Child Endangerment Porn, or, my problems with “Slumdog” and “Dollhouse”
A friend with a good track record of Oscar predictions thinks “Slumdog Millionaire” will win best picture, best director and best screenplay. My wife and I left the theater an hour into the movie.
We walked out at the moment (mild spoiler alert) when the Fagin-like beggar king and his cronies were about to maim a child in order to make the child more sympathetic as a beggar. I couldn’t tell what atrocity in particular was going to happen — it looked like the kid was going to have a leg cut off; later I heard that he was blinded instead — but that was the point of maximum saturation for us and we left, getting our money back and leaving the theater.
We have young children, and we don’t see movies all that often. When the planets aligned and we had a chance to go to a show, we chose the movie that everybody has been talking about, Slumdog, which the optimistic one-sheet…
Slumdog Millionaire One-Sheet
…advertises as “a buoyant hymm to life, and a movie to celebrate” — this crock of BS quotation according to Richard Corliss.
An hour into this movie the high water mark of buoyancy was when the young protagonist jumped into the wet-and-smelly end of an outhouse in order to rescue a beloved photograph of his movie idol, then ran to said idol covered in feces to get an autograph. Otherwise, the movie was one relentless panorama of degradation, fear and humiliation instead… happening both to the young-adult protagonist but mostly flashbacks to his childhood self.
To us, this isn’t entertainment. We spent the whole time thinking about OUR kids and projecting them onto the screen, and wondering how people can survive in such abject poverty. The setting and serial debasement kept us from engaging with the story. We left.
Much has been made of the “poverty porn” of Slumdog (search on “slumdog poverty porn” for myriad examples), but it’s the child-endangerment porn that I’m writing about today. Increasingly, we see movie-and-TV makers putting kids in graphically-portrayed danger, and there’s no warning to the audience. There’s a clear warning if the movie contains the inexplicable dangers an exposed female breast and an equally clear note if somebody uses the word “fuck,” but no warning if a kid gets killed or nearly killed.
Why not?
Let me be clear: I have no objection to Danny Boyle making Slumdog. I don’t believe in censorship, and I believe that the R rating was apprpropriate.
But the movie sure wasn’t for us. I’m sensitive to child endangerment in movies, and my wife Kathi is even more sensitive. Even when I find myself watching TV or movies alone or with others, when the story turns to a kid with a gun to his head or the like, I feel a virtual Kathi flinch next to me.
When, for example, I saw “Dark Knight” with a bunch of my work colleagues and was sitting next to my friend Don — whose wife Michelle would find her “do not watch” list of movies similar to Kathi’s — the (mild spoiler alert, but c’mon you’ve SEEN this already, right?) I knew that the Joker-holding-a-gun-to-a-child’s-head moment at the climax of the movie would have sent Kathi out of the theater even a few minutes from the big finish. It took ME out of my engagement with the story, and I’m a Batmaniac for several decades. Don took Michelle to see it a few days later — because it truly is a great movie and a historic performance by the late Heath Ledger — and after that key moment Michelle wanted her two hours back.
Even Shakespeare — who had Kent’s eyes spooned out onstage in King Lear and characters humiliated in unthinkable ways in COMEDIES, let alone histories and tragedies — thought twice before before showing children hurt. In Act 4, scene 2 of “Macbeth,” the evil king has rival Macduff’s wife and children “savagely slaughtered,” but it happens OFFSTAGE, and in the next scene Macduff receives the news and breaks down:
He has no Children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? Oh Hell-Kite! All?
What, All my pretty Chickens, and their Dame
At one fell swoop?
You’d think that in the gory 1971 Roman Polanski film of Macbeth — just a few short months after Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was killed in the Manson Murders — the director would have shown the kids being killed, but Polanski didn’t.
What has changed between 1971 and 2009? Why is OK to show these things now?
Which brings us to “Dollhouse,” the new Fox series by Buffy-creator Joss Whedon, where the protagonist, “Echo” (played by Buffy alumna Eliza Dushku), has her memory wiped and a new identity programmed for each assignment. The pilot ran last Friday night, and Kathi and I caught up with it Saturday night.
The plot of the pilot (real spoiler alert this time) revolves around a 12 year old girl getting kidnapped, watching her father shot (and possibly killed) during a ransom attempt, and almost — almost! — winding up as the sex slave of a pedophile. Echo — of course, because this is television ladies and gents — winds up saving the day.
Kathi didn’t make it through the episode. I nearly didn’t but decided to finish it after she had gone to sleep.
Dollhouse has an excellent storytelling engine (see John Seavey’s remarkable Fraggmented blog for a deep exploration of storytelling engines in pop-culture), but the child endangerment porn — which was not essential to the engine for the series overall — will keep Kathi from returning to the show.
Whedon, for all his genius, put the wrong foot forward on Dollhouse.
Let me end with something simple: putting kids in graphic, urgent, life-threatening physical danger is a cheap storytelling shortcut.
And I hope that Slumdog does NOT win the Oscar.
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