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
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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