Ordinary Kids: Wassup Rockers (2005)

Helen Bandis

Photographer-director Larry Clark has been labelled a ‘pervert’ for so long and by so many that his Wassup Rockers, when it first appeared, attracted disapproving, suspicious reactions. It was even called ‘bizarre’, as if Clark’s interest in following and depicting teenage Latino boys just had to be hiding a lascivious, exploitative intent.

But, in the face of what is actually on screen, it is these snap attitudes and descriptions that are bizarre, not the film itself. Although obviously an extension of Clark’s earlier film work on many levels, Wassup Rockers is, by the same token, an anti-Kids (1995), an anti-Ken Park (2003). These kids are just that: kids. They ‘play themselves’ at a slightly earlier moment of their development, when Clark first encountered them out on the streets, around the age of thirteen. The film captures (or re-creates) them at this curious moment, not exactly of innocence, but of a certain pre-adolescence. They are starting to get into lifting weights, but are not yet completely body-conscious.

So much of what these characters do is perfectly childlike. They frolic in a playground, whack each other in the balls, giggle and laugh endlessly (something the film captures with wonderful spontaneity); during a ‘sophisticated party’ scene, one of the kids amuses himself by donning a ‘menacing’ spooky mask. Several well-placed details show us they are ‘momma’s boys’. They take no drugs, and drink little. Mostly, they just want to be left alone to skate – and Clark obligingly gives them a tremendous sequence-shot where, one by one, they ‘join the bunch’ as they skate down a road, the camera positioned in front of them, travelling backwards.

This kind of childlike behaviour impacts upon the narrative form and mood of the film. Nothing is terribly ‘consequential’ in Wassup Rockers, even when there are arrests or deaths. Events simply happen, and the kids move on, at high speed; nothing is ever recalled or discussed later. Potential moments of sensation or drama are cleverly undercut and diverted: in a scene where a cop gives the kids a hard time, Milton (Milton Velasquez) rushes to the police car not to take a gun or the car keys, but the cop’s sandwich. The ‘lightness’ of the film on this level is clinched by its coda: Milton, alone in frame, smiles with pride and relief now that his mates have stopped finally calling him ‘Spermball’.

Clark lays out, in an intriguing split-screen video prologue, how the film’s plot was generated: the first half is mostly derived from incidents in the boys’ lives (such as the hilarious suicide attempt in a bathroom sink); the second half has a simple ‘getting home from the other side of town’ premise that pays dual homage to Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) and Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968). The second half swells with sometimes near-surreal conceits: Janice Dickinson electrocutes herself in a bath; a Charlton Heston-type (who looks and sounds more like Clint Eastwood) pulls out his gun when the kids run through his backyard; a Hollywood socialite falls to his doom down a flight of stairs. (At least, this rate of attrition among affluent whites equals out the everyday battle-losses incurred on the Latino side.) Two characters inspired by Paris and Nicky Hilton give the boys an instruction that results in one of the film’s most memorable and nutty images: their house can be identified, they explain, by the red car and pink fountain out front. When it comes, this image is like a kitsch postcard.

The film has a sociological aspect. Although these kids belong to (as they proudly boast) ‘the ghetto’ of South Central in Los Angeles, their patchwork Latino culture (they are variously Guatemalan, El Salvadoran ... although constantly lumped together and mislabelled as ‘Mexicans’) is at loggerheads with African-American groups. Shunning hip hop, they are into punk (a cop who is one of the few friendly adult figures they encounter shares their love of The Ramones). Their clothes are not loose and baggy, but ultra-tight – not a fashion statement, simply the clothes they have been wearing since they were children. When this band of outsiders needs to get back home in a hurry, a Latina ‘sisterhood’ network of servants in rich homes conspires to help them. This class and ethnic solidarity is palpable.

It is a far less explicit film than most people have come to expect from Clark. These kids do have sex, but the film does not show it, and a running gag is that Kico (Francisco Pedrasa) never manages to get to it; he is always interrupted. There is some familiar camera-work wandering over close-up details of flesh and clothing (like the familiar passages of action-editing powered by great punk music), but for the most part Clark eschews that style branded almost everywhere (without much discernment or intelligence) as ‘voyeuristic’. Instead, shooting with a two-camera digital format (although it is easy to mistake it for 35mm celluloid), Clark concentrates, often with immense simplicity and directness, on the interactions of his characters, and on their uneventful, everyday, ordinary actions – from getting out of bed in the morning to riding home, tired, on the train. In this as in so much else, Wassup Rockers is a splendidly disarming film.