Extreme Damage
Elle Nash on destruction, deconstruction, and Harmony Korine’s Kids.
Kids was the first time I saw kids doing what I was doing on TV. I was seventeen when I watched it — working my way through the tail end of a weed habit, stealing prescription pills, trying to figure out love with my girlfriends. I learned that people found the film shocking, which was shocking to us. To us it was life.
The first time I got an HIV test was in high school. That was when I learned fooling around with my friends was risky. That cocaine made it worse. The nurse asked me how many sexual partners I’d had. I said, I don’t know. Four or five? They were girls. I was sixteen.
Harmony Korine was nineteen when he wrote Kids. The cast was made up of teenagers with little to no acting experience, on purpose, to get at the heart of what it means to be a teenager, in front of a camera the way you’re in front of the world. Unrehearsed.
In Kids there are:
- Telly, a self-described virgin surgeon, who spends the movie spreading HIV to the girls he sleeps with. Presumably by accident.
- Jennie, played by Chloë Sevigny, who gets diagnosed with HIV. She was a virgin until she slept with Telly.
- Ruby, played by Rosario Dawson, the token promiscuous girl. STD-free.
- Casper, Telly’s friend, who rapes Jennie.
- Darcy, an extremely young girl Telly targets as his next unfortunate fuck.
The boys in Kids acted like the boys I knew: shortsighted, meanspirited, charming only when they wanted something. It felt comforting to know that certain kinds of boys had always existed, and always would. That it wasn’t just a failing on my part, to be treated the way I had been, even though I was predisposed to think so.
In high school there were:
- A, a frog-faced boy I’d had a crush on since I was thirteen, who was always dating someone yet flirting with me.
- B, a skinny boy with pale green hair whose lap I sat on in my neighbor’s garage. Told me he didn’t have to try to impress me anymore, because I was already here.
- C, an older goth girl who wore her hair in a grown-out Chelsea cut and confessed her undying love to me after she moved away.
- D, my best friend at the time who hadn’t dropped out of school yet, and wore all black everything before it was cool.
- F. See: Shawn from Boy Meets World. Brad Pitt circa 1992. Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet. You know. That hair.
This always happens: I try to talk about something I love and just end up talking about myself.
You can’t ascribe meaning to the films Korine makes. And if you can, you shouldn’t. In fact he says not to. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian regarding his latest film, Spring Breakers, he describes the attempt to do so as suffocating the work, not letting it breathe.
When Kids debuted, people decried its obscenity, believing it to be unscripted. The documentary feel. The lack of glitz, how a spotlight on the mundane bends fiction into reality. A portrait by an artist and a young man. His first deconstruction of cinema.
If there is anything consistent about Korine and his films, it’s a desire to do extreme damage. He says a film is like a fight. The idea that art is a physical process, an uncomfortable one, isn’t new, but it’s one I understand: you have a vision and you try to pull it into the world from the inside out, and an existential gap the size of you opens up as you attempt to bring that vision to fruit. You have to do damage to yourself, jump into that gap with your whole body to get at anything lifelike, or if not lifelike, like life.
But audiences want to see characters change. Better themselves, come to some life-changing realization in a neat, two-hour package. We’re so willing to believe in the better, we’re willing to settle for any sort of change. Offscreen, most people don’t change for the better. Most people do damage, to others and themselves. It’s the damage we live in.
The first scene in which Jennie makes her appearance in Kids, she sits on a bed with Ruby in a room full of other girls. Jennie’s wearing a ringer tee and her hair is cut short in a pixie, very 90s. Ruby, Jennie, and the other girls are discussing the difference between sex, making love, and fucking. Sex, of course, is just sex. But making love is, like, passionate. Fucking is what Ruby likes most.
The scene of the girls cuts to a scene of the boys hanging out at someone’s place, smoking weed and doing poppers. They’re discussing their assumptions of what girls want. Telly says girls like it slow and romantic. Both the girls and the boys talk about using condoms. Of course, no one likes using them.
At the lunch table, I tell C and D about A, and how I’m planning to fuck him that weekend while his mom is out of town. It will be my first time having sex with a boy. C holds up a donut with cream dripping from the center and puts it in my face. I take one long lick up, then down. She says, Cuntlicker. I just smile.
Every writing teacher says the key to telling a good story is to tell a boring story in an interesting way. You don’t have to worry about the premise being recycled if you burn the language just right. The way a lens flipped on the kaleidoscope doesn’t change its insides, just changes how you see inside.
That’s what I see when I see Kids. A boring story, my boring story. Stupid boys and the girls who trust them. But it is how the story is told and retold — in this case, not told — that makes me feel connected. That’s the humanitarian work of the artist. Not to tell your own story as much as give the audience room to breathe.
A and I had been writing notes back and forth. He was considering dating me, or some girl from another school. The bell would ring for us to go to the next class, and he’d pull my arm back as I got up, wait until everyone exited the room, and sit me on his lap. You’re cute, he’d say. He’d kiss me, not caring if the teacher saw.
We know how this story ends, because this story never ends: I’m going to fuck this stupid boy, and he is not going to treat me nicely after.
The nurse who took my blood told me how HIV works. That you can be infected but that there is a window period, that you won’t know it, your body won’t start making antibodies until up to six months later. I wanted to ask if girls counted as sexual partners, if a blow job was the same as sex, but I didn’t want to see the look on his face.
Ruby wants to get tested and Jennie goes with her. The nurse asks Ruby how many people she’s slept with. The answer is several. The nurse asks Jennie, and Jennie says just one person, Telly. Ruby and Jennie get their results back and get called into private rooms to discuss their results. Of course, of the two of them, Jennie has HIV.
A series of moments in lives, presented without comment or manipulation, ripples upon ripples, under no umbrella. A framework. It is just a scene, then another scene, and from the present scene the past and future unravel. The result has been called disturbing: there is no morality in observable fact.
Present to the senses a series of images. Some are banal. Some shock and provoke. With no direct plot, it creates dissonance inside the heart. The pieces are put down and we can’t help but arrange them. A puzzle portrait. This is how longing is built. How much of who we are is made up of what we aren’t.
When I am writing, I don’t want to tell the reader how to feel. So to do that I describe everything to the point of pain. I abuse the other five senses. I have to say everything but what I want to say.
That weekend, I go over to D’s house for a party. B is there. I leave, and everyone gets drunk without me. I walk to A’s in the next neighborhood over in the middle of the night, and sneak through his basement window, my shoes kicking gravel all over his bed. I have sex with him, sex with a boy for the first time. Am I losing my virginity? It doesn’t feel like anything special. Is this what we were waiting for? It doesn’t even hurt.
In Kids, the audience can see the big picture, but the characters only see what’s happening to them. A comes and I don’t. I climb out the window.
F is diagnosed with HIV. I remember the day, but I remember it like a movie: a group of kids hanging out at the smoker’s corner. Morning, it’s cold, our skin that dead pale yellow of Colorado Springs. The grass, the sky. Even closeups can’t get closer than our faces. Our skin and our teeth. One of our friends walks toward F as he approaches, and takes him in his arms. The two of them kiss.
I didn’t understand the gravity of this then: the way forever feels different at different times in your life.
Individual consciousness, the basic experience of our lives, is nonlinear, even if we believe it to be otherwise. Our memories — a collaged past of images, sights, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes, neurotically pinned together by our idea of chronological time. Like writing, film cuts memory.
But an internal world without structure becomes chaotic and terrifying, and it is in that lack of structure that we scream into the emptiness. In the absence of pacing and plot, the ego screams back, projects itself into, onto. There is an author-sized hole in every story for a reader to fill, but if the scream comes back at us, is it someone on the other side? Or is it only our own echo?
Four days after I sleep with him, A finally makes his decision: I’m the loser. I turn away from him and laugh.
Elle Nash is the author of ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER (Dzanc, 2018). She is a founding editor at Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. You can find her on the web at yourgirlelle.com.
