

But some parents just might not understand this film, with a sexual frankness very rarely seen on non-porn screens. Clark has already heard the hostile arguments, ad nauseam, about charges of sleaze and reckless moral abandon, about cinematic-taboo-breaking that will poison young minds. Lachman has a response: “What I’m concerned about is why a six year old goes into a school and shoots another classmate, or why a 13 year old burns down a house and kills their own father. Why is there such anger and violence among children? If this film can open up these questions, I think that’s a good thing. It shouldn’t really revolve simply around sexuality, but the violence.

“Hollywood films tend to rely on a three-act narrative with emotional catharsis for a solution to the problem. That’s not the way life is. People can’t live up to those standards. We wanted to have a non-linear structure that didn’t resolve those kinds of questions. We wanted to raise questions, not offer pat answers.”

And there are certainly no pat answers within Ken Park, an audacity that will make it a difficult film to see at your local megaplex. The filmmakers have decided to forgo trying to get a rating; as an unrated film, that translates to distribution headaches about where it can and can’t get screened. Lachman says, however, that with the hefty festival buzz generated at Telluride, Venice and Toronto added to the name recognition attached to Korine and Clark, he’s confident the film will “find its own audience.”

And Clark insists that within the tortuous images of sex and violence, Ken Park has the potential to redeem. “As you get older it’s sometimes harder to accept your limitations, or you can slip into denial. You create a dark side for yourself to deal with your limitations, and that can manifest itself in self-destructive behaviour. In the adults, we depict their unfulfilment and emotional needs being taken out on their children. The adolescents are simply trying to co-exist within the adult world.

“If we open up the door to see that we are not alone in our struggle to deal with our own fears and unhappiness, maybe the doors we live behind won’t be so closed.” :

Ken Park has its Montreal premiere
as part of the 31st annual New Film Festival,
which screens from Oct. 10–20

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