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Larry Clark
By Caroline RyderPhoto By Dan Monick
When director Larry Clark was a teenager, people in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, still liked to pretend everything was peachy behind their white picket fences. Even though the kids were mindlessly fucking and getting messed up on drugs, it wasn’t something that was discussed—until Clark got his camera out. He spent eight years photographing himself and his outlaw buddies having sex, shooting up methamphetamines (one of them while pregnant), and looking bored, and published the grainy black-and-white images in his groundbreaking 1971 book, Tulsa. “Those were very repressed times,” says Clark, now 63, whose father was a professional baby photographer. “I knew a girl who had five brothers who all fucked her, but no one did anything about it. Kids would come into school with black eyes because their parents were beating them up. So I started photographing things that weren’t supposed to be going on. It was like visual anthropology.”
Unapologetically graphic, Tulsa was a smack in the face for Middle America. He followed it up with another, even more extreme, photographic collection, Teenage Lust. One image shows a young girl on acid, eyes glazed and legs splayed as she’s being fucked senseless by one boy, his friend watching and waiting for his turn. In lowercase type, Clark writes about his childhood, about “the fat girl next door who gave me blowjobs after school and i treated her mean and told all my pals. we kept count up to about three hundred the times we fucked her in the eighth grade. i got the crabs from babs. albert who said ‘no i’m first, she’s my sister.’” Long before Gus Van Sant and Nan Goldin came on the scene, Larry Clark was saying “fuck you” to parents under the naïve illusion that the kids were alright.
His books earned him a cult, art-house following, with Martin Scorsese citing Clark’s work as a primary influence for the film Taxi Driver, Francis Ford Coppola for Rumble Fish, and Gus Van Sant for Drugstore Cowboy. But it wasn’t until Clark moved into moviemaking himself that his bleak wake-up call was brought to the masses, most famously in 1995 in his first movie, Kids, an unshakably vivid Teenage Lust on celluloid. None of the cast, which included Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and Justin Pierce, had ever acted before. Clark found them by befriending skater kids in Manhattan, one of whom, Harmony Korine, became his collaborator and wrote the dialogue to the movie. The result is a brutal piece of filmmaking, with no happy ending, no moral. “People ask me why I do this,” says Clark. “Well, it’s because I don’t believe in letting the audience off the hook. Good cinema pulls you into a world, good or bad. You’re in there with them. You relate to the human experience. And that’s all I am trying to do when I make films.”
He followed up Kids with five more movies, all but one (Another Day in Paradise) documenting adolescent subcultures. His most recent is Wassup Rockers, which follows a group of Salvadorian skater punks from South Central Los Angeles who hook up with a pair of Beverly Hills babes along the way. Again, none of the kids are professional actors – Clark met them at a Hollywood skate spot three days after moving from New York in 2003. His 2001 film Bully tells the true-life tale of a group of bored Florida teens who fuck a lot and murder one of their own. After being sent a copy of Bully, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sent Clark a fax simply saying, “Our advice to America is: Hide your children.” But his most shocking movie to date has been Ken Park, which packs a formidable X-rated teen punch as well. “With my movies, it’s either love or hate,” says Clark. “They either say, ‘This is a masterpiece’ or ‘This is porno shit awful crap.’ One writer said I should be put in jail after he saw Ken Park. I loved that. Because as an artist I feel that if everybody likes my work then something’s wrong.”
A scene in Ken Park where a teenage boy is molested by his drunken stepfather was the most difficult thing he has had to film in his whole career, says Clark. In it, the dad, who up to that point we have seen beating up his stepson, becomes eerily tender as he tugs gently on his sleeping kid’s shorts and kisses him. “That actually happened to a friend of mine,” says Clark. “But it was incredibly hard to film because we had no other point of reference. We had to figure out how to make it look real. There’s a tremendous emotional price that you pay for that.”
The movie ends with the three young protagonists having a ménage à trois. Ironically, this portrayal of teen group sex provides the sweetest moments in the movie. It is also, like most of the sex scenes in his movies, very realistic. So is there ever any actual on-set penetration in his films? “When people ask me that question, I say, ‘What do you think?’ But the truth is no, there isn’t. I’m a visual artist, and there are camera angles that you can use to make it look real.” Ken Park is as yet unreleased in the U.S. and the U.K. due to clearance issues with the soundtrack.
Critics have branded his work as exploitative and pornographic, but there’s no doubt that his young muses have almost always benefited from the Larry Clark effect. Sevigny and Dawson are now major stars. Some of the kids in Wassup Rockers have already been approached by skate companies and conducted shoots with Vogue. Which leaves us with this question: Is Larry Clark merely a pied piper with a creepy teen obsession, repeatedly reliving his own misspent youth through his young protégés? Or is he one of the few artists brave enough to show us what really goes on when kids in America close their bedroom doors? “At the end of the day, what I show is real life,” he says. “I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking.”