- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 1986
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Crime
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- A high school slacker kills his girlfriend and shows off her dead body to his friends. However, the friends’ reaction is almost as ambiguous and perplexing as the crime itself.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Emotional repression | Ethical Politics | Friendship | Guilt | Loneliness | Loyalty | White culture
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Review Format:
- Cinema
Children Without Childhood
Nothing to dislike here despite the fact that the characterization is archetypal and thus the characters are only visible for what they do rather than who they are.
This one focuses on the actual motivations of White teenagers, not just their behavior; revealing directionlessness and an unempathetic White culture. The lack of self-respect so revealed reveals the characters as having no sense of the value of life nor of any self-worth; normalizing murder as a valid means of self-expression.
White youth are shown as morally-bereft; their false sense of loyalty to those they grow up with masked by trying to keep a secret so vile it becomes the basis of false friendship for the lonely. The choices people make about who their friends are become problematic in the presence of bad parenting and a declining White culture, since accepting what one is born into is easier than consciously choosing between False Loyalty; Loneliness; or, Finding New Friends.
Friendship as emotional blackmail becomes the central metaphor for a culture-in-crisis as teens try to discover the true nature of human relationships when surrounded by adult ones that have largely failed through lack of application. Characterless, friendless moral vacua in a morally-vacuous culture - they do not know themselves so do not know each other; desperately wondering how to respond to situations that may result in the loss of friendships that might not be worth continuing in the first place.
Only a deep sense of morbidity makes the people here feel alive since life itself is alien to them: They are potentially dead before ever having lived since their lives lack meaning. A cultureless culture where Will to Power becomes a solace for the paranoid/schizophrenia brought-on by a profound sense of existential despair.
A masterpiece.
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