Two things sparked this video. First learning about Alan Moore's Lost
Girls, and also this tweet. So Pop Culture Detective already made a really good
video called "Born Sexy Yesterday", which is about the trope of women embodying
childlike traits in order for them to appease the male ego, and also for them
to run around shamelessly naked. But today I want to talk about the
opposite of that trope, which is little girls embodying adult traits in order to
make their pairing with their adult male co-star less creepy.
So some movies that embody this trope, which I'm going to call the pseudo
maturity of traumatized girls in film, the films I want to talk about are
Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver from 1976 playing a child prostitute named Iris, then
there's Natalie Portman who's 12 years old in Leon The Professional which came
out in 1994, then there's Alan Moore's Lost Girls, who are Dorothy Wendy and
Alice, who are all underage at some point in the book, and there's Dominique Swain who
is 17 in Lolita in 1997, and there's Mena Suvari who was 20 in American Beauty
which came out in 1999 alongside a 40-year old Kevin Spacey. Because most of
these girls that I've listed above have experienced the horrors of adulthood and
have had their innocence taken away from them, it's easier to portray them having
adult-like qualities and helps the audience understand why an older man
would take an interest in a 12 year old girl. However, it's important to
understand that these girls are still kids. Just because they've experienced
trauma doesn't mean that they really understand reality or what it's like
being an adult. It's not like Jodie Foster's filing taxes and Natalie
Portman's enrolling in night classes. In fact, in Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro's
character of Travis and Jodie Foster's character Iris, trauma bond over their
shared experiences. He helps her get out of being a child prostitute, while she
helps him feel human again. The most famous scene that Jodie and DeNiro have
together is when they're sitting in a diner and Iris says that she ran away
from home because she hates her parents and they hate her. Maybe she's
experienced trauma back home that she's trying to run away from, but she plays it
cool. This could just be a coping mechanism - if she didn't go back home in
the end and her father didn't contact Travis saying that everything's okay and
that she's back in school. Clearly she has nothing to run from and is just
irresponsibly getting herself in trouble. In the scene she talks fast and
self-assured showing that she isn't actually scarred by being forced to sell
herself, but rather "empowered". "Didn't you ever hear of women's lib?" Of course
this is all an act and she doesn't actually feel this way. In fact in the
shootout scene at the end she's terrified and becomes a kid again though
Travis saves her he still forces her to watch two murders. The worst part to me
about the movie is that it shows child prostitution has not being "that bad."
Iris is aesthetic is cool and quirky and she's just seen as a "working girl".
This is extremely detrimental because child prostitution is not a choice, it's
a hellhole mostly perpetuated by the elite, not just by some faceless scum. At
the end of the movie Iris is able to return to her normal life, but it's
highly unrealistic for someone who's experienced the trauma that she has.
Next we have Leon the professional where Natalie Portman plays Mathilda, a
twelve-year-old daughter of abusive parents alongside co-star John Reno the
neighborhood hitman. Mathilda goes to a school for troubled girls and she's
basically the quintessential "not like other girls" girl. She was quirky
clothings, she smokes, she ditches school. One day a crazed drug addict comes to
kill her entire family and she goes to Leon for comfort and he takes her in,
albeit, reluctantly. After Mathilda realizes that he's a
hitman he teaches her how to use guns and she in turn repays him by cleaning
his house. She tells him that she loves him, she tries on dress and adult
clothes for him to seem more "grown-up" and earn his affections, which he does
reciprocate but never verbalizes until the end of the movie when they're being
chased down by the cops. By the end of the movie Leon dies and Mathilda goes
back to school and will always have fond memories of Leon. This movie highly
romanticizes child an older man relations and even sounds like a
romantic movie. There's romantic mashups of the two on
YouTube staring longingly at one another and it's just creepy. Mathilda falls into
the pseudo mature trope because of her trauma, but it's important to remember
that she's still a kid at heart and shouldn't be sexualized in any way shape
or form. So for the next example we have Alan Moore's Lost Girls, which I already
went into excruciating detail in in another video, so I'm gonna try to
keep it short here. For some reason people love defending this book because
they see it as an exploration of women's sexuality and I would agree with that if
it didn't detail the exploits of children. The story deals with three
beloved childhood figures - Dorothy, Wendy, and Alice, and just goes to
town on them. They're brutalized, they're raped, they're pimped out, they're in
incestuous relationships, are addicted to drugs, and then force other girls into
submission in order to reenact to their own trauma. Alice, who becomes addicted to
opium, watches other girls be raped like she was. This is an example of an abuse
victim, who to cope with their trauma, is complicit in the abuse of others. When
Alice sees Lily another girl being abused at Redman's brothel being
systematically raped in issue three she doesn't do anything, and instead says, "I
didn't hinder Lily's corruption." Clearly Alice, and probably Jodie Foster's
character Iris, will continue the vicious cycle of victim and predator. Alice rapes
Wendy when they're adults in issue 2 chapter 12
about the seven deadly sins and Wendy is at first reluctant and says no but
eventually gives in to Alice's advances after Alice wears her down. The book
would have been fine if it just showed consensual acts between adults and I
even agree at the end that the women do help each other cope with their trauma
however why must women be brutalized and traumatized in order for them to
grow and to become strong? In the article Childhood Emotional Abuse Predicts Late
Adolescent Sexual Aggression, Perpetration, and Victimization by Eileen
Zurbriggen, Robin L Goldman, and Jennifer J Fredy, they stress that
emotional abuse as well as physical abuse will lead adolescents to become
more sexually aggressive as they age.
It's clear that Alice disassociates, first with her
father's friend when he rapes her and starts to enjoy it by imagining that
she's having sex with herself, and when she victimizes Lily and later,
Wendy. The Lost Girls are clearly troubled individuals and though the book
doesn't shy away from that it does do all of this for the pleasure of men. The
next two don't really fit into the pseudo mature traumatized girl trope
because their trauma is either unspoken or the film is through the perpetrators
perspective and thus, it is harder to judge whether the female characters are being sexual
or are just perceived as being sexual because of the creepy older predator.
First there's Lolita from 1997 which stars a
17 year old Dominic Swain alongside a 49 year old Jeremy Irons, and I myself am
guilty of loving this movie as a kid because I thought that their romance was
illicit and edgy, but as an adult I don't see it that way at all. It's a totally
gross and very sympathetic to Humbert Humbert's character. Yes he has abusive
outbursts and violent moments but they're always resolved because Dolores
uses sex to get what she wants - again proving the thesis that children of
sexual assault may become more sexually aggressive as they get older.
However, she doesn't have a history of sexual abuse before she meets him but
the camera does make it seem as though she's constantly being sexual. First as
the time where Humbert meets her and she's lying on the grass totally
drenched, then there's a time where she sits on his lap a little too closely, or
when she says goodbye to him before she goes to summer camp a little too
aggressively. It seems to us because the film is told from Humbert Humbert's perspective that
she's constantly egging him on. However I think that's giving the film way too
much credit. These moments are framed as romantic in order to get us, the audience,
on board with their future escapades. Thankfully, Dolores is able to run
away from him into the arms of a much bigger creep Quilty who has a child
pornography business. So HH's abduction of a child is okay, but what Quilty is
doing is way too far. I don't really think that HH is in the position to
judge. Anyway Dolores is able to escape Quilty and Humbert and by the end of the
movie and seems to be living a lower-middle-class life with her new
husband. What she needs is in a happy ending what she needs is counseling and
proper therapy. I guess because she's pregnant at the
end it shows that she's still a fully functioning human being but then she
dies in childbirth. What a thankless existence. And now finally we have my
favorite movie as a teenager, and the film that got me into critiquing film in the
first place, American Beauty from 1999, starring a 40-year old Kevin Spacey as
Lester Burnham, and a 20 year old Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes. I wasn't sure if
this one was going to make the list because again, it's from Lester's
perspective, and Angela didn't have any explicit trauma in her past, however she
is extremely sexually aggressive and that makes me think that she did have
some sexual trauma in the past. Seriously?! He just pulled down his pants
and yanked it out you know like say hello to Mr. Happy. Gross!
It wasn't gross. It was kind of cool. So did you do it? Well, of course I did.
He's a really well-known photographer. He shoots for Elle unlike a regular
basis. Angela's character constantly talks
about sex. She comments on Lester and his wife sexual relationship to his daughter
Jane, she talks about what boys are "really" thinking, she talks about
masturbation, and then she even touts the fact that boys started drooling over her
when she was only 12 years old. Clearly she has some serious issues going on
caused by something, however when it's revealed at the end that it was all
facade and that she's actually a virgin, this stops her from getting raped by
Lester. And in the end her purity saves her. This could even turn the pseudo
mature traumatized girl on its head by saying that kids are just kids and they're
not as mature as we say they are, and we should stop the culture that perpetuates
this idea in the first place. Though this is a positive take away from the film, the
other parts where she's being sexualized kind of takes away from this idea if
you're not watching it with a close enough eye.
Okay so for part two I want to talk about the men and the boys and where they fit into this trope.
Firstly, male characters are never really put into seemingly romantic or
sexual relationships with older women that are to be taken seriously. Milk
Money from 1994 is an obvious joke and in the Star Wars prequel trilogy
Padme consistently turns Anakin down because of their age difference. Lastly,
in the Graduate, Ben having sex with an older woman is seen as "cool". However,
there are some movies that deal with male trauma and pseudo mature children
but not together. There's Mystic River from 2003 which
deals heavily with the aftermath of sexual abuse. Three kids are playing in
the street in Boston when a fake cop and a fake priest come up and try to
abduct the kids and are successful in abducting one and that's Dave. When
Dave grows up he continually deals with this trauma. He's quiet and reserved and
even framed as kind of sexually perverse. However, this is just kind of there
to throw us off the real mystery. After one of the boys from the beginning, Jimmy,
discovers that his daughter was murdered all fingers point to Dave. Jimmy then hunts Dave
down and makes him give a false confession saying that he killed his
daughter. However before Jimmy pulls the trigger
Dave tells him what he was really doing, which was beating up a pedophile.
Jimmy doesn't believe him, and in the end, kills him. Mystic River is a great movie
about how we vilify victims in society. Though victims of repeated abuse are more
likely to be violent, that doesn't mean that we should vilify them or blame them
for that abuse, but rather help them seek proper treatment. Lastly, there's Birth
from 2004 starring Nicole Kidman an 11 year old Cameron Bright as Anna and
young Sean respectively. So after Anna's husband Sean dies she becomes convinced
at this 11 year old boy Sean is her husband reincarnated. Young Sean
recounts the details of his and Anna's sex life as an 11 year old, Anna then
asks him for a kiss on the lips, watches him bathe and undress, and even asks him
to marry her after he becomes legal. However by the end of the movie it's
revealed that young Sean isn't older Sean reincarnated and Anna goes on to
marry her fiance that she's been with for 10 years. So this film does have
aspects of the pseudo matured girl trope like being a child paired with an adult
co-star, however Shawn doesn't really have any trauma history and in order to
seem older he just has this delusion that he's Anna's reincarnated husband.
In 2017 the Georgetown Center of Poverty and Inequality proposed the study
entitled Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls Childhood by Rebecca
Epstein, Jamila J. Blake, and Thalia González. They argue that the perceived
adulthood of black girls is due to the fact that black people are less protected under the law
and by law enforcement. Young black girls growing up under police brutality take
on more responsibilities and grow up faster, already knowing the harshness
that the world has to offer. They also theorized because of the long
history of slavery and slave stereotypes like - The Sapphire, The Jezebel, and The Mammy - that
police officers, as well as your average white citizen, believe black girls are
more stubborn, more sexual, and more mothering. Therefore, their childhood has
been erased because they're already seen as mini adults, rather than the children
that they are.
The trope of pseudo maturity of
traumatized girls and film is even more damaging for black girls because too
many movies focus on how "adult" black girls are, and black girl hood is therefore,
erased and replaced with white fragile girls because they fit that ideal of
femininity that needs to be protected. Black girls don't get that privilege,
their sexuality is never under siege. In movies where black adolescence is
portrayed, for example in Precious from 2009 where the title character is
supposed to be 16, but is played by a 26 year old Gabourey Sidibe, she's shown
being abused because they aged her up, whereas Matilda from Leon The
Professional is seen with bruises on her face and a bloody nose and is kind of
beat up by her sister, it's never to the degree that precious faces a because
she's 12, but also because even though she's a pseudo adult like Precious, she's
not as adult as her because she's white. And yeah I think it's a good idea that
they use an older actor in Precious because it's a very demanding role, but
at the same time, they still kind of erased black girlhood by not using a
younger actress. And the abuse shown in Precious kind of reminds me of
blaxploitation films. The director Lee Daniels even admits of being a little
embarrassed to show this film at Cannes because he didn't want to make black
people look bad. And that's the tough thing about being a minority filmmaker.
You're supposed to represent everyone from your racial group when that's
impossible. No white director is tasked with trying
to represent all white people in film. Lastly in a more recent film The Hate U Give
starring Amandla Stenberg playing a seventeen-year-old, but who was
actually 20 when the film premiered, shows black girl hood in a somewhat less
traumatizing light. Starr Carter, though well aware of the injustice is in her
society, is also just a kid. She goes to prom, hangs out with their friends and
family, but is also forced into growing up and being a voice for her people
after her best friend gets shot by the police. I'm not here to say that these
movies shouldn't exist because they do show you some of the realities of what
it's like having your childhood ripped away from you because of your race
however I do think we need to get out of this mindset that this black film will
show you everything about black girl hood because it's so much more
complicated than that. It seems like for both white girls and
black girls we need to bring girlhood back into the picture. We need to let
kids be kids, but especially for black girls, who because of systemic racism, get
even less of a childhood than their white peers.
Alright guys I hope you really enjoyed this video. This was the topic that was
on my mind for a really long time and if you have any other examples of this
trope in movies or TV shows or books please leave it down below, like, comment
and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one bye :)