Ken Park is the story of four teenagers in a not particularly affluent Californian town. No, five. Theyre sixteen: the opening music tells us this very clearly.
Some of them are skateboarders. We see one of them, all red hair and freckles, zooming along suburban streets to the skatepark. There, he sits, and we see his face scared and determined. He takes a videocamera and a gun from his rucksack and shoots himself.
This is the eponymous Ken Park, (Adam Chubbuck) and though hes referred to throughout the film we dont discover why he killed himself until the end.
Then we meet the four. They introduce each other. Shawn (James Bullard) is the savviest of these teenagers, a boy who keeps his eye on his younger brother while his single mum scrubs her kitchen and attempts, uselessly, to referee them.
Shawn has a girlfriend: blonde, pretty, classically Californian. But hes also sleeping with Rhonda (Maeve Quinlan) and shes his girlfriends mum. Its sex based on liking and lust but not, on her part, love. She is the experienced woman in this story; playing her part, good with her preschool daughter, organising family outings, inviting her daughters boyfriend over for a family meal. She thinks he and her teenage daughter make a cute couple. Shawn thinks he might be falling in love with her. The family meal is a minefield of unresolved tension.
Claude (Stephen Jaso) is a skateboarder like Ken Park. His Dad (Wade Williams) has been unemployed for months, his mum (Amanda Plummer) is hugely pregnant. They are all pleased about the new baby but his dad thinks Claude is a sissy, maybe a fairy. Hes not the son he wanted, a man like him, with muscles. His dad goes out boozing with a friend one night, arguing about picking up a young hooker. They dont, and when Wade comes home and his sleeping wife pushes him away he stumbles drunkenly into Claudes bedroom and starts to fumble in the shorts of the sleeping boy, who wakes up and pushes him away.
As the father falls, he slumps in a corner, mumbling 'nobody loves me.' Its a disturbing scene but in no way one which titillates or condones child abuse.
Tate (James Ransone) is the angriest kid. Hes been raised by doting, smothering grandparents who cant acknowledge how deeply troubled he is. They love him but cant listen to him. Tate downloads macabre pictures from the net and names them after adults he hates. We dont know what has happened to his parents. Tate is an isolate, reduced to talking with younger kids skipping rope in the street, exploding when his grandfather cheats at scrabble. He masturbates with a dressing gown belt around his neck, aroused by watching Martina Navratolova playing tennis.
Later he kills his grandparents, in a rage over the scrabble game. The scene is dealt with reasonably discretely by multiplex standards. From the police car, we hear his voice-over: 'I never once had a girl really close to me.'
And then there is Peaches (Tiffany Limos, a 22-yr-old actress). Her mother died when she was young, and her father (Julio Oscar Mechoso), is a fundamentalist Christian with some very weird visions. He has raised Peaches to fulfil his idealised image of her mother. When he finds her in bed with her boyfriend he beats them both, then dresses her in her mother's wedding dress and attempts to deprogram her.
For me this is the most painful and distressing story in Ken Park. But then, I had a fundamentalist childhood and a father who turned to stabbing the Bible, seeking guidance from random texts when my mother left him, and then tried to recreate her in those around him. We can have strong urges to guard and idealise the images of those we have lost in ways that can prevent us truly seeing our kids.
Each of us will bring our own contexts to Ken Park, as we do to all films.
This is a film which streams with sadness. I dont find it as powerful as Larry Clark and Harmony Korines first film, Kids - perhaps because some of the characters of the parents are too lightly sketched. Clarks snapshot style of story-telling doesnt work here in as integrated a way as Kids did. Nor does it have the adolescent exurberance in Kids: of teenage girls bonding as they tell swap experiences of sex, of the stumbling exuberance of a teenage party.
Instead, when the boys get together they talk, over a bong, of how to deal with their parents. Another kid tells about losing his father, from prison and kidney failure.
'Your dad may piss you off,' he counsels Claude, 'but at least you have a dad around to look out for you.'
This film is not pornography. Pornography is designed to arouse, deliberately divorced from emotional and social context.
This is a film about the various ways and contexts in which kids see adults using sex, and looking for their own values. Sex does have an emotional charge. Its about the many differences between loving sex and selfish sex, sex for angry relief, sex for curiosity, sex for affirmation. Sex in an age where the angry rantings of people on the Jerry Springer show play out as spectator sports.
Finally, Larry Clark is saying, teenagers these days turn to each other. But they are still longing for something more from their parents.
And Ken Park Because you cant legally see the film in Australia, Ive told the teenagers' stories in more detail than I would normally. Now Ill have to blow the ending.
Ken Park kills himself because his girlfriend is pregnant. Hes been trying to do the right thing, working to raise money for her. Two troubled kids sit on a park bench, and she tells him she doesnt want an abortion.
'How would you feel,' she asks the stricken boy, 'if your parents had aborted you'
Odd that we ban a film which asks this question.
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