The one good thing that this quarantine has done for me mentally is that it has gotten me to watch/re-watch many movies. With no new movies in theaters including the delay of the anticipated films Wonder Woman: 1984, A Quiet Place II, The New Mutants, among many others, I needed to revert to my movie watch-list and old favorites. This has dampened my mood, but not ruined my schedule of watching movies. Just today I decided last-minute to watch 1995’s Mallrats and 1999’s Dogma by Kevin Smith, but more on those in a future article. Last week was my most active week due to my viewing of four movies on April 4th. These films were all first-time watches: The Myth of the American Sleepover, Kids, Gummo, and Ichi the Killer.
I wanted to reflect on two of these movies, both written by the polarizing Harmony Korine: 1995’s Kids, which was his first screenplay that he wrote at age 19, and 1997’s Gummo, his directorial debut which released theatrically when Korine was only 24 years old.
Kids was famously controversial upon its release in 1995 with many critics labeling it a revelation of American cinema, but others claiming it was nothing more than exploitative trash. One of the harshest reviews of the film came from Rita Kempley of The Washington Post in which she claimed, “Except for pedophiles, it’s hard to imagine who’ll be drawn to this irresponsible Little Bo Peep show.” The film was famously released without a rating, and the film was even given an NC-17 by the MPAA. Surprisingly, the MPAA advised the director, Larry Clark, to not edit the film down for an R rating so that the film wouldn’t lose its power. This film couldn’t have been released with many mature themes including assault, heavy drug use, rape, and STDs all within people under the age of 18, some even 12 years old, with just an R rating. In general, Kids could not have been released today due to the film’s incredibly dark material. The film opens up with the protagonist, 17 year old Telly, in bed with a 12 year old girl. After this, he meets up with his friend Casper to walk through New York City and brag about how “deflowering” young girls is much superior than just having sex with experienced girls. The heavy scenario pulls viewers in with a sense of dread and disgust, and carries on throughout the rest of the film. One of the most prevalent examples being how sexually active teenage boys and girls discuss sex. The boys speak more in a bragging manner when discussing how girls finish for them, but for the girls it is more about a body-count than actual satisfaction. Even though the coming of age and slice of life genres of dramatic films had been around for years before Kids including with the filmography of Robert Altman and even Richard Linklater’s early 1990s works Slacker and Dazed and Confused, prior films had never shown America’s youth in the way that Korine’s vision did. Even 25 years after its theatrical release, the shocking conclusion of the film involving Casper and a half-passed out teenage girl diagnosed with AIDS was able to make my jaw drop. I can’t even begin to imagine what was going through the heads of adults, and even kids, in 1995 that witnessed this film firsthand. The incendiary response that the film received was without a doubt well-warranted, but it also shows us how life, and films showing everyday life, should provoke and shock people. Kids is not a complete fantasy, rather it is meant to be an eye-opener that displays the lives of troubled youth in urban settings. This style of film-making was eye-opening, but it still could not prepare critics for Gummo.
Gummo did not receive the mixed response that Kids received 2 years prior, instead it received overwhelming hate from critics upon release. Even on Metacritic, an aggregate media scoring site, only one critic gave the film a positive review. Critics just saw Gummo as a self-masturbatory, nihilistic, and overall ugly movie that had less to say than Korine had originally thought. Don’t get me wrong I can understand the hate that this movie received, especially for how bombastic it was for a 1997 release, but viewing the film through the lens of a film enthusiast 23 years after its original release genuinely kept me enthralled from beginning to end. One could easily criticize the film for having a pessimistic view of humanity by focusing on people through a perspective akin to gawkers at a freak-show, but I was able to see the genuine beauty of the ugliness presented throughout the film’s uncomfortable entirety. Finding beauty in the ugly might seem like an oxymoron, but if a director can genuinely get under my skin and provoke me then he has achieved something wonderful. From a cinematography viewpoint, the composition of the film is really impressive so it is not like Harmony Korine is going for cheap shock. He knows what he is doing by presenting this side of America that we choose to ignore for how uncomfortable, and even guilty, that it can make us feel. This in and of itself is truly beautiful and ingenious. The main characters of the film walk through a dirty wasteland, sell cats, drown cats, and even beat cats that hang by a rope in order to survive/entertain themselves. If that last sentence pissed you off, then it just goes to show that Harmony Korine succeeded. It also shows that if you are a big cat person, you should skip some parts of this film. One of the rougher criticisms that attacked Gummo when it came out was written by Mark Carao of Chicago Tribune who stated, “Perhaps Korine thinks he’s getting at some harsh truth in showing troubled youngsters running amok without positive adult role models, but that’s malarkey. There’s a difference between unblinkingly observing reality and wallowing in degeneracy.” As a supporter of the film, I have to disagree with Carao’s review since it seems clear to me that Korine is approaching this subject at a very darkly humorous standpoint since that would have been the most effective method. If Korine made this film in a very straightforward manner, it would come off as bland and preachy. By showing these characters in an off-kilter manner, he has made a signature style for himself and made something undeniably unique.
Unfortunately, movies of the 21st century have not followed in the footsteps of Kids and Gummo, instead the slice of life/coming of age films we get now are glorified and clean. These modern films include Edge of Seventeen, Booksmart, Lady Bird, and Mid90s. While all these films are good in their own right, viewing the early works of Harmony Korine just left me wanting more and made me see some of these modern films in a more pessimistic way for how much more they could be. I strongly urge anyone that wants to be provoked and be pushed to see the coming of age genre differently to check these films out as soon as possible. As for myself, I will be revisiting these films very soon and I am very confident that I will appreciate them even more after writing this piece.