Wider Screenings column #2 Aug/Sept 2008
Exploring the Ambiguities of Childhood Socialization
The dynamics of human inter-personal relationships may have made for some of the most memorable and enduring of cinema’s treasures but there is one aspect of human social interaction which has provoked filmmakers into some of their most emotionally affecting and personally revealing work: sexual socialization. As environmental factors impacting sexual maturation have a conditioning affect in addition to biological drives, the cinema of inter-personal development seeks to dramatize this dualism in what Romantic poet William Blake expressed so eloquently as the transition from innocence to experience.
In Sergio Leone’s violent, epic gangster saga Once Upon a Time in America, for instance, a teenage boy has bought a small dessert treat not for himself but to give to a girl in exchange for his first sexual experience. However, this boy is left alone for some time waiting and his eyes are torn between the door the girl is behind and the dessert treat he holds in his hands: divided between the temptations of a boy and a man. There is an innocence in his dilemma, but it is the incipient yearning for experience that gives it added poignancy. Yet, in that lure of sexual curiosity can be a perversity that makes innocence sinister: hence the boy in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea who has drilled a hole in the wall in order to spy on his mother’s bedroom activities.
Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby
But, just as the Oedipal affect of familial circumstances on sexual development is stressed in film so is the sense of deterministic socialization. Hence, Pretty Baby examined the life of a teenage girl whose childhood is spent in a New Orleans brothel where she lives with her whore mother. Inevitably, her sense of adult womanhood is heavily socialized in terms of this home environment: her rite of passage into adulthood being her first client and the loss of her virginity for money an act she accepts as a natural given of the world she inhabits. Often it is similarly ambiguous and qualified conceptions of childhood socialization into experience rather than celebrations of innocence which are the dominant concerns in adult-oriented films about the maturation process, from the boy shouting for his idolized hero to return at the end of Shane to the conscious deliberation of the child to remain forever innocent in The Tin Drum.
For contrast, it is interesting to note the distinction between depictions of childhood in films made for adults and films made for children / families. In the latter, typified by what has come to be known as the Disney ethic, childhood innocence is idealized. Although the main message behind these films may be positive, similar portrayals in adult-oriented films are cautious and even negative regarding innocence – here, childhood innocence is an illusion held in contrast to the sheer monstrousness of the adult world which must inevitably consume it to the point where in, say, River’s Edge, teenagers have been so amorally warped by their socialization that they think nothing when one of them kills a friend: the complex and morally ambiguous state of “experience” consumes whatever pure “innocence” may have existed to begin with – “experience” is the inescapable reality to which all are socialized.
Hayley Joel Osment in AI: Artificial Intelligence
No consideration of themes of childhood innocence in modern populist cinema would be complete without mention of Steven Spielberg. The hit family film E.T the Extra-Terrestrial idealizes innocence to the point where children have the last vestige of humanism, protecting a benevolent alien from the adult inhumanity that would see it dissected. Yet, as an adult, Spielberg is aware of the escapism inherent in his conception of innocence, so much so that, some twenty years later, the robot child in A.I Artificial Intelligence is programmed with an unconditional love for his mother, indicative of what the film considers innocence, but which is revealed finally to be a perfect but virtually delusional state. The progression in Spielberg is striking for the director’s reluctance to fully relinquish the conception of an absolute innocence even in the face of cynical despair.
The vast discrepancy evident between so-called safe family fare and more adult considerations reveals that what is commonly considered “innocence” is actually a multi-faceted deliberate construct rather than a true state of being. However, the alternative “experience” with its fatalistic inevitability is often so unrelentingly despairing as to make a return to a fabricated innocence a desired state, hence both the consistently popular nature of innocuous family entertainment and its ultimate thematic insignificance to an adult audience: insignificant because it negates the qualities which distinguish the dramatization of the maturation process and its symbolic transition from innocence to experience in true adult-oriented cinema – ambiguity and irony.
MUSIC TO BROWSE THIS COLUMN: with DJ Drifter
(courtesy of YouTube embedded video)
"In the article Time for Change in No Limits magazine (Aug-Sept. 2008), international author and speaker Nancy R. Daly shares a tip for transforming your life: "Listening to your intuition: discerning cues and messages from your inner truth." In addition, she remarks on relationships of the need for "surrounding yourself with positive rather than negative people". DJ Drifter's inner truth though is something far darker, far more sinister, more sexual. But I need positive people, positive listeners. Without such there is an emptiness, a sadness, but even melancholia can be beautiful: Why (Annie Lennox)"
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