Perfect Movie Children Make Me Sick

By Mark Johnson

The specter of desire for the perfect, manufactured child has long haunted Hollywood movies, not to mention the star-making industry itself. It has even spawned cogent cautionary tales such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Magnolia (1999).

Haley Joel Osment's status as then-child star of the moment added a layer of significance to his portrayal of the robot child in AI. To a degree, child stars are manufactured, and the more Hollywood agents and coaches engineer their under-aged client's similarity to an ideal kid, the higher the child's celebrity star will rise.

If AI were remade today with the main character a machine-made daughter, current "it" girl Dakota Fanning would be the logical choice. She is the latest embodiment of Hollywood's ideal kid: smart, plucky and uncannily doll-like.

Elisabeth Bronfen, a professor of American studies at the University of Zurich and author of the new book, Home in Hollywood, refers to the durability of such images of children. "Dakota is super-perfect," she says. "It's clear she's an actress who knows exactly what an audience wants from a pretty little child. She's picking up on the Shirley Temples, the Judy Garlands and Drew Barrymores with perfection."

Her character's "this is your space" exercise to calm herself amid the chaotic War of the Worlds denotes privilege; this child has obviously had some Hollywood-style therapy.

"I think it's a way of educating the parents," Bronfen continues. "It's saying, ‘These little ones are smarter than you are. You're so caught up in your personal problems and worries, whereas they are more focused.' That's very much a romantic concept, that the child is closer to some divine knowledge or purity."

"It's dangerous to confuse children with angels." (Magnolia)

But is this the way kids really are? Fanning's agent, Cindy Osbrink, has expressed annoyance at the media's insistence that kids such as Fanning may be missing out on a normal childhood, insisting that she's a "happy, happy kid."

The sense that these kids are at a remove from "real" kids raises the question of where this image came from. Do Hollywood executives and filmmakers have a skewed view of childhood? Are they fashioning the image after their own privileged kids?

Hollywood nannies have disclosed - mostly off the record - that the filmmaking elite often treat their own kids like accessories and abandon them when the novelty wears off. These kids - who allegedly often end up in therapy - are raised by nannies obligated to be parents and employees at the same time.

Steven Mintz, Professor of History at the University of Houston and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, says using Hollywood's pampered and precocious kids as a model for screen children may be part of the "tiny adult" syndrome, but it also has to do with nervousness about tackling tough subjects such as the reality of childhood.

He points out that "the primary audience for movies now is young. And children, like the rest of us, like to be pandered to. One way to do that is to show them how they'd like to be seen. Kids often feel powerless, and it is a very potent fantasy to think that you might be able to parent your parents or control your own destiny."

Such child characters aren't an entirely new phenomenon, and Bronfen doesn't believe the image is necessarily antithetical to "real" childhood. She points out that the stars playing them are doing what many children do: responding to expectations. "These are children who know how to do exactly what their parents want them to do in order to love them."

"When I look at my friends, I know there's goodness." (George Washington)

David Gordon Green, who is slated to direct Fanning in The Secret Life of Bees, has managed to exact a degree of vulnerability and innocence from young characters in films such as Undertow (2004) and George Washington (2000) - the latter having been refreshingly devoid of stars.

Set mostly amidst the daily lives of black children in a small Southern town, "I got kids from teen centers and churches, kids who had a new way of speaking, who had things to say and thoughts to express, who had lived through tragedies and traumas," Green said in an interview with David Walsh. "Kids who were willing to share that with a camera in a comfortable way that was going to be believable and natural."

Greater naturalism means addressing the malaises of our atomized society. As in depictions of family, alienation has become a central theme of movie childhood, with directors like Larry Clark, Gus Van Sant and Todd Solondz probing some uncomfortable realities of being a kid.

"But I don't want to go to Disney World." (Welcome to the Dollhouse)

Solondz's feature debut, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), satirically skewered the fascination with doll-like daughters by pitting homely main character Dawn Wiener against her pretty, pampered sister. The film is a merciless look at how tough a kid's life can be.

"Grown-ups know which things really matter," Solondz has said, "but when you're a kid, everything is a matter of life and death. In American films, this period of life is not treated seriously. You have either the cute and cuddly Disney kid or the evil devil monster."

"We, as a society, have very complex attitudes toward children," says Mintz. "Parents love their own children, but often view others peoples' children as problems."

Mischievous, Evil or Ill?

The mischievous-but-good child, in the literary mold of Tom Sawyer and To Kill a Mockingbird, used to be the reigning model. But when America's perfect-world mythology hit shaky ground mid-century, kids changed. The romanticized girlhood of The Parent Trap (1961) became Taxi Driver's (1976) teenage prostitute. The Bad Seed became a reflection of the fear of having given birth to the wrong child or being an inadequate parent.

UCLA film professor Vivian Sobchack reads the spate of family chillers in the 1970s in the mold of The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) as a case of unacknowledged anxieties coming home to roost. According to Sobchack, the negative aspects of childhood and parenthood repressed by bourgeois mythology are played out as monstrosities.

Now, in movies like Elephant (2003), Mean Creek (2004) and Thirteen (2003), adults are mostly absent or ineffectual and kids are portrayed as possessed by the more banal ills of society. This sets up something of a tug of war between the family and the outside world, with kids in the middle.

Judith Rich Harris, the child-development researcher whose book The Nurture Assumption caused a stir by questioning the real influence of parents, suggested that kids are raised more by their social surroundings than by their parents. Harris' position is that children instinctively look to the outside world to find out how to act. There, after all, is where they'll have to survive.

"What's missing in our movies about childhood is that we may portray children, but we don't really show the world through children's eyes," says Mintz. He points to Ingmar Bergman's family saga Fanny and Alexander (1982), in which the child's viewpoint is one of discovery, as an exception to this rule. "A child can see a lot of things, but not have the categories to interpret them. So [to them] there may be many mysteries in the world."

What children in the movies are often trying to do, says Bronfen, is "bring something back to the parents - not innocence, but self-knowledge. In fairy tales, that's what children always have. They always know how to get out of the woods."