Yesterday I watched the movie 'Hard Candy'. It's a revenge flick, in which our heroine settles accounts with a suspected child murderer - so far, so contemporary. It even has a happy ending, of sorts, in which today's version of natural justice is amply served.
Our heroine is 14. And the needs of this natural justice are met by her castration of the only other major character in the movie. The castration involved is (in the world of the movie, of course) literal and actual. Our heroine first seduces, then drugs and confines, and finally castrates, a man she believes to be responsible for the sexual assault and murder of another child prior to the opening scenes of the film.
The movie opens with images of 'chat-type' text being exchanged online between 'Thonggrrl14' and 'Lensman319'. Lensman is a succesful professional photographer, Thonggrrl a seemingly precocious, highly articulate, young, lonely teenager, very much impressed by the attentions of an older, successful, sophisticated man. So far, so much in line with the current terror of sexual predators which obsesses America. But the narrative immediately breaks with this conventional storyline and presents us with something completely unexpected.
Thonggrrl directs the conversation, issues the innuendos, and finally challenges Lensman to meet her. Our scene then moves to a diner were Thonggrrl (brilliantly played by an extraordinary actress called Ellen Page) continues her seduction of the hapless photographer, getting him (despite his early natural misgiving at being confronted by such overt willingness to go to his home with him) to take her back to his very well appointed apartment, its walls decorated with oversized photographs of the nubile young models he most often photographs. Hayley (Thonggrrl) and her photographer (Jeff) drink screwdrivers - which, at Hayley's insistence, she prepares.
Pretending to be very much more drunk than she actually is, Hayley has no trouble in persuading Jeff to photograph her while she waits for the drug she has added to Jeff's screwdriver to take effect. He collapses, and recovering consciousness discovers he's been very thoroughly and effectively tied to a chair.
The rest of the movie is essentially a psychological dissection of the unfortunate Jeff. It becomes plain that Jeff's attraction to his models (all of whom were overage but all of whom could very well pass for much younger than they are) has something unsavoury and suspect to it. Unsavoury and suspect, that is, if you refuse to accept that all males who have passed through puberty look at all females who have had their first menstrual cycle - no matter their age - as sexually available. All males. Whether they admit it or not. Every man thinks with his dick before he thinks with his head. Every man. But not every man is so foolish as to immediately follow through on these 'dick thoughts'. Jeff, at this stage, is in this sense a normal but foolish guy - even though portrayed as almost-a-monster even at this very early stage of the movie. Even within the movie there is as yet absolutely no evidence that Jeff is anything more than a guy with a taste for dangerously young, highly intelligent and articulate women. And that in itself is not yet a crime - even within the terms of America's tortured sexual psyche.
Hayley is a juvenile vigilante, the avenger of sexually abused children everywhere, and Jeff is her proxy for every abuser. It's at this point that the moral ambivalence of this remarkable movie becomes apparent. Because there is no suggestion that Hayley views her intended action (the castration of Jeff) as in any way wrong - if she's correct in her belief that Jeff is an abuser. She searches his apartment for evidence - and eventually finds something (we are not shown what exactly) that she can construe as the 'proof' she needs. At which point her determination to maim another becomes implacable.
The justice of a child, it's suggested, cuts (pun intended) through the sophisticated prevarications and contingent decisions of the adult system of justice that has 'failed' so many other children. She has her proof, it's sufficient, and she is utterly ruthless in its administration. She castrates Jeff. As she works, the camera is focused exclusively on her face, outwardly calm and certain through dripping with the sweat of stress and concentration. It's not her intention to kill - at least, not directly. The movie proceeds to its conclusion, which I won't describe, but which is as shocking in its own way as its premise - that a child has the capacity to judge an adult and execute that judgment. And not merely the capacity, but also the right.
I confess I came to despise Jeff. Not because he probably was a child molester, but because he succumbed so completely and helplessly to the machinations of a precocious child. Were I ever fool enough to find myself in such a position, and unable to escape so that I was castrated, my victimizer would have to kill me. Because if I survived I would certainly find him or her and kill not only the person responsible, but his or her entire family into the bargain for having brought such a foul, unnatural little monstrosity into the world in the first place. Adults, and especially parents, who victimize children are properly thought to be monsters because they violate the duty of care that all adults owe to children generally, and that parents in particular owe to their children.
Children who victimize and in this (imaginary) instance violate adults are equally monstrous because they violate the relation of authority that has existed between adults and children for millennia. Children are not fit to judge even their own actions because they lack the experience necessary for proper judgment, and the charity necessary to true justice which arises from that experience. They are not fit to judge. The character of Hayley is not simply judge over the character Jeff, but his jury and his executioner also. Courts, judges, juries, and lawful procedure were created in order to provide redress for the effects of blind, prejudiced and hateful judgments such as Hayley's. What's shocking about the movie is not the castration itself, but Jeff's supine acquiescence, his impotence to prevent his castration, Hayley's monstrous and abominable rebellion, and the movie-maker's clear sympathy with that rebellion.
In the world of the movie hayley is an agent of natural justice, and in that world 'natural' means direct, unmediated by any of the sophisticated mechanisms of adult justice which, it's implied, are wholly unnatural, as well as incompetent, because they cannot ensure that predatory sexuality is outlawed and prevented. Jeff is a proxy not merely for judgment upon predatory sexuality but also upon an emasculated and impotent adult world.
This presumption of the impotence of the adult world runs throughout the whole movie, nor is it in any way questioned. It's a given, the leit-motif that serves as the foundation upon which the world of the movie is built, and it's one more sign of the cultural degeneracy of the West. Where the judgment of children is, even by implication, preferred to that of adults, the culture that makes that preference is doomed to destruction. And rightly so. Such a preference is a sign of cultural senility, a sign of the desire for a return to the simplicities of the schoolyard and its unfettered hatreds and loves.
We have spent ten thousand years, more or less, advancing to a point where we can see that passion is not the source of judgment but its antithesis - and this movie, without the least hint of irony or self-knowledge, celebrates the demise of that hard-won advance, substituting for it instead the 'innocence' of the unfettered passions of a child. This movie is not in itself the problem: one movie, no matter how shocking, does not a shift in cultural paradigms make. It is, however, a symptom. It's a symptom of a disease that had its origins in the England of Queen Victoria's time - when English culture, its obsessions, terrors, horrors - as well as its virtues - dominated the world and set the pattern for cultural productions of all kinds, at least in the West.
Before that time, children were, simply, the property of their parents. Property not in the simple sense of ownership but in the sense of proceeding from, being produced by, the combined nature of their parents. They were, of course, also regarded as chattels to be disposed of as their parents saw fit - much as they are in large parts of the world of today. Though not, of course, in America, or the UK, or any other part of the 'developed' world. In England before Victoria's time (Victoria: possibly the most constitutionally and politically sophisticated Monarch ever to rule England, paragon of 'Virctorian' virtue - to which she gave her name - and absolutely convinced of the 'impossibility' of Lesbianism) children were thought of as undisciplined animals - especially the children of the uneducated poor - who did not become fully human until they had attained the age of Majority - then considered to be 21.
After Victoria's ascenscion to the Throne, and following her devotion to her family (she and Albert had nine children) children came to be understood not simply as animals but as innocent animals - innocent, in particular, with regard to sex. Whereas, prior to her rule, children throughout Europe were simply recognised as sexual beings, both during her reign and after it children became asexual, devoid both of sexual feeling and sexual understanding.
Anyone believing this is very much in danger of falling victim to someone like Hayley. By age nine I had already passed through puberty. I masturbated regularly and was avidly interested in sex, devouring any and all information concerning it that came my way. By age thirteen I was sexually active - entirely outside the knowledge of my parents and any other adult. An ignorance I happily exploited, knowing full well that my parents had no conception, not the remotest inkling, of what I was frequently doing - on more than one occasion under their roof and while they were in the house.
Children are not 'holy innocents'. They are animals untempered by judgment, largely untouched by morality (save for the morality of the schoolyard) and incapable of self-control (which is one more reason why the portrayal of Hayley is shocking: most will be filled with horror at the thought of any child, let alone their own, being sexually sophisticated enough to manipulate an adult). Any parent of a child that has passed through puberty, that has menstruated for the first time, who is not radically aware that their child is a sexual creature, is in for the most god-awful shock. As is the child concerned. My sexual adventures at that time occurred among my peers: but what I wanted was sexual contact with an adult. Was I ready for it? That would depend on what's meant by 'it'. Was I ready for an adult sexual relationship with all that's implied by that term? Of course not. I was thirteen. How could I be? Was I prepared to engage in unfettered sexual behaviour with any adult with wit enough to perceive that readiness? Yes. And it was only certain peculiarities of character and personal circumstance that kept me from actively seeking it: I had opportunities. I had more than one teacher dancing attendance upon me, and because of a quirk of personal history more than one opportunity to seek such attendance outside school.
Just as much now as in Victoria's day, though with far less reason and even in the light of far greater knowledge of the psychology of the child, we consider children to be a kind of 'holy innocent', to be protected from knowlege at all costs. 'Hayley' contraverts that foolish assumption. Her egregious evil in pursuing and carrying out her hateful task, combined with the movie-maker's cheerful complicity in that evil, reminds us that it's not the devils we know and recognise that will cause us to be damned, but the devils we refuse to acknowledge. And every recognition of the 'rights' of the child against the rights of the adult brings that damnation a little closer - because to recognise the 'rights' of the child is to abdicate from the judgment of adults.
Adulthood is too hard won to be resigned in favor of the fevered sentiment, the undisciplined animality, of the child. But the romance of the innocence of childhood, combined with the weary awareness of the demands of adulthood - and with the pervasive sexual terror of Americans, who must surely be the least sexually aware, least sexually sophisticated, population of the planet - serves to undermine whatever progress we have made as a species towards sexual maturity. 'Hayley' is an unmitigated monster in rebellion against every social advance we have made. Far from being an icon of natural justice, she is an idol of the passions and of their destructive nature.
If I were to meet her, I'd break her neck. Not despite her childishness but because of it.