July 23, 2006
wassup rockers
Folks seem periodically anxious about how Larry Clark sexualizes the boy teens of Wassup Rockers — Clark himself is surely a bit anxious, if the violence with which he kills off the pedophiles within the film's frame is any indication. But such strategic disavowals seem as irrelevant as the moral tut-tutting; isn't the film's ideal audience equally the suckers who get with the movie's "message" and those who get with the deflated outrage about the film's slack excuse for visual usury?
About which: oh, yawn. If Clark's camera sexualizes his subjects, it's no more than seven out of ten cameras in Hollywood (Burbank, the valley, Studio City, New York). We — the market, that is to say, whether our response is indulgence, outrage, boredom, or some admixture — pay these people to do this very thing. Clark may be better at it in certain ways, but the idea that we're invited to consume innocent sexuality more here than in your basic Amanda Bynes vehicle is a curious one. And even if the reasonable response to that is, well that sucks too — it seems to us that a couple of hours (or decades) of making male bodies the crypto-porno objects of mersh cinema might be a swell correction. The movie even diligently draws the parallels: withhout making a big song and dance about it, the boys' episodic travails stem in every single case from the irresistable sexual appeal of their de facto leader (who is indeed their leader, the singer in the band, exactly because of his sexual magnetism), a magnetism he cyclically abuses and ignores.
It's as if the film was making a point about what variations, exactly, within the standard recipe of American feature film, motivate us to issue a little hue and cry...
Posted by jane at July 23, 2006 10:41 PM | TrackBack