Books, Arts & Manners: Disorder and Early Sorrow

Few documentaries are as suggestion-laden, as mind-exercising, as undislodgeable from the memory as Streetwise. Based on pictures by Mary Ellen Mark and words by Cheryl McCall in Life magazine, this is a film about teenaged—mostly young teenaged, at that—street kids in Seattle. The girls are chiefly prostitutes; the boys, pimps, con artists, male whores, drug pushers, petty thieves. All are hustlers of one kind or another, yet in a strange quasi-Wordsworthian way, they are also innocent children walking through hell as if it were simply the asphalt with which the roads are paved.

Produced by Miss McCall, shot by Martin Bell, and edited by Nancy Baker, the film breathes camera-ignoring naturalness, as far as the lives of these tragic children can be called natural. “It’s strange that older men like little girls,” says a radiant little childwhore. “I think they’re perverts. I don’t like them, but I like the money.” Consider this statement well. Imagine homes not merely broken, but shattered into wounding splinters; imagine a society in which 13-year-old girls (or younger) pose for suggestive fashion ads; imagine conspicuous consumption of the sort that allows teenagers to become millionaires as rock stars or promoters; imagine the contemporary city with the inequities it flaunts and the iniquities it fosters. Then, if you dare, cast your first stone.

Few documentaries are as suggestion-laden, as mind-exercising, as undislodgeable from the memory as Streetwise. Based on pictures by Mary Ellen Mark and words by Cheryl McCall in Life magazine, this is a film about teenaged—mostly young teenaged, at that—street kids in Seattle. The girls are chiefly prostitutes; the boys, pimps, con artists, male whores, drug pushers, petty thieves. All are hustlers of one kind or another, yet in a strange quasi-Wordsworthian way, they are also innocent children walking through hell as if it were simply the asphalt with which the roads are paved.

Produced by Miss McCall, shot by Martin Bell, and edited by Nancy Baker, the film breathes camera-ignoring naturalness, as far as the lives of these tragic children can be called natural. “It’s strange that older men like little girls,” says a radiant little childwhore. “I think they’re perverts. I don’t like them, but I like the money.” Consider this statement well. Imagine homes not merely broken, but shattered into wounding splinters; imagine a society in which 13-year-old girls (or younger) pose for suggestive fashion ads; imagine conspicuous consumption of the sort that allows teenagers to become millionaires as rock stars or promoters; imagine the contemporary city with the inequities it flaunts and the iniquities it fosters. Then, if you dare, cast your first stone.