Still Banned in Some Territories
Ken Park opens with a boy skating to a park, setting up his camera on a tripod, and shooting himself in the head. Larry Clark doesn’t ease you in. He never eased you in—not in Kids, not in Bully—but Ken Park, from 2002, is the one where he figured out what he was actually doing and did it with something approaching mastery.
Co-directed with cinematographer Edward Lachman and written by Harmony Korine, the film follows four teenagers in a small nowhere town between Los Angeles and Fresno—three boys and a girl, all friends, all caught inside versions of the same suburban American nightmare. Domestic violence. Incest. A religiosity so performatively devout it curdles into menace. Murder. A pervasive blankness that never resolves into meaning. Lachman’s photography is exact and beautiful in the way that makes it impossible to dismiss what it’s showing you—the images are too good-looking to look away from, which is the cruelest possible formal choice.
What separates Ken Park from Clark’s earlier work is how it treats sex. In Kids, sexuality was almost purely damage. Here it becomes something more complicated—sometimes honest, occasionally tender, particularly in the relationship between Shawn and the older Rhonda. Clark cleared away the usual erotic dread and gave some of his characters a sexuality that simply exists, unburdened by consequence, which in the context of everything else happening in this film reads as almost radical. It’s his most cinematically accomplished work, and the one that remains hardest to see, still restricted or banned in several countries seventeen years on.
Designer Ava Nirui—who built a reputation working in the space between homage and bootleg, and who has collaborated with Marc Jacobs—put together a small capsule collection with Clark drawn directly from the film. The focus lands on Shawn and Rhonda’s liaison, alongside stills, text, and at least one piece of critical writing. It’s exactly the right scale for the subject: a cult film doesn’t need a full merchandise program, just something precise and knowing from people who understand what they’re touching.