AMY C. CHAMBERS
Mysterious Skin (Greg Araki, 2004),
Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005) and
Little Children (Todd Field, 2006) are emblematic of a cycle of films released in the early twenty-first century that engage with the issues surrounding child abuse. These films, alongside other examples including
L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001),
Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004),
The Woodsman (Nicole Kassell, 2004) and
Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre 2006), offer a balanced and therefore controversial representation of the paedophile by giving both paedophiles and their victims a voice. Paedophiles are presented as sympathetic, caring, broken and, in some instances, victims themselves. Children are reframed as active figures with an often-burgeoning sexuality that further complicates the relationship between the abuser and the abused. Rather than aligning with the Western media’s ‘stranger danger’ moral panics of the 1980s and 1990s, these films attempt to offer a complex response to a taboo subject.
1 Their developed characters contrast with the ‘characters’ circulated in news media of the demonised paedophile and the damaged victim by providing a nuanced response to the crime, and its impact upon the lives of both victim
and perpetrator.
Mysterious Skin tells the divergent tales of two boys, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian (Brady Corbett), who experience sexual abuse at the hand of their Little League coach (Bill Sage). Whereas Neil grows up to be a male prostitute, his counterpart Brian is practically asexual. Neil rejects the idea that he was a victim and the film narrative explores the notion of victimhood by placing the character in role of both victim and perpetrator. Coach is framed as a fantasy figure who appears in dream sequences when Neil fellates his clients in later-life as a teenage prostitute. The seemingly cocksure Neil is compared to his clearly damaged counterpart Brian who develops a pervasive fantasy that explains his blackouts: alien abduction.
Hard Candy subverts the role of the victim; Hayley (Ellen Paige) the juvenile anti-hero essentially grooms the paedophile, Jeff (Patrick Wilson), through an online chat room. She defines herself as an avenger seeking justice for molested girls by abusing Jeff on their behalf.
Little Children explores some of the difficulties experienced by a sex offender and their family when rejoining a community after his release from prison. In this final film the victims of abuse are not necessarily just little children. Each film approaches the figure and the role of the paedophile in individual and public discourses and uses them to explore often socially unacceptable forms of sex and desire, whilst also transgressing traditional boundaries concerning conceptions of children and adults, and abusers and victims.
The child abuse panics in the US during the 1980s and 1990s were underpinned by an apparent upsurge and increased reportage of sophisticated paedophile rings and child abuse by the clergy and other authority figures. These issues were reflected in TV-movies like
Do You Know the Muffin Man (Gilbert Cates, 1989), that features a neighbourhood day-care centre where children are being systematically abused,
Judgment (Tom Topor, 1990) and
The Boys of St. Vincent (John N. Smith, 1992), that revolve around the abuse of boys at the hands of the clergy, and the horror of organised paedophile rings in
Bump in the Night (Karen Arthur, 1991). These movies presented the paedophile as unremarkable and ‘camouflaged by ordinariness’ (Rafter 2007: 225), which made him more dangerous because he could blend into a neighbourhood unnoticed. The monstrous paedophile can also be found as a horror figure; for example, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) from
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) is ‘coded as a child molester’ (Heba 1995: 110); this actual monster is an embodiment of the nightmare and consequences of abuse.
2 These earlier images of the paedophile align with media images that frame them as ‘monsters’, ‘beasts’ and ‘fiends’ (Thomas 2005: 21).
This chapter analyses the different representations of desire, victims and abuse in a cinematic turn that subverted images of the monstrous in cinematic child abuse narratives. This cycle was made possible by the independent sector of the American filmmaking industry that exists both in parallel to the traditional Hollywood system, and in isolation from it. The early 2000s were one of independent cinema’s ‘most commercial periods’ with a boom in globally successful films made with limited budgets and limited studio interference (see King et al. 2013: 3). Mysterious Skin, Hard Candy and Little Children were all made on low budgets with smaller independent production companies rather than mini-majors or the indie wings of major studios. Gregg Araki, director and screenwriter of Mysterious Skin, agreed to a lower than planned budget for the film because he ‘never, never wanted the movie to be too big, because it was fairly controversial material and [he] didn’t want to have to water it down to make it palatable for a mini-major-type company’ (2005: n.p.). In order to explore the controversial issues of abuse and desire at play in the child abuse narratives central to Mysterious Skin, Hard Candy and Little Children, independent production was essential.
Independent cinema permits a more nuanced representation of abuser/abused narratives that neither demonises the abuser nor strips the abused of agency. Films such as
Mysterious Skin,
Hard Candy and
Little Children sit outside of the constraints of the Hollywood industry’s control; American independent cinema has a wider scope for experimentation and transgression. These films represent both the perpetrator and child as fluid characters that do not neatly fit into traditional definitions, allowing for the development of a more involved narrative beyond the genre confines of horror, thriller and melodrama. This film cycle contrasts heavily with the mass media’s moral panics about child molestation that retain a binaristic definition and focus upon ‘stranger danger’ rather than the more likely threat from within the home or family community. The mass media controls how certain ‘folk devils’ are presented by offering a restricted reporting of the ‘facts’, as Stanley Cohen notes: ‘[the] media have long operated as agents of moral indignation in their own right: even if they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muck-raking, their very reporting of certain “facts” can be sufficient to generate concern, anxiety, indignation or panic’ (1972: 9–10). In
Mysterious Skin the abuser is a baseball coach, a trusted member of the community; in
Hard Candy the paedophile really does not look like, as Hayley remarks, the ‘kind of guy who needs to meet girls on the Internet’; and in
Little Children, even though Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) fits into the visual stereotype of the paedophile (weak and pathetic), his childlike persona and loving mother, May (Phyllis Somerville), subvert the perceived characteristics of the paedophile that might include a past of physical or sexual abuse, neglect, a broken home or a definable, possibly untreated, mental illness.
This independent cinema cycle in the early 2000s provides images of the paedophile in a manner that transgresses traditional binary definitions of victims and victimisers, and considers complex questions concerning the social construction of sexuality, desire and innocence. This cycle constitutes a form of trauma cinema that offers not only a cathartic space for the victim but also the perpetrator.
3 This is most clearly seen in
Little Children, where chapters of the film are told from the perspective of the paedophile, Ronnie. The film opens with Ronnie under the glazed gaze of his mother’s collection of little porcelain children (Hummel figurines) as he watches a newscast reporting his release from prison. He is pictured alone and isolated, but as Ronnie is in suburbia he is constantly surrounded by temptation. Yet it is not so much a confession from the perpetrator that this cycle of cinema allows for, but an opportunity to give dimensions to the traditionally monstrous paedophile and de-sexualised innocent child. The experience of trauma is not homogeneous and the films under discussion here do not resort to prototypical representations of victims and villains, and neat ethical resolutions.
Trauma cinema stylistically promotes ‘vivid bodily and visual sensations’ (Walker 2001: 214) over ‘verbal narrative and context’ (Herman 1992: 8). The trauma of the past, or, in the case of
Hard Candy, the present, is characterised ‘through an unusual admixture of emotional affect, metonmyic [sic] symbolism and cinematic flashbacks’ (Walker 2001: 214).
Mysterious Skin opens on a delighted child being showered with candy-coloured cereal in washed-out slow-motion shots that gives the film a dream-like texture. Memories of abuse are presented as dream sequences; they are both fantasies and nightmares as Neil and Brian attempt to come to terms with their fractured memories and traumatic pasts. The opening act of
Hard Candy uses tight framing to give the film a simultaneously innocent and intimate sensation, and as a seemingly naïve Hayley is driven to Jeff’s home the sparse dialogue is overcome by visuals: pastel-coloured dreamy images of the drive are enhanced with artistic lens flares and slow-motion shots of the couple as they laugh, talk and flirt. It is a form of visual storytelling that allows for discussion of memory and personal experience in a way that does not necessarily require verbalisation.
Figs 1 & 2: Fantasies and nightmares: A younger Neil’s (Chase Ellison) candy-coloured dream-like experiences of paedophilia contrast with Brian’s (George Webster) clinical alien nightmares in Mysterious Skin (2004).
This chapter is split into three sections that discuss the transgressive nature of this cycle of paedophilia-related cinema. The first section of this chapter explores the construction of the paedophile in traditional narratives and how the image of the paedophile begins to be deconstructed by films released in the early 2000s. For example, in
Mysterious Skin the paedophile is a simplistic secondary character given no history or motivation allowing for the focus to be upon the two abused boys, and although his essentially off-screen actions (child abuse) are undeniably deplorable, the paedophilic Little League coach is not a monstrous figure. It contradicts the social construction of the paedophile theorised by James R. Kincaid and Michel Foucault. The second section analyses the different ways in which
Hard Candy,
Little Children and
Mysterious Skin contravene traditional ideas about victims. In
Hard Candy, Hayley actively takes on the role of the victim and justifies her role as an abuser by presenting her actions as a form of revenge and community cleansing.
Little Children’s paedophile, Ronnie, is a broken subject who fails to understand the consequences of his actions. When his mother dies, Ronnie takes extreme measures in attempts to follow her deathbed instructions: ‘Please be a good boy.’ The abused characters in
Mysterious Skin struggle to accept their position as victims and they construct excuses and elaborate fantasies to avoid accepting what has happened to them. The final section of this chapter considers different forms of abuse by looking at the child as abuser and subversion of the idea that children are unknowing participants in abuse.
Little Children explores the previously unknown family of the abuser, and further complicates the construction of the paedophile by providing a back-story of a loving home and a happy childhood. This is then contrasted in
Mysterious Skin when the ineffectual parent is presented as a possible cause for child abuse as they inadvertently provide the opportunity for the paedophile to manipulate and violate a child.
Monsters and Innocents
In Mysterious Skin, Hard Candy and Little Children the paedophiles are not simply monsters lurking in the shadows, and the children they desire are not necessarily de-sexualised innocents cared for by dutiful parents and concerned communities. As noted by Karen Lury in The Child in Film, the child figure can be a ‘complex and powerful agent’ (2010: 4) that allows filmmakers to play upon audience expectations for the definition of childhood and how children should act. Both ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ have become almost mythic concepts that are embedded and entangled within contemporary Western culture. By reframing the child as an active and perhaps erotic figure filmmakers can transgress ‘conventional modes of identification and expressions of sexuality’ (ibid.). While Mysterious Skin, Hard Candy and Little Children are all distinct films, they do come together to argue for a more fluid understanding of child sexuality, and also a more complex reading of the paedophile by moving beyond simplistic caricature.
Paedophiles are often utilised in both fictional and factual discourses as figures that society can project its most sinister fears and anxieties upon. In order for the paedophile to function in this fashion they must be, as James R. Kincaid (1992; 1998) argues, kept at a distance – an evil person defined only by their actions as child abusers. By keeping the paedophile at the edges of society both literally and figuratively in reports and stories, the paedophile is culturally marked as ‘other’, and thus ‘a complex image of projection and denial’ (1992: 5). Societal constructions of sexuality, which have resulted in positioning children as complete innocents, ‘creates a space’ for the paedophile, a space that ‘we can bet will not go unoccupied’ (1992: 3). Kincaid argues that the demonised paedophile is a necessary element within a society – a locus of cultural fears that acceptably explains the eroticisation of children in contemporary society. The ‘myth of child molestation’ (1998: 5) has become an intrinsic part of US culture, and the stories that surround the abusers and the abused are given clear boundaries and resolutions. Kincaid notes that in cinema children are often ‘scoured free from eroticism’ (1998: 124) but when filmmakers do eroticise child actors and transgress the image of the chaste child they must ‘invent quite extraordinary sleights of hand, be satisfied with a marginal movie, or bear up under a storm of outrage’.
Despite their controversial approach to paedophiles and child victims the independent films released in the early 2000s did not cause a ‘storm of outrage’. They rejected the construction of victims, and indeed perpetrators of child abuse, as being without individual agency both on- and off-screen. Traditionally children are framed as innocents and victims, and this section looks at the construction of childhood innocence as a Western concept that is not internationally universal. Michel Foucault theorised that ‘childhood’ gradually emerged as a concept in the seventeenth century as the young were increasingly perceived as something innocent to be protected, disciplined and educated. The development of the idea of childhood also changed concepts of the family and home as ‘a dense, saturated, permanent, continuous physical environment which envelops, maintains, and develops the child’s body’ (1984a: 280). Philippe Ariès also argued that childhood was not recognised as a distinct phase of human life until relatively late in human history and that the sentimental idea of the child as an innocent resulted in the ‘attitude and behaviour towards childhood’ that required ‘safeguarding it against pollution by life’ (1962: 119). Children should be pure and under the protection of their parents, in some senses stripped of their own sexual identity. Foucault argues, and Kincaid agrees, that the de-sexualisation of children has had ‘the consequence of sexually exciting the bodies of children while at the same time fixing the parental gaze and vigilance on the peril of infantile sexuality’ (1984b: 62). It became a sexual taboo for a child to be considered sexually attractive and/or the subject of sexual pleasure, and those that did see the young as erotic figures, and worse those who acted upon these desires, become the monstrous ‘other’.
Emma Wilson explores an approach to childhood that analyses the representation of the child’s ‘own experiences and sensations’ (2005: 330). She considers this a ‘deconstructive process’ that moves beyond examining the figure of the child in terms of its meaning to adults, which has been the focus of much of the cultural studies scholarship prior to 2005 and the release of the cycle of films under discussion here. Wilson instead focuses upon the construction of childhood outside of the restrictive idea of innocence. As she remarks: ‘innocence emerges as the dominant fantasy in whose terms children have been variously represented, protected and desired. This fantasy in itself has been seen as in part responsible for the very disempowerment of the child’ (2005: 331). This aligns with Kincaid’s and Foucault’s argument that by failing to give children agency and retaining a classification of innocence the child becomes a fetishised fantasy object. The distinction between child and adult is widened by the adhesion to childhood innocence; children are there to be protected, revealing child vulnerability and the ‘[confirmation of] adult power’ (Holland 2004: 144).
Mysterious Skin actively subverts the image of the innocent child as the children are granted agency and complex post-abuse narratives. It shows how traumatic events in childhood are integral to understanding Neil and Brian as young-adults.
Mysterious Skin attempts to close the gap between child and adult by indicating that both can be powerful and vulnerable. Coach, the paedophile, is neither monstrous nor fully realised as he is essentially a mechanism for exploring traumatic childhood experiences. The film is not about Coach and instead challenges the presentation and construction of the victim with Brian and Neil driving the narrative forward.
Little Children’s Ronnie and
Hard Candy’s Jeff are well-developed characters offering a progressive representation of the paedophile as human in comparison to the sketchy, unnamed Coach who is a narrative device rather than a character.
Mysterious Skin garnered some negative press upon release because it did not demonise the paedophile and, according to protesters, it provided a ‘how-to manual that could instruct potentially paedophilic viewers in the mechanisms of successful “grooming” behaviour’ (Green and Goode 2008: 77). The director, Gregg Araki, chose to challenge the perceptions of child abuse by showing the effect abuse can have upon a child and most controversially gives an eight-year-old, Neil (Chase Ellison), sexual agency as he openly explores his newfound sexuality by spying on his mother having sex and masturbating over men in his mother’s issues of
Playgirl.
Mysterious Skin does not give the paedophile much room to grow as a character; he is a catalyst for the story about the boys rather than a character in his own right. Alongside the other key adult figures, including the boys’ parents, Coach is not given a name. Adults are not the focus of the film and their individual stories lack details or resolution. It appears that Coach receives no punishment for his actions; he only lives on in the present-day narratives as a ghostly figure haunting Neil and Brian.
In Little Children the paedophile, Ronnie, is more than a ghostly apparition or a nightmare. He takes a central role in the narrative and his transgressions are part of the film’s wider discussion of culturally rejected forms of love, desire and sex. His attraction to children is wrong, and Little Children does not justify this behaviour but purposefully, as director Todd Fields explains, ‘never comments on him’ (2005: n.p.) or his crimes. Ronnie takes a childish approach to his interactions with other people and attempts to please his mother who, despite his offences, still sees Ronnie as her ‘miracle’. In one scene, he goes to a swimming pool full of children during a heat-wave, fails to fully appreciate how his actions have caused panic and is removed by the police – as he is pulled away he shouts ‘I was just trying to cool off!’ Ronnie goes out on an ill-fated date with a woman from a lonely-hearts column called Shelia (Jane Adams) ‘as a sort of expression of love’ for his mother (ibid.). The awkward date ends with Ronnie asking Shelia to drive to a secluded playground so that he can masturbate. Ronnie is an ‘inadequate adult’ (Green and Goode 2008: 74) who cannot manage his desires or look after himself; he needs to be cared for by his mother, and once she dies he is lost without her moral and emotional guidance. Little Children acknowledges Ronnie’s struggles and invites a compassionate response from its audience as the paedophile himself is child-like.
The children and adults presented in
Mysterious Skin and
Little Children do not fit into the binary constructions of the child and adult, nor child and child abuser. These films as part of a broader cycle test the moral boundaries of acceptable representation of child abuse narratives. Paedophiles are presented as victims of their own desire, or of a threatening other. Paedophile narratives are shown to be multifaceted in ways that do not comfortably sit within expected child abuse narratives. The abuser is shown as a flawed human, and the children are given their own stories and motivations separate from the narratives that are so often constructed for them. The victim is not always easy to identify and in each of the films discussed it may shift between adults and children.
Accepting and Rejecting Victimhood
The cycle of paedophile-based films released in the 2000s focuses upon victim-hood. But they do not provide a neat means of understanding the definition of the ‘victim’ or its apparent opposite in the ‘abuser’. The distinction is blurred as the characters and stories develop, and adults and children are ambiguously marked and represented. What are the implications of making the audience empathise with the paedophile, if only temporarily? This is particularly noticeable in
Hard Candy, Little Children and
The Woodsman, where the paedophile protagonist, Walter (Kevin Bacon), is presented as a traumatised victim of his own taboo desire. Walter does not define himself as a victim, but the filmmakers do and it is only when he attacks another paedophile – and his face appears momentarily in place of the man he’s hitting – that the audience and indeed Walter are offered a sense of resolution.
Mysterious Skin does not punish its paedophile and, unlike the other films discussed in this chapter, the abuser is a secondary sketchy character. The victims struggle with their experiences and neither Neil nor Brian fully accept (or reject) their victim-hood. This liminality is important to this cycle of films as it purposely forces the audience to ‘make up their own minds’ (Fields 2005: n.p.). The distinctions between victims and perpetrators are purposely murky and viewers are forced to question the actions and motivations of not only the adult but also the child characters.
Fig. 3: Alluringly innocent: Hayley (Ellen Page) presents a carefully constructed androgynous childlike image in Hard Candy (2005).
The fourteen-year-old Hayley Stark actively takes on the role of the victim; she is a meta-victim. At the beginning of Hard Candy, the paedophilic Jeff and the audience who view the story-world through his experiences in this opening sequence are drawn in by Hayley’s carefully managed innocence. She is first introduced as a fresh-faced girl with a smear of chocolate frosting on her lip. She sways between maturity and innocence as her coquettish and intelligent conversation contrasts with her apparent shyness and youth. Jeff appears to be in charge of the situation when Hayley joins him for a dreamy ride to his home expressed through the pastel sun-bleached hues and slow-motion cinematography. Both Jeff and the viewer are tricked by Hayley’s child-like representation until her true intentions are revealed – the camera’s ‘persistent gaze at her innocent young face’ (Henry 2014: 71) makes the audience anxious as they fear what the sexual predator will do to the teenager. Yet, as the alcohol and tranquilisers flow, Jeff quickly loses control of his body and his mind, as his virtual fantasy girl becomes his literal nightmare. In a reversal of the tightly-framed shots of the seemingly innocent Hayley, later close-ups of a traumatised Jeff become the camera’s focus, shifting audience sympathies uncomfortably towards the paedophile (if only temporarily). Jeff asks who the ‘hell’ she is when it is clear that she is not the innocent girl she created on the Internet, and Hayley responds: ‘I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed.’ She sees herself as giving molested and perhaps murdered girls the opportunity for revenge.
Hard Candy disrupts the distinction between abuser and abused. Hayley is a liminal character on the verge of adulthood and she rationalises her own abusive actions by victimising a paedophile. It is unclear if she has been molested, or whether she is using the devastating, traumatic experiences of other girls as justification for acting out her own violent fantasies. Jeff is not Hayley’s first victim; she is a repeat offender and audiences are challenged by the idea that Hayley might gain pleasure from traumatising the paedophiles she has entrapped. It is also unclear if her manipulation of Jeff and his eventual suicide should be considered morally acceptable because the victim is a paedophile. Hayley transgresses the notion of the innocent child. She is not asexual and innocent; she uses her pubescent sexuality and fabricated naïve personality to manipulate her intended target. Jeff is the subject of Hayley’s vigilante justice but it is difficult to see Jeff as a true victim: even the final act of his suicide is performed to protect his reputation rather than to atone for his paedophilic sins.
In
Little Children, Ronnie is a demonised source of anxiety for his local community but he is permitted to develop as a multi-dimensional flawed character with a family and future that deserves representation. In contrast to
Hard Candy’s Jeff, Ronnie’s final act is self-mutilation; he castrates himself in order to ‘be a good boy’ following the death of his mother. He would rather hurt himself than break a promise he has made to his mother to be good. He is a victim of his own desires that he cannot control and his self-castration is not necessarily an attempt to punish himself but a drastic and naïve way of preventing himself from re-offending. A campaign is mounted to force Ronnie out of the neighbourhood, but the warning posters featuring a picture of his face and the extensive graffiti on his mother’s house do not seem to affect him. He is detached from his actions and how he is perceived in the local community. Instead it is his mother who is the victim of the vigilante crusades as she washes ‘EVIL’ off her front path, and confronts the
de facto vigilante leader Larry (Noah Emmerich) on her doorstep. She is worried about how it impacts her son as she tries to build his confidence and reassure him with phrases like, ‘You did a bad thing, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person’. Her death is presented as a consequence of the abuse she has sustained.
Both Little Children and Hard Candy give their paedophile characters names and a sense of identity. Mysterious Skin does not. Mysterious Skin is told almost exclusively from a child’s, and later a young adult’s, perspective through voice-over and uncomfortable point-of-view shots of abuse. But the children’s experiences differ: Neil sees pastel colours, slow motion and intimacy, and Brian sees blurry ominous figures and blackouts. Both boys in some senses reject their role as abused children and thus victims. Brian suffers from dissociative amnesia and has repressed the traumatic childhood memories of rape and searches for explanations of the time he is missing by exploring the possibility of alien abduction. He has recurring nightmares that reveal fragments of truth amongst disturbing images of aliens and probes. Dream sequences are used in Neil and Brian’s parallel stories and where Brian sees trauma and alien abduction, Neil creates dreamy memories of his experience with Coach that are frequently cross-cut into moments when Neil is being fellated by clients. Neil fantasises about Coach during sex and throughout the film the audience are confronted with the idea that his abuse was a positive experience. Sexual fantasising is something that an individual does rather than being something that is forced upon them (see Dwyer 2009). Whereas Brian is apparently sexually repressed – a possible reaction to his early exposure to sex – Neil is quite the opposite. He actively rejects his role as the victim and fondly recalls his time with Coach. Coach is never given a name and has little screen time, but his actions are a catalyst for the development of the main characters. He is compared to the swimsuit models Neil sees in his mother’s Playgirl magazines, a surface image and a dream. Society gives little sexual agency to pre-pubescent children and by viewing his abuse as sexual enlightenment, and Coach as his ‘first love’, Neil contravenes this restrictive image of the child. Whereas Brian’s experience validates the monstrous child molestation discourse, Neil rejects it.
Neil is an affront to the traditional understanding of what a child should be as his purity has been tainted by abuse. He repeats the abusive acts committed against him by bullying and coercing other children into engaging in indecent acts. Neil is not only given agency and presented as having a developing queer sexual identity, he is also revealed as an accomplice. In one of the most disturbing sequences in
Mysterious Skin, Neil acts out the role of the abuser. Eleven-year-old Neil and his best friend Wendy (Riley McGuire) are out unsupervised for Halloween and they lure a mentally challenged child away from his friends. Once alone Neil puts firecrackers in the child’s mouth and sets them alight despite Wendy’s protestations. Inevitably the child is hurt and Neil attempts to resolve the situation with oral sex. Neil uses sex to distract and placate his victim using the phrases and tone utilised by Coach to calm and coerce Neil into sex acts. In the later stages of the film, when Neil and Brian’s stories begin to merge, it is revealed that Neil was present when Brian was abused – he was used to coax unwilling or nervous boys, including Brian, into engaging in sex with Neil and Coach. As a fifteen-year-old prostitute he actively invites older men to use his body to act out their inappropriate and essentially paedophilic fantasies. This disregard for himself is seen to stem from his abusive past – he is a victim, and in the final shots of the film as Brian weeps at the full realisation that he was abused, Neil comprehends the magnitude of aiding Coach in his paedophilia. The film resolves in a far more conventional fashion than the majority of its run-time predicts;
Mysterious Skin’s ambiguous ending can be interpreted as a moment of realisation for Neil who had so actively rejected his own victimhood. These children were violated against their will, and Neil helped; the final scene shows Neil finally accepting himself as both a victim and an abuser and experiencing feelings of both acceptance and guilt.
Hard Candy, Little Children and Mysterious Skin do not conform to traditional definitions of childhood. Hard Candy and Mysterious Skin present child characters with sexual confidence and agency who are aware of their actions although not necessarily of their consequences. Little Children presents the paedophile as a complex character; Ronnie might be perceived as mentally ill rather than fully aware of his actions. The film still holds him accountable for his sexual offences (he has been punished with imprisonment) but he is offered redemption and hope for the future by the filmmakers as he attempts to ‘cure’ himself and be ‘a good boy’. In contrast, the paedophile-as-victim presented in Hard Candy neither seeks nor deserves forgiveness. All three films manipulate and explore the apparently oppositional concepts of victim and perpetrator; characters exhibit traits of both often simultaneously and by transgressing the notion of the child as a desexualised figure. They question the absolute demonisation of sex offenders and the restricted agency afforded to children. These independent productions transgress the image of the child and the paedophile. By deconstructing these binaries the films also raise questions about abuse and its definition. It can take many forms, and each of the films question its construction and impact upon the narratives of both victims and abusers themselves.
Shades of Abuse
By presenting complex child characters who are damaged by their experiences and situations, and paedophiles who are also victims of desire and perceptions potentially out of their control, this cycle of paedophile- and child-abuse themed films allows for the questioning of the boundaries.
Hard Candy’s Hayley and
Mysterious Skin’s Neil are minors, aged fourteen and fifteen respectively. They each take on the role of the abuser with Hayley acting as a vengeful meta-victim, and Neil as a child who is complicit in the abuse of other children. The distinction between seemingly opposite positions, emotions and moral stances are shown to be fluid and unstable. In both
Hard Candy and
Little Children characters die as a result of sustained mental abuse, questioning whether there is an appropriate punishment for a paedophile and if they can or should be allowed redemption.
Mysterious Skin also explores different forms of child abuse beyond the sexual by looking towards parental negligence and asking if poor parenting is another form of abuse even when it is unintentional.
Mysterious Skin, in its presentation of Neil, conforms to the idea that children who are abused go on to perpetuate that abuse upon others. Neil kidnaps and rapes another child. He goes far beyond bullying or pranking. Neil uses the boy’s disability (read innocence) to manipulate the situation as Coach has taught him; he takes on the role of the abuser. As Vicky Lebeau remarks, Brian ‘can be seen as the very image of the abused child, his face erased by the experience of sexual abuse at the hands of Coach and, indeed, his prop, Neil. But Neil’s sexuality does not fit the more or less conventionalised narratives of child sex abuse’ (2008: 130). Brian acts as a counterbalance to Neil throughout the film; his responses are more acceptable and expected. Neil and Brian’s childhood experiences influence each of them differently, but their shared history does not equate to a shared future.
Neil and Hayley are ‘symbol[s] of a childhood lost’ (Lebeau 2008: 108); they are damaged by their early exposure to sex and detailed knowledge of abuse. Hayley is not given a back-story and thus no excuse for her behaviour. She indicates that she has a sister, but as she taunts Jeff it is revealed that most, if not all, of the personal details she has disclosed to him are false. Like her online identity ‘Thonggrrrl’, ‘Hayley’ is an unstable character – she is difficult to trust and empathise with. Everything she does in the film is a manipulation. Hayley tortures Jeff as she ‘performs’ a castration but, like her personality on- and offline, the castration scene is fiction. Jeff watches in horror as Hayley, armed with surgical equipment, a medical textbook and a video camera, apparently gelds him. But after the procedure is complete Jeff discovers that he is still complete and that the video feed of the castration was an instructional medical video. Hayley does not physically harm Jeff; he perpetrates the only physically abusive actions after he escapes from Hayley’s impromptu operating table. Hayley uses props to aid her mental torture: videos, medical equipment and drugs. Jeff hits Hayley and chases her with a knife, but it is she who ultimately prevails as she convinces Jeff to hang himself. She is alarmingly aware of her own sexual agency and it forces the audience to consider, and more disturbingly imagine, what has led her to this abusive point.
Little Children places the paedophile within a family context and argues that abusive adults are not always a consequence of abused or abusive children; it is difficult to interpret Ronnie’s paedophilic actions as a response to a neglectful childhood. His attraction to children is controversially envisioned as a compulsion. There is opportunity to compare his mother May to Mrs. Bates, the overbearing mother figure in
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but whereas the off-screen ‘Mother’ is a little more than a ‘grotesque’ figure of Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins) and, indeed, the audience’s imagination (see Dick 2000: 240), May’s compassionate on-screen mothering shows a woman who has accepted if not forgiven her son’s compulsive crimes. May still sees her son as a child who needs her guidance and she believes he can be rehabilitated with her support. When May dies Ronnie is left alone, and the ‘only child who is critically wounded in
Little Children is Ronnie’ (McAlister 2008: 18) because without his mother to guide him he tries his best to resolve his sexual problems by hurting himself. May is a victim of the community response to her son, people who are only able to see him as the dangerous sex offender confirmed in playground gossip and news headlines. She represents the families who suffer alongside the abusers, the unseen victims of the cycle of abuse. May is a tragic character whose every action is inspired by an unlimited love for her child.
Even though Ronnie has a protective and devoted mother he still acts upon his paedophilic desires – his offences are not the result of poor parenting or an abusive childhood. Negligence becomes part of the cycle of abuse; inactivity and failure to protect the child from other predatory adults is seen as a form of child abuse. In Mysterious Skin absent and ineffectual parents are portioned some of the blame as both of the abused children are made vulnerable to the paedophile by a lack of parental care. Neil’s mother, Mrs. McCormick (Elisabeth Shue), although loving towards her son, is shown as a perpetual teenager with a string of inappropriate boyfriends. Neil learns from his abuser as other children might learn behaviours from their parents. Coach is a fantasy father as well as a sexual fantasy for Neil – they go to movies, play video games and play with their food. Coach, from Neil’s perspective, takes on the role of his father; similarly, in L.I.E., Howie (Paul Dano) is looked after by a paedophile, Big John (Brian Cox). Big John makes advances on Howie, but when he is rejected Big John backs off but chooses to keep Howie safe until his own father is able to take care of him. The paedophile is shown as a father figure who gives the children the intimacy and emotional support they crave. As Joel Dossi remarks, ‘the horror of being abused by a trusted adult looms. This duality elicits contradictory emotional responses from both his victims and the audience’ (2005: 65). Adults are flawed characters who are in their own way abusive. In Mysterious Skin Brian’s ineffectual father is partially to blame for his abuse; Mr. Lackey (Chris Mulkey) sees his bespectacled little boy as a failure – he cannot play sports, and he wets the bed, faints and has chronic nosebleeds. Mr. Lackey has little time for his son and it is when he forgets to collect Brian from a Little League game that Coach is offered the opportunity to molest the abandoned child. Questions of responsibility, neglect and abuse underpin Mysterious Skin and use of the child’s point of view further contravenes the traditional understanding of paedophile and child victims by placing paedophilia within the broader spectrum of abusive and neglectful relationships.
Abuse is a fluid concept in this early twenty-first century cycle of child abuse films. The expected characterisation of the abuser is transgressed as the notion of abuse is deconstructed. Alongside physical sexual abuses these films present other forms of abuse including negligence, mental abuse and self-mutilation.
Hard Candy’s shifting sympathies question how a lack of physical evidence should be understood, whether Hayley deserves punishment, and if her vigilante justice constitutes a victimless crime.
Little Children also considers mental abuse, as neither Ronnie nor his mother are physically abused by Larry or other members of the concerned community. Like Jeff, Ronnie and his mother are harmed by mental abuse – the abuse exacerbates May’s heart condition and she dies, and Ronnie mutilates himself in order to be a ‘good boy’ for his mother and to appease, however naïvely, the neighbourhood who call for his castration. Abuse takes another form in
Mysterious Skin as a child commits child abuse; Neil as abuser is seen to repeat the rhetoric and rationalisation of his abuser and thus this becomes an extension of the original abuse. Whereas the film’s neglectful parents become part of the abuse rather than being innocent bystanders, they are partly responsible for the crimes committed against their children. The primary case studies all interpret abuse as a fractured concept that vilifies and identifies not only paedophiles but also children as active figures alongside their families and local communities as contributors to the cycle and interpretation of child abuse.
Little Children,
Hard Candy and
Mysterious Skin attempt to broaden the understanding and representation of child abuse in twenty-first century US cinema by destabilising accepted caricatures and expected power relations.
Conclusion
Mysterious Skin, Hard Candy and Little Children are ‘cultural artefacts of the intense anxiety attached to emerging conceptions of the child in the early twenty-first century’ (Lennard 2014: 161). They promote, if not entirely reflect, a need to reassess the societal construction of childhood and children. By moving the paedophile out of the narrative shadows and actively crafting a more multi-dimensional characterisation, filmmakers can raise questions about the dangers of stereotyping both abusers and their victims. The films under discussion here were all made for an adult audience and attempt, if only momentarily, to give adult viewers ‘an awareness of helplessness’ and ‘sensitise [them] to the experience (and suffering) of children and so engage [them] more voluntarily, changing [their] perspective on childhood’ (Wilson 2005: 330). By telling these stories from the perspective of the child and, in the case of Little Children, the paedophile, the filmmakers endeavour to alter audience understanding of victims and perpetrators by provoking ‘involuntary emotions’ and placing the viewer in the seemingly helpless position of the victim (ibid.). Mysterious Skin actively subverts the image of the innocent child and firmly positions the film in the light of child rather than adult experience. Hard Candy defines and redefines audience perceptions of who is the victim and who is the abuser, forcing the audience into the perspective of both. Little Children represents the paedophile as a complex character who can be a victim not only of his own desires but also the pressures of family and the public.
These films give previously under- or entirely un-represented figures representation through cinematic form and style. The child’s perspective is given priority through camerawork and visual imagery that mirrors their subjective experiences. The viewer ‘experiences’ Neil and Brian’s abuse in Mysterious Skin through closely framed shots with Coach filling the screen and obscuring the view of the child. The dream-like sequences in both Mysterious Skin and Hard Candy offer a childish image of an adult experience – sex and grooming in Mysterious Skin, and a car ride for a teenage girl on the way to an exciting stranger’s home – although the latter’s use of this visual tone and style essentially serves to confuse the viewer in the understanding of relationship between child and abuser. In Little Children, the camera explores the world from the perspective of the paedophile eliciting empathy if not sympathy from the audience. All three films provide their previously under-represented figures, both child and adult, with a voice that allows for an exploration of the complexities of their character that extends beyond monstrosity and innocence.
Complex meditations upon child sexuality and agency, and adult culpability are found in films that are ghettoised and only available to smaller, more active audiences due to their independent mode of production and limited release. The three case-study films –
Mysterious Skin,
Hard Candy and
Little Children – frame the act and consequences of abuse in a morally indecisive fashion with constructions of desire, innocence, victimhood and agency being treated in a way that provides no clear answers or judgements for the audience. As Vicky Lebeau states in her monograph
Childhood and Cinema, ‘it is a mark of the achievement of contemporary cinema that it continues to engage the sexuality and sexual dissidents of children and adolescents’ (2005: 128); these films engage with these issues in a rebellious fashion not only in terms of representation but also narrative construction. They refuse to tell a single story about abuse, and the relationship between children and adults. Child abuse and its media construction is challenged and reframed, and adult audience members are invited to make up their own minds about with whom their sympathies should lie.
Notes
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