Lies Like Truth: Kids

It was formerly received truth that the documentary could provide a more objective take on reality than standard cinema fare. But several decades of film scholarship have amply demonstrated that the medium's promise of opening a window upon the world untainted by subjective bias, hence somehow implicitly “truthful,” is illusory.

The viewpoint behind the camera's eye may be unabashedly polemical-e. g., Leni Riefenstahl's despicable paean to fascism in Triumph of the Will, or Michael Moore's uproarious deconstruction of corporate greed in Roger and Me. Documentarians may cut their material to fit their concerns more subtly, as in French and Canadian cinema verité, or the American direct cinema of the fifties/sixties. The maker's prejudices may be conscious or repressed-e. g., the unwitting colonialism that informs Robert Flaherty's vision of noble natural man in Nanook of the North. Whatever its distorting prism, hopes that the documentary can yield up the thing itself, instead of a refracted, distorted image of the thing, seem bound to go unfulfilled.

When a fiction film uses documentary methods to advance its agenda, one's hard-won alertness to Bijou manipulations of reality can be easily surrendered-precisely when a high degree of vigilance may be most necessary. We mainly enter the theater to be entertained, not drearily instructed. If the events onscreen are rendered more gripping, more gratifying by documentary techniques, why bother pondering overmuch any questionable intentions underpinning the methodology, or the validity of the “real” being thus purveyed?

At issue here is the ambiguous intent, if not downright bad faith, of Larry Clark, a photographer of underground repute who liberally employs documentary locations to illuminate the pubescent netherworld of his controversial first feature, Kids. The director himself reportedly served as one model for the pharmacothymic hero of Gus Van Sant's arresting Drugstore Cowboy (Van Sant is Kids' executive producer). Bo