Life imitates art and just as regularly art imitates life. In Kids and Good Will Hunting we are presented with two films and a variety of characters that demonstrate much about culture, society and class stratification. In Kids we follow, documentary style, a group of young teenagers who live on the outskirts of society. Adults do not exist in this world of sex, violence, crime and drug abuse. This is illustrated in one scene where Telly and Casper stop on a street corner and Casper begins to urinate in broad daylight. This is not unique, but what is different is that Telly goes around the corner to give Casper some privacy. In their world, the adults passing by do not exist. In Good Will Hunting, a math prodigy called Will Hunting, has personal troubles, the majority of which stem from the social stratification in Boston where he is a janitor at MIT. In both of these films we see how poverty, a normless environment, and a society that promotes values not every has equal access to create deviance, isolation, and crime.
In Kids the teenagers are from broken homes, homeless or live pretty much a poor existence as children of poor working class parents. Sex, drugs and skateboarding are the values adopted by this group of teenagers as they reject the values promoted by culture at large. Telly likes to take virgins because, as he tells his friend Casper, “Say you die tomorrow. Fifty years from now, she’ll still remember you” (Ebert 1). Drugs, alcohol, sex and skateboarding are the values of this counterculture, formed in part because of having little opportunity to rise out of their lower middle-class background. We see Telly arrive home to his single parent, child in arms. He changes clothes, begs his mom for a few bucks and then heads back out to his life on the streets. The film does not sentimentalize the lifestyle of these tens, not does it trivialize their world, even though it is one fi
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