Plot
The opening of the film depicts teenager Ken Park (nicknamed "krap nek") skateboarding across Visalia. He arrives at a skate park, where he casually sits in the middle of it, sets up a camcorder, and shoots himself in the head using a handgun. His death is used to set up the rest of the film, which follows four other teens he used to hang out with, shortly afterward the suicide:
Shawn: The most stable of the four main characters, Shawn has an ongoing sexual relationship with his girlfriend's mother Rhonda throughout the story. He casually socializes with their family, who (including his girlfriend) are completely unaware of the situation.
Claude: A teen who is largely at the mercy of his violent, alcoholic father, Claude tries to take care of his pregnant mother. His father despises him for being insufficiently manly, but after coming home drunk one night, attempts to perform oral sex on him, and Claude runs away from home.
Peaches: She is a sweet girl living alone with her extremely religious father, who fixates on her as the embodiment of her deceased mother. When her father catches her having sex with her boyfriend, he beats the boy and savagely disciplines her, including forcing her to participate in a quasi-incestuous wedding ritual with him.
Tate: Sadistic and unstable, Tate lives with his grandparents whom he frequently verbally abuses, and is shown engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation to orgasm. He later murders his grandparents in their bed, in retaliation for his grandfather "cheating" at Scrabble and his grandmother for "invading his privacy"; the act arouses him sexually.
The film cuts frequently between subplots, with no overlap of characters or events from one subplot to another until the end. As Tate is being arrested, Shawn, Claude, and Peaches meet and have sex as a threesome. The film finally reveals the motive behind Ken Park's suicide: He had impregnated his girlfriend, who responded to his suggestion of abortion by asking if he regretted his mother not aborting him. Concluding that he did, he skates off to kill himself.
Read more about this topic: Ken Park
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)