Wherein film maker Penelope Spheeris digs a bit into the phenomenon of gutter punks by documenting a group of kids in and around Hollywood. The word decline has bothered me increasingly across her body of work. It may have started out as irony but by the time this came out in 1998 it just struck me as silly. Western “Civilization” has always dropped crumbs and created what is a mess for real lives and not for “civilization.” The detritus has almost always been children born into the detritus of the generation before them. Any recipe, whether it ends up as a culinary masterpiece or a hot mess, leaves you with a fucked up countertop and a messy kitchen.

The gutter punks and crusties really aren’t all that far removed from the people represented in The New York Hardcore Chronicles that I mentioned the other night. The kids in this particular film are just the ones that you don’t see in NYHC Chronicles. They’re the ones that probably aren’t going to make it, and in fact at least one of the kids Penelope Spheeris started out with didn’t make the end of the film. Bear in mind that this isn’t a fictional work. It’s a documentary.

Western Civilization has always gone to great lengths to force out and ostracize and exile the people that don’t or won’t toe the line. There’s nothing new about that. That’s why I reject the word decline, whether or not the intent is irony. There is no decline. This stuff is just the part of it that we don’t like to talk about. It isn’t, for the most part, a choice. Some people just can’t fit the mold and we don’t do a lot to accommodate that. Most people don’t lose any sleep over it either. The fact is that some people just can’t hack it. Returning to the ongoing theme, they adapt and make adjustments so they can get by. It’s not moral or amoral. It’s not about ethics, unless you flip it and start talking about why the rest of us don’t do more to make space for it.

There seems to be a lot more gutter punks and crusties now in 2020 than even back in the heyday of punk, hardcore and poverty. There is an awful lot of kids living out on the street. Whether or not they adopt the punk look or “ethos” isn’t the point. There is a shit ton of homeless children and returning again to the previous themes, many of us are a lot closer to the same conditions than we like to believe we are. Deny it all you want.

Getting back to the film though, it is really good but it is relentlessly jarring to follow a bunch of kids that have been kicked to the curb. I’m sure there is some degree of performance in their interviews but you still have to question why they feel the need to perform. You get the idea that they are trying hard to embrace some alternative to feeling discarded, and make no mistake. They were discarded. There is no sense of hope to be gathered between them. They all seem to fully expect to be dead in five years when they are asked. Or at least they can’t imagine a tomorrow. That’s a hard enough question for any adolescent unless you’re expecting a tale of fantasy. No kid can honestly project themselves five years into the future, but you’re not generally going to get people who have no expectations to even be alive.

So, to me, its more a question of collateral damage (a disgusting term) than a question of society itself being in decline. The forces of western capitalism are a juggernaut and there are regular casualties. That said, Penelope Spheeris has always had a talent for getting people to open up, beyond how quickly people jump to it when there is a camera poked at them and they’re asked about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. They’re just not always as honest as she gets them to be. That’s the beauty of DoWC3. She gets the kids to lighten up and light up, if even for only brief moments, and where they won’t she lets them do their thing. She doesn’t editorialize which is refreshing. She lets them tell their stories and there isn’t any judgment. It’s straight reporting and there is a kindness in just paying attention to people that so many others step over or call the police on.

They’re just kids.

Just kids.

We need to stop throwing kids out.

I’m going to work backwards into the previous installments from the 80s. I don’t believe I’ve seen either in over 25 years.