Hmm. Obviously you have read a very different, more literal, and entirely valid, "message" in the two films than I have, which (to me) is part of their ambiguous beauty. Korine pre-empts criticism on moral grounds due to the fact that his films are typically uninterested in any sort of "right" or "wrong"-doing by their subjects. They are a product of their environments. In some ways, Gummo is more about geography than it is about characters.
Throughout his career, Korine has always provided space for multiple veins of interpretation, dancing around depiction of heinous and offensive material without official endorsement, rather than force an ideological stance on the events that transpire within either film (something that Spielberg, for example, does in a grotesquely consistent fashion).
Where you might see Korine as someone simply condemning the nihilistic excesses of youth depicted in KIDS, I see it as something very authentic and morally complex, a mixture of euphoria, extreme boredom, and mass depression in the face of urban squalor and Reagan-era drug-war politics and hip-hop culture affecting aimless ignorant middle-class white kids with a bad case of existential angst, rather than hand-wringing condescension and race baiting of something like Reefer Madness (I am reminded here of the deeply interconnected "marijuana" sequence in Welles' Touch of Evil, which plays with the political and racially motivated fear-mongering atmosphere of drug usage in similar ways.)
In KIDS, Telly is the only one transmitting HIV, and he does so unwittingly. He actually never finds out he is HIV positive, enhancing the moral ambiguity of Telly's dubious antics. Lets not pretend as if reality is some sort of fantasy in which teenagers go about leading chaste, righteous lives in the eyes of the Lord our Savior Jesus Christ Amen. Teenagers do drugs and *beep* each other. If they didn't we wouldn't be so concerned about it in the first place. They're human too, you know.
How much Larry Clark had to do with the more emotive aspects of the film is up for debate, but from reading the screenplay I would argue that Korine is really the dominant auteur figure here, and his thematic material translates over time through the rest of his films even to Spring Breakers.
You don't have to do much research to discover that Korine himself was probably on A LOT of drugs when he wrote KIDS. (http://www.harmony-korine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2655&start=15) The "realism" of the dialogue comes from dramatizing personal experience, while for the first time Spring Breakers eschews any semblance of so-called visual "realism"--previously one of Korine's most prominent aesthetic hallmarks--in favor of neo-Brechtian gloss and hyper-active artifice. Comedy is, of course, quite subjective, but if you don't see ironic intent in the Britney Spears sequence or the fact that corn-rowed, grill-clad cracker-poseur Alien is gunned down almost immediately while his bikini-clad muses trot effortlessly through the racially binary bloodbath of the neon-lit climax at Gucci Mane's gangster castle, then the joke is simply lost on you (or not particularly funny, which is fine too).
For me, this film is ALWAYS pretending to be something that it isn't. From the stunt-casting to the marketing to the resulting "box office" success of a modestly-budgeted and astoundingly vulgar art-film masquerading as a piece of pop cinema, it was intended to lure unsuspecting viewers into the audience and shock them with a product that is rather indigestible, alienating, and should leave them wondering what it was that they expected and why they went in expecting trash and got trash of a completely different order.
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