Okay, so the actors play teens, they have sex with each other and anything else that moves, Larry Clark is a pedophile and he makes the same movie over and over again. In contrast Gus Van Sant is a genius, even though 80% of his movies are meandering, pretentious crap, and I'd give just about anything to get back all the time I've spent watching everything he's made since 'My Own Private Idaho.' I'd like to posit the reverse, and explore a realm where Larry Clark is the auteur director that all the film students want to emulate and Gus Van Sant is recognized as the chump Ed Wood of arthouse cinema. Let's test this hypothesis by contrasting how the two directors explore America's great slacker pasttime, skateboard culture.
Skateboard culture, and teen culture in general, is nothing new to Larry Clark. His photography explored outcasts, junkies and losers, and his first feature, 'Kids,' is a bonafide classic of independant cinema, focusing on a gang of teens who carouse the streets, smoke weed, skateboard, drink, and fuck. 'Another Day In Paradise' was a wild diversion, and it had a cameo by Clarence Carter whose performance of 'I'm Looking For A Fox' was a highlight of the film for me (although while we're on the topic of Clarence Carter, neglected soul great, I may have preferred something hilarious like 'Backdoor Santa,' 'I Got Caught (Makin' Love To Another Man's Wife),' or maybe even 'Strokin'). 'Bully' was another bleak teenage film, and 'Teenage Caveman' took Clark's schtick into science fiction territory. 'Ken Park' and 'Wassup Rockers,' on the other hand, bring him right back to his roots.
'Ken Park' is about a group of young friends, their relationships with one another, and their dysfunctional homes, where beatings are commonplace, and ever more terrible things are always a possibility. Unfortunately, the film was almost universally maligned by critics and condemned by censors for its graphic depictions of teenage sex. Not surprinsingly, those blinded by righteous outrage missed the sensitive, amateurish beauty of teenage lust as depicted in the film. 'Wassup Rockers,' while exploring similar territory, is a pseudo-doc featuring a group of Guatemalan skate-punks in LA, outcasts in their own neighborhood due to their tight pants and taste for hardcore punk, but outright aliens in posh Rodeo. The film chronicles a day in the lives of the Velasquez brothers with humour and realism, punctuated by disturbing scenes of racism and the innocence of young lovers.
Clark's characters, for all their confusion, their faults and insecurities, their misdirected anger and childishness, are real, three dimensional. Jonathan Velasquez's opening monologue ('and then... and then... and then...') in 'Wassup Rockers' is almost absurd in its sheer banality. Then we realize that even though the boys are growing up hard in a rough neighborhood, their concerns are as real and insignificant as those of the kids who live in every mall in America. Jonathan's desires are simple and universal: girls, bros, skateboards, music. In 'Ken Park', the character's desires are even more base - they want to fuck - but their concerns are in many ways bigger and more desperate. These kids are escaping domestic cruelty and abuse the only way they know how to: the base joy of sex is their coping mechanism, their therapeutic release. But their sexuality is pure. There's nothing degrading or dirty about the teens fooling around with each other (except for their scruffy clothes and greasy hair), even when one of the young boys eats out his girlfriend's mother (!). Like 'Citrus,' or just about any other song The Hold Steady have ever written, the viewer easily finds "Jesus in the clumsiness of (these) young and awkward lovers." If the sex is in anyway offensive or shocking, it's because we know that at the end of the day they must return to homes as hard and violent as their lovemaking is delicate and kind. Perhaps Ken Park, the ghost character whose demise hangs over the entire movie, was forced to his unlikely demise because for the first time, his teenage sexual fantasies resulted in adult consequences.
What truly separates Clark from his contemporaries, and especially Van Sant, is the verisimilitude of his works. Clark may be a pervert, but he doesn't pervert (!sorry!) his characters' true selves. In 'Ken Park' and 'Wassup Rockers' the dialogue feels easy and improvised, and Clark's stories are always loose, messy, inconclusive. In contrast to the mass of staid and tepid teenage melodramas, Clark recognizes that hyperbole and polish (clean scripts, nice sets, and polished actors are not to be found in his films) mask the true nature of adolescence. Instead, Clark gives us dirty streets, awkward sex, and scruffy, stinky non-actors, as if to say "pay heed -this is where the true drama of youth and its greatest tales are to be found."
'Paranoid Park,' on the other hand, is a crime against celluloid and adolescence. The repetitive structure of the film is interesting at first, and is probably meant to evoke the obsessive, confusing, circular reasoning of the teenage mind, but is ultimately neither illuminating nor terribly interesting. In contrast to Clark's non-actors, Van Sant's crew are outfitted in brand name clothing, spiffy haircuts and decals of cool. One similarity to Clark's films however, is the fact that Van Sant's kids can't act - which is not a compliment here. Mirroring the general trend of indie art, rock and style being absorbed into the mainstream, Van Sant's film, like 'Elephant' before it, is more cool than it is real. Sure, the narrative is non-traditional, but like skateboarding, non-linear narratives are no longer a crime.
And though the cinematography is at times striking, it seems as if Van Sant, rather than letting his characters simply live and breath, has surrounded them in artifice. The film's one saving grace are Van Sant's beautiful, slow-motion shots of skaters riding around bowls and ramps and zigzaging down in full pipes. Contrast these images with the Velasquez brothers crusing through gritty South Central locales, or wiping out on stairs outside a posh high school. No, beauty does not equal youth; and though Van Sant shows us a security guard diced in half on a train track, his main character's movement towards understanding seems contrived, too pretty, too complete.
Ken Park (Larry Clark): 8.5/10
Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark): 7.5/10
Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant): 3/10
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