The Kids Are All Trite

River's Edge represents the veritable apex of narrative sensationalism and exploitation, appropriating a then-recent shock crime to the end of making good old Hollywood feature fiction. And, yes, this is an independent production marketed toward adult arthouse audiences, but it's construction and presentation are unabashedly traditional—and while I agree with Marissa's assessment that it was probably not the director's intention to posit a "kids-these-days"-type argument, the end result is a film that demands judgment and scorn from its audience, inviting us to digest the act and its implications, drawing conclusions about the state of a)all youth everywhere, b)the parenting (or lack thereof) which quite obviously caused this degradation of the moral fibre of American culture, and c)the sum total of all social/cultural evils which contributed to the downfall of the decent way of life. River's Edge is satisfying because we get to cast judgment on others and feel better about own moral worth, because I (and, uh, my hypothetical children) would have clearly acted different. And, like, think of the children, because they're so far gone they don't even know that a dead body = a horrible crime.

I can't say I particularly agree about the assertion that River's Edge is some bold comment on violence against women or power struggles with regard to gender—as Anita proposes elsewhere—but I can see where this might come from. It's true the violent act in the centre of the film sees a man overcoming a woman, but I think it's maybe too easy to project meaning onto the gender relationship when that may only be incidental (or in the very least, significant but not deliberately or especially so—the case is based on a true crime, which crime itself may point to some more fundamental issue with gender power relationships in society at large, but I wouldn't necessarily read the film as being about violence against women so much as violence in youth culture and the apathy with which peers treat/accept it). Remember that there are several women in the social network involved in the coverup of the murder, and while both victims (the antagonist's and Dennis Hopper's recollected murdering of his girlfriend) are indeed women, so too are there women implicated in the crime by way of their silence and apathy when faced with the corpse near the river. Violence against women is a serious social issue, but its representation in River's Edge seems more symptomatic of its continued presence and significance rather than explicitly argued or critiqued; the film certainly involves the issue, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily about the issue.

One of the more interesting sequences in the film for me—and Anita brought this up too—was the cross-cutting of Clarissa and Matt engaging in intercourse with the first time we actually see John murdering his Jamie. Cross-cutting is a traditional trope employed to suggest a casual or metaphorical connection between two narratively disparate actions—in this case, sex and violence. David Cronenberg's films often draw similar parallels between sexual acts and violent ones, but where his thesis usually revolves around how both are natural or primal acts innate within us, in River's Edge the implication seems less justifying and more damning: are we meant to see John's murderous impulse as somehow sexual/fetishistic, or is Matt and Clarissa's sex implicitly violent and taboo? Maybe the answer is that both acts show youth as flippantly and unthinkingly engaging in rash, inappropriate behavior, and that the jump from promiscuous (and presumably unprotected) sex to violence and murder is somehow negligible? It's not entirely clear, but I think it's worth further thought.