No Limits

By Paul Gray

YOUTH TERROR: THE VIEW FROM BEHIND THE GUN ABC, June 28

This documentary on teen-age crime, a segment in the "ABC News Closeup" series, may be the most disturbing and dramatic news program ever seen on American commercial television. It is certainly the most explicit. The network recommends "parental discretion" in the opening credits, and as the show unfolds, that cliche takes on new meaning. There is graphic violence, to be sure: bloodied heads; a lone youth being attacked by three others, one of them swinging a baseball bat; an unflinching look at a junkie mainlining. And the street toughs and ghetto dwellers who provide the sole narration converse in four-and twelve-letter words that many movie theaters, not to mention TV sets, have never amplified. To view and hear all this is not easy, but it should not be missed; parental discretion is a poor reason for dissuading people from seeing what a lack of parental discretion has helped to create.

Filmed entire in the slums of New York City and Newark, the project took some nine months and posed hazards for Producer-Director Helen Whitney, whose voice can be frequently heard questioning the show's young subjects. Her purse was stolen during one interview, and she was slammed against the hood of a car during a street altercation. The menace is often palpable. When Whitney asks a group of young men where they draw the line at violence, one replies heatedly: "Ain't no limit. If I gotta kill you to get what I want, I'll kill you."

Such pathology cannot be explained through quick-cut cinema verite. The pro gram's power rests not in analysis but in immediacy. The footage seems to have been shot in the fly-on-the-wall manner of Film Maker Frederick Wiseman, but the editing is both jumpier and crisper than in Wiseman's works. In one se quence, the camera pans up an icicle-festooned stairwell inside a Newark tenement, enters an apartment squalid beyond words and comes to rest on an infant cooing over its bottle. No one states the obvious: that child will never have a chance. The faces of parents appear, studies in anger and bewilderment. Visibly, they are passing on pain to children doomed to repeat the same cycle.

Equally shocking are the voices of the hoodlums. They seem at first to be speaking another language, easily recounting acts of aggression and mayhem that might give even hardened criminals pause. Asked why an ice pick was his preferred weapon in a previous assault, a thin, pale, seemingly fragile boy chuckles and answers, "Internal bleeding." The more they talk, the less monstrous they become: "I wouldn't mind goin' to school if I knew how to read . . . My dreams scare me ... I want somebody to know I been here . . . I can't do nothing. I can't function . . ."

Everyone connected with this enter prise deserves praise: the "News Close-up" staff for making it, the network for accepting it, and, though some have balked, the affiliated stations for carrying it. Nothing has been done to prettify this study of the effects of poverty, racism and some ineradicable germ of human ignorance. Near the end, one youth gestures emphatically at the ground: "I've been around here for 21 years. This is hell. Believe me." Seeing this stunning program is believing.

Paul Gray

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