Beautiful, poetic, ideal – that is our vision of the child. She embodies the dream of a lost golden age, which, like every golden age, never really existed. Films like Christophe Barratier’s The Chorus (with 8.5 million paid admissions) or Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot play on that theme and are in fact reactionary: their mass appeal lies in their nostalgia-inducing quality, both nostalgia for the past and nostalgia for a lost childhood. Since children always attract viewers, TV uses them as an excuse for the most vacuous programs conceivable. This includes the telethon in aid of children with genetic diseases (a veritable Yom Kippur of good feeling, starring Generosity itself), in which a titanic effort is made to collect the greatest possible amount of money in the shortest possible time. What wouldn’t you do for sick kids? The result is obscene and profoundly stupid. But hey! It’s for the kids.
Curiously, childhood has become an ideal that leads adults into illusory dreams. It is no longer children who dream of freedom and growing up, as Benoît Duteutre stresses in his book The Little Girl and the Cigarette, but rather adults who dream of childhood as a paradise that they will never again visit. Except on TV. What other explanation is there for reality shows like Star Academy, in which adults voluntarily go back to school, where they sleep in dormitories, learn to sing and dance, squabble, and then get publicly forgiven. Television shows just worship childhood, even when – or especially when – it’s adults who write and act in them.
News programs (the “news” part is a misnomer) are also crazy about kids. They cover all kinds of sordid stuff: lost or murdered children regularly open the 6 o’clock news. Folks want it, it seems. In France, they adored little Gregory, an unsolved murder they talked non-stop about for months, maybe years. It was breathtaking suspense. It’s as if nothing really happened in the world between the Gregory story, in 1986, and 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Fortunately, a few years later public opinion (or the journalists – it’s hard to tell the chicken from the egg) got to sink its teeth into murders committed by Marc Dutroux, the filthy Belgian. Then there was the case of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub. And the public was enthralled with the story of Natascha Kampusch, the little Austrian girl kidnapped at the age of ten and locked in a cellar for eight years. And they were righteously indignant over Véronique Courjault, the French woman whose two frozen children were discovered in her freezer in Seoul. They shivered over the story of the German who killed nine of his newborn children and hid their bodies in flowerpots. These modern Medeas bring out our morbid fascination. The wicked child murderer, the perverse killer of infants – they are monsters! But at home things are going just great, thanks: our kids are “fulfilled” and their parents “well balanced.”