From the moment of its first naming as GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency), AIDS has been what Lee Edelman calls a "Plague of Discourse," a condition under which

Kids depicts a day in the life of a group of teenaged skate punks in New York. One of the film's protagonists, Telly, prides himself on his proficiency at seducing virgins, and the opening scene shows one such seduction. In a voiceover, Telly says: "Virgins. I love 'em. No diseases, no loose as a goose pussy, no skank. No nothin. Just pure pleasure." 2 After parting company with the girl, who looks incredibly young, he runs outside to his friend Casper, who has been waiting for him, and they have a long conversation about the pleasures of sex with virgins. Meanwhile Jennie, one of Telly's previous conquests, finds out she is HIV positive and goes looking for Telly to tell him that he is infected (she has had no other partners). From this point on, the film cuts back and forth between Telly and Jennie. Jennie follows Telly throughout the day and night, always arriving at places he has just left. Jennie's pursuit of Telly mirrors Telly's pursuit of his new target, another very young girl named Darcy. Jennie, hopelessly stoned after a brief visit to a rave, finally tracks Telly to a party and walks in on him and Darcy having sex. Without interrupting them, she wanders out of the room and passes out on a couch. In the morning, Casper, the first to wake up, rapes the semiconscious Jennie, an event which takes up seemingly endless screen time given the MTVish pace of the rest of the film.

To understand the meaning of the two copulations at the end of Kids, we must first understand that the identity of the virgin whom Telly "deflowers" is entirely insignificant. Telly's object throughout the film is virginity itself, not girl #1 (as she's named in the credits), or Darcy, or Jennie. The most clear indication of this is the uncanny similarity between Telly's seductions at the beginning and end of the movie. The girls' objections are identical, Telly uses the same lines to assuage them, and they are even positioned in the exact same way. From Jennie's brief account, we can imagine that the scene with her was the same. Girl #1 equals Darcy who equals Jennie, just as long as she's a virgin. Virginity is important for two reasons, the first of which Telly articulates in his voiceover: he thinks it will keep him free from disease. The second reason he explains to Casper: "I want to knock her guard down" (94). This reasoning, a combination of male hysteria and aggression, is neither unique nor surprising. It figures both a shoring up of the male body against intrusion by a defiled feminine and a demonstration of that security through a violent demonstration of feminine penetrability. It's hard not to suspect, though, that all this ideological work rather takes the fun out of the act itself.

In fact, if we can't quite agree with Judith Butler that "disavowed male homosexuality culminates in a heightened or consolidated masculinity, one which maintains the feminine as the unthinkable and unnamable," 3  it is only because we can see that disavowed desire reemerging for Telly and Casper in the very act of "naming" the feminine. The actual pleasure that Telly attains from his seduction comes from talking about it with Casper. The following notes in the screenplay, all of which are from the scene where Telly tells Casper about his experience, describe the film well: "the two of them are walking down the street, oblivious to everything but themselves talking" (90); "Casper is hyper as he jumps up and down and claws Telly's arm" (91); "their conversation has gotten them very excited" (94); "the two of them start laughing and jumping on each other" (96); "It is a very hot day, both boys are wiping sweat from their bodies" (97). The exchange moves into the realm of the sensual when Telly twice offers his fingers so that Casper can smell them (they smell, according to Casper, "like butterscotch" [91]). In the same conversation, Telly reveals that his idea of "going all out" sexually is to "put it in her ass." Later on, in one of the few genuinely erotic scenes in the movie, Telly sprays Casper from a water bottle. The hand-held camera hesitates on their bodies, with Telly holding the bottle and spraying Casper's bare chest and midriff. In short, one need not be Dr. Freud to identify the homoerotics of Casper and Telly's relationship. How far is it to the conclusion that, as Telly fucks Darcy, and Casper fucks Jennie, Telly fucks Casper, that the two of them are actualizing, through the bodies of these women, their libidinal attachment without the undignified necessity of actually admitting their own penetrability? Not very far at all, especially given the formative value of homoerotic desire in the kind of self-purifying masculinity that Casper and Telly produce together.

The disturbing implications of this analysis are clear: we find ourselves back to the fantasy of sex between men as the place of the transmission, if not the genesis, of HIV. At the same time, we find ourselves participating in the elision of women that we notice in the film. Part of our answer to this problem resides in what Leo Bersani calls "a frenzied epidemic of displacements in the discourse on sexuality and on AIDS." 4  The fact that during this frenzy a text which poses as radical returns us to the most retrograde heterosexual fantasies about AIDS should by this point seem passe. What's interesting here are the consequences of the anxiogenic quality of Casper and Telly's attraction, the structurally necessary positioning of a more-or-less anonymous woman between them as a discursively-produced bridge and as an utterly abject figure. We must not, in other words, in the enthusiasm at discovering the "actual" libidinal trajectory of the film, accept Jennie's disappearance. She, too, plays an important part of the film's "frenzy of displacements," for she is not only, to borrow Jacques Lacan's parlance, the "symptom" of the male protagonist, but also the bearer of his diagnosis.

But what can she do with that symbolic taint? How can she utter her diagnosis, and what are its consequences? As she approaches her goal, piecing together Telly's movements and slowly zeroing in on his location, Jennie becomes more and more lethargic and distracted. By the time she actually finds Telly and Darcy, the pill she has taken and her drinking have rendered her almost immobile. In both instances where she comes up against the danger which she could remove (or at least diminish) by uttering the diagnosis, when she walks in on Telly and Darcy and when Casper is raping her, she finds herself unable to do so. In short, Jennie consistently and frustratingly fails to deliver her information.

The most visible reason for her failure is that she is so intoxicated that she can barely move. The person who gives Jennie the pill convinces her to take it is Fidget, the friend she meets at the rave she goes to when seeking Telly. According to an interview with Larry Clark, the person who plays Fidget, though he did so unwillingly, is Harmony Korine, the film's 19-year-old screenwriter. 5  That Korine should appear in the film at the very moment that Jennie is diverted from her goal is fitting given the centrality of that diversion to the film's narrative pleasure. In the same interview, Clark mentions that "All the kids in the movie were real; Jennie was the only made-up character" (130). What he means is that the other characters were modeled on people that Korine knew and were played by nonprofessional actors, whereas Jennie was invented and, as it turns out, had to be played by a professional. Clark describes the failure of the nonprofessional actor originally hired to play Jennie and the last-minute hiring of Chloe Sevigny to replace her. Jenny's insertion into a film which so many critics describe as documentary in tone makes the fictional narrative function. Whatever narrative force the film generates hinges entirely on Jennie's exclusive knowledge of Telly's HIV status, the sources of her pathos and her quest. Without her (and we will remember that she is the bearer of the diagnosis, and the impurity that it signifies) the film would lose its status as fiction. Even Telly's pursuit of Darcy would lose the limited suspense it accumulates if it were not colored by the viewer's knowledge of Telly's HIV status. Korine's appearance as an obstacle to Jennie's successfully delivering the diagnosis coincidentally points to the film's own investment in her failure, which goes beyond the demands of traditional narrative.

In Slavoj Zizek's terms (we'll remember that in the dominant culture HIV is a death-sentence, even if we don't subscribe to that view ourselves), Jennie's failure to deliver her information puts Telly in the role of the living dead, the person who is dead in reality but who lives on because that knowledge hasn't entered into the symbolic as the diagnosis. 6  In this way, Telly's situation is roughly analogous to the bizarre idiocy that characterizes so much of American AIDS discourse. But the film does not share Telly’s ignorance. Kids is not afraid to name HIV; in fact it is a sort of punk after-school special on the virus. Nor does Clark feel any desire to allow either Telly or Casper the emotional security that they seek in their pursuit of young girls, as we see from their (and their friends') reaction to two gay men, one black and one white, walking through Washington Square Park holding hands. As a group, the kids scream insults at the two men until they walk past. When, a short time later, Casper and a black kid of about the same age accidentally bump into each other, the whole group brutally beats the outsider. The beating, so obviously a response to the anxiety invoked by the gay men, lays bear Casper and Telly’s homophobia.

If Kids' heart, if not its practice, is in the right place when it comes to Telly's homophobia, its approach to Jenny is a little less "innocent." I want to call attention to a crucial difference between the screenplay and the film itself. Harmony Korine opens the screenplay with the "very loud sound of people having sex." The first shot is of the face of a "very pretty young girl" (girl #1, of course) who "looks like she's on the verge of pain and ecstasy." The girl is speaking: "Oh yes, Telly it hurts, oh yes, oh yes, please Telly, Telly" (88). Clark's film begins very differently, as we've already discussed, with the seduction scene that is shown as a flashback in Korine's version. In it, the girl expresses understandable reservations about having sex with Telly, who answers all of her concerns with obvious lies (including the old salt "you won't get pregnant because I like you"). When they do fuck in Clark's version, the girl's pain is dissociated from any pleasure, a result achieved in part by removing the word "yes" from the girl's part of the dialog.

Except for one other notable exception, the removal of a scene that visually represents an apocryphal story told by Telly in which Casper, as a young child, mistakes his parents' S/M lovemaking for a real attack and stabs his leather-masked father to death with the family's turkey-carving knife, the film is very loyal to the screenplay. The removal of the girl's pleasure is, in every sense of the word, a disciplinary move. It checks the screenplay's mobilization of the male fantasy that women take pleasure from mistreatment, which is difficult to criticize. Nonetheless, we should return here to the meaning of AIDS in American culture, in particular to how its "meaning" is produced. The AIDS epidemic has allowed many more Americans than would admit it to see it as an answer of the "real" in Zizek's sense of the word, as evidence of an other of the Other, taking the form of a moral force that punishes—what else?—enjoyment. 7  That the enjoyment can be the unacceptable enjoyment of gay men and IV drug users, all the better, but we must remember that the discourse on AIDS has been seen as a message about heterosexual enjoyment as well, as the "price of the sexual revolution." If we remember, then, that the inadequate cultural response to AIDS is a consequence of a similar disciplinary move to disavow enjoyment, we must think twice about Clark's change. Clark's ascetic reworking of Korine's figuration of female pleasure at the very beginning of the film inaugurates and validates the fantasy of purity that Telly utters in a voiceover as his very motto: "No diseases, no loose as a goose pussy, no skank. No nothing. Just pure pleasure." That is, Telly's pleasure without the disgusting traces of Jennie's (or Darcy's, or Girl #1's).

The censorious removal of female pleasure in Clark's film anticipates its reemergence as the reason for Jennie's failure to deliver the diagnosis. Let us look more closely at the scene at the rave, which is called "Nasa." Jennie walks to the front of the huge line waiting outside and is greeted congenially by the security guard, who lets her in. The next friend she meets is Fidget, who, before offering her the pill, shows her a "real spectacle" (140): four fully dressed kids kissing and petting each other at the back of the club. He then convinces her to take the pill, a "euphoric blockbuster" (141). The scene ends and we get a brief description of the party Casper and Telly are at. When we return to Jennie, she is sitting next to a speaker watching people dance. It is not until another friend asks her to dance that she makes inquiries about Telly. When her friend tells her that Telly is at the party, she takes on a slightly more lucid appearance and says, "Oh my God. What's going on?" (143). As viewers, we ask the same question. This is by far the most painful part of the film. Here is Jennie, with whom we've identified throughout, whose very presence enables the narrative, sitting around. In psychoanalytic terms, she turns away from her role in the symbolic and gets caught up in the imaginary pleasure of looking, of the "real spectacle" of Nasa. How are we to approach her look, which is impossible to understand in the economy of the film and obscene in character given the urgency of her mission? Zizek answers:

And where is the viewer when she encounters Jennie staring vacuously at her hormone-charged peers but face-to-face with herself as spectator? Jennie's pause and its terrible consequences implicate the film's audience with frightening force. This moment, more than any of the more graphic images of adolescent depravity, gives the film the appearance of a "wake-up call to the world," to use the words of Janet Maslin's New York Times review. 9  At the same time, it draws a very clear connection between Jennie's pleasure and the catastrophe that ends Kids: the movie's last words, uttered by Casper in the aftermath of the two violent sexual encounters that constitute its climax, uttered indeed as he wakes up, are a time-shifted restatement of Jennie's question: "Jesus Christ. What happened?" (1 5 0).

Immediately before Casper’s final utterance, as the camera lingers on Telly and Darcy asleep together, we hear Telly again in voice-over:

His words reiterate the conclusions we have come to about Kids. He is very clear on the position of women's bodies as the field on which discourse and reality are made possible. They are not only what he always thinks about, they're also what he always talks about, and his relations to them figure his own identity. He also turns our attention to the implications of going "inside." It should be clear from the relationship Telly has to women's bodies that he is only incidentally referring to going inside in the sense suggested by copulation. "Going inside" for Telly is renouncing the permeability of his body, shoring it up by proving someone else's permeability. The "pure pleasure" that Telly derives from going inside is ironically opposed to the virus which has gotten inside of him. By revealing Telly’s blindness, Kids distances itself from his misogyny even as it colludes in his disavowal of female pleasure.

With that collusion, the film reveals its implication in the strange defensiveness that I identified earlier as the fundamental symptom of the "plague of discourse" around AIDS. Female pleasure takes the place of homosexuality, but that substitution only shifts the center of a discursive pattern that is shaped by, and that ultimately refers back to, the homophobic and racist function of AIDS as an ideology. This is not to say that Kids is as retrograde or malicious as typical representations of AIDS, or that it has nothing to teach us. By revealing Telly’s misogyny and homophobia as failed defensive projects, Kids has given us the tools to recognize its own gestures of renunciation. To attack it, as bell hooks and other have done, for being "the product of Clark’s imaginative obsession with adolescent hedonism" 10  is to reproduce those gestures in yet another form. I hope my reading of Kids suggests that the fight against AIDS ought not to be a fight against pleasure, even if the sources of that pleasure deserve to be attacked. If this film gets off on Telly’s homophobia and misogyny, it also teaches us that telling it not to get off will not protect us from homophobia and misogyny. Even the most progressive approaches to AIDS will succumb to a fatal and unacceptable blindness as long as they attempt to repudiate pleasures they don't (or won't) understand.

Notes