First Time
Larry Clark makes films by getting wrecked teenagers to destroy themselves on camera. Kids, his debut, is the one that cemented this approach—real kids, real sex, real cocaine, real collapse, with a script so thin it barely functions. Provocation as method, exploitation depending on who’s doing the judging, and I can’t unhear or unsee any of it, which I suspect was the entire point.
I was thirteen when I first watched it. Maybe fourteen—doesn’t matter, I remember everything else about that day too clearly to doubt the rest. I walked in as a kid and walked out as something that wasn’t quite a kid anymore. AIDS. Rape. The kind of casual violence that kills you slowly or quickly depending on luck. All of it suddenly real, not theoretical, not something that happened in news reports. Just what could happen. What did happen. The film spent ninety minutes making clear that my innocence was borrowed and now it was time to return it.
Certain moments have never left. A disabled man singing to himself on the subway, barely audible, barely present. Chloe Sevigny unconscious while Justin Pierce’s character takes what he wants—I don’t fully understand why that scene wired itself into me the way it did, why it tangled sex and horror together in my head and left them stuck. Leo Fitzpatrick spreading infection the way some people spread jokes, knowing better and not caring. These images have weight. They don’t fade.
By the mid-’90s, enough governments had tried to ban or restrict it that the film developed this forbidden-fruit mystique. Obscene. Corrupting. The usual guardianship. And then the film festivals picked it up, critics championed it, and it got folded into the canon of Important Films. Which is maybe right and maybe misses everything—Kids doesn’t feel honored by that machinery. It’s a threat in a suit now, but it was scarier when it was just a threat.
So yeah, Larry Clark broke something open in me that’s never quite sealed again, which I think was exactly what he meant to do. Kids will always be my first time in that particular way—not sex or drugs, but the moment I learned that art could genuinely hurt you, genuinely change you, if it was willing to go that far. Not sure if I’m grateful for that or just stuck with it. Probably both. Probably neither.