Funny I made a post here and it's gone. Did some trigger-happy mod delete it? Couldn't you at least have the courtesy to say "This post was deleted by an administrator" or whatever the message is?
My answer, again, to the thread is, yes, individually, some kids' lives are similar to the film. There are indeed teen suicides, pregnancy, and "experimentation" with things such as auto-erotic asphyxiation.
But nowhere in the world does everything that happens in the film could happen within the same proximity of people in the exact same neighborhood. Otherwise it's an abberation. If the movie treated the events as such then I might give it a fairer shake, but it tries so hard to say "this is REAL LIFE man this is TEEN REALITY" that I just want to tell the movie to piss right off. Gummo, as much as I hate that movie, at least didn't pretend that its strange world was anything but.
Like I said, individually, cases as shown in the movie happen. But often when they do happen it's newsworthy, at a local level if nothing else because it's not exactly representative of an average teen's everyday ritual. When you throw all of that into one concentrated area among one group of friends within the same few days or week then my suspension of disbelief is ravaged and eaten by hordes of flying yeti pigmen demons who just opened up a black hole in the earth leading straight to Rainbow Technicolor Hell where Satan himself is actually an anthropomorphic glass of grapefruit juice who communicates via vuvuzela. I mean a kid commits suicide by gunshot to the head in a public park with a camcorder with a creepy smile on his face, another kid is having sexual relations with his girlfriend's MILF of a mother, another has a hysterically religious father who beats up kids tied to beds in their underwear then proceeds to "marry" their daughter to atone for her sins or some *beep* another has your average abusive drunk of a father who turns out, *GASP* to also be an incestuous pedophile! Another does the whole masturbating while hanging thing as I mentioned then proceeds to stab his grandparents to death while nude, blood-splattered and with a hard-on as he so delightfully explains, all culminating in a friends-with-benefits three-way where everyone is a sexual dynamo bordering on porno professional without the slightest bit of awkwardness, and unprotected at that (really, with the detail they show you can see nobody's wearing a condom, funny coming from Larry "I did a movie showing the dangers of kids getting AIDS from unprotected sex!" Clark). And teen pregnancy, that's probably the most normal part of the movie. And in case I haven't spelled it out clearly enough already, all of this happens within the same few days, among the same group of friends in the same town for no reason whatsoever other than that Larry Clark wants to "shock" people into a nonexistent reality dressed up as such, or a bizarre reality that doesn't acknowledge that these coincidental flights of fancy are in fact bizarre or coincidental. It makes Paul Haggis' Crash look like a Ken Loach film in terms of social realism.
The movie from what I read takes place in Visalia, CA. As OanCitizen wondered, "Is there something in the water here?" That's the only justification for the whole story and structure of the movie and its characters. Some of that bad Gummo and Trash Humpers water trickled down into this nice little suburban town causing a singularity where everything we know about reality and human psychology to break down and shatter like tiny bits of glass.
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