Taboo Films (pt. II)

Pretty Baby

Happiness

tw: lots of unpleasantness

Oof. Here we go again. Greetings and sorry in advance, dear reader, because this double feature is a doozy. Around this time last year, I decided to watch two controversial and deeply unpleasant films that are respectively upheld as intriguing, even necessary viewing for cinephiles and appreciators of art. They’re the kind of films that spark uncomfortable conversations and emotional discourse, due to their confrontational, despicable, unsettling content. I use the term “taboo” to keep things succinct, but really these are just hard-to-watch films, which I’m no real stranger to, but some are just more unwatchable than others. When you do watch these kinds of films, it can feel like there’s a camera suddenly pointed at you, the viewer—there is often an aggressively arresting quality to them that reaches beyond the screen and makes you anxious, even from the comfort of your own, morally-upstanding home. The funny thing about taste is its impossibility to be truly defined or nailed down, to remain static or predictable or intelligible, so I don’t have a great explanation for why I enjoy watching Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Oldboy, Red Rocket, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover, The Devils, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and why I detest watching A Clockwork Orange, Kids, and Love Actually. Everyone has different artistic limits and boundaries that they are likely unaware of until their conventions are challenged, and as with many strangely-competitive, oddly-completionist film lovers, I get a sick kick out of challenging my own movie comfort zones. You would think, with all of the horror films and films featuring‍ ‍unsettling‍ ‍topics‍ ‍that‍ ‍I’ve‍ ‍viewed‍ ‍on‍ ‍this‍ ‍blog, that I would be somewhat immune to the shocking schemes of any taboo film, but even I have my limits. And while watching tonight’s films I couldn’t help but wonder… if the taboo topics in these movies weren’t considered taboo, would these films have made as much of an impact? Would their stories still be perceived as intriguing, compelling, or challenging? Taboo is in the eye of the beholder, and were these films more tame, would anyone still be talking about them in the decades that have followed? I try not to pre-judge a film before I view it, but the reputations of tonight’s selections are fairly well known, and they are so infamously uncomfortable, that it was hard not to hold my breath as I pressed play. But, I do what I do because I love movies so much, and I love talking about them with you, my dear, sweet, twisted reader, so let’s dive in to two more unpleasant, unwelcome, arguably unnecessary taboo films.

There are certain movies that are begging to be talked about, that were seemingly created just to spark discourse, but even among my fellow freaky film nerds, I haven’t heard much discussion around tonight’s first film: this is Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby. Louis Malle is known for his critically-acclaimed works like My Dinner with Andre and Atlantic City—I, for one, am a huge fan of his noir classic Elevator to the Gallows—but Pretty Baby is one of his most famous, and most controversial, films. Based on historian Al Rose’s 1974 book Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District, which was adapted for the screen by Polly Platt, Pretty Baby follows the final days of legal prostitution in the red-light district of New Orleans—as seen through the eyes of a little girl named Violet (Brooke Shields.) If that brief synopsis makes your skin crawl, go ahead and stop reading now. The film lets us know immediately that it wants to push the envelope as much as possible, while still representing something more pure than you’d expect: as the opening scene shows 12 year old Violet, eyes wide, witnessing what sounds like a chorus of pleasurable moans, only to reveal a woman not having sex, but giving birth. The woman is Hattie (Susan Sarandon), Violet’s mom, who has just given birth to a healthy baby boy—another child of a sex worker who will call this brothel home. Violet gallops downstairs, giddily whispering the good news to the ladies of the night, the bartenders, and the piano player, “it’s a boy!” None of the patrons are perplexed or disturbed by this child’s presence in this elegant but seedy establishment, she is simply another fixture like the liquor and the lights on the wall. Within no time, Hattie is back to work and Violet, the oldest of the children, seemingly looks after the kids when their mothers are with clientele. Vulgarities are spoken and adult acts are done pretty much out in the open, but Violet doesn’t blush or cower, she is just as curious, ambivalent, and full of capricious energy as any child is—jump-roping in the halls and chasing chickens around the backyard coop. One day, a photographer named Ernest Bellocq (Keith Carradine) shows up in the daytime, not seeking any services but desiring to take photographs of anyone who is willing. Hattie and Violet are the only ones who are awake, so they volunteer to pose for this strange man, and soon enough, he also becomes a fixture of this house. It all feels relatively tame and manageable at this point—no harm is done to Violet, and when a man does advance on her, Madame Nell (Frances Faye) steps in and protects her—but then, seemingly out of nowhere, it comes time for Violet to join the family business. The women, or, more appropriately, girls, give Violet advice like, “the main thing is to whimper and cry when it starts, then you pretend like it feels good… touch him like it’s an accident”, etc., to which Violet rolls her eyes and says, “I know!” as if she’s being told how to brush her teeth. She dons a new, white, semi-sheer dress and adorns her face with doll-like makeup before she is paraded and auctioned off—literally—to a house full of rich men who bid to take Violet’s virginity. Someone in the crowd asks, “How old is she?” to which Madame Nell responds, “You wanna put me in jail? She’s just old enough”—a casual acknowledgment of the harm being done, which continues to be acknowledged but not protested throughout the movie. This discomfort with Violet’s age and level of maturity deepens when Hattie gets married and moves away, and Violet shacks up with Ernest, who treats her as both a child and a lover. Ernest is aware of how inappropriate their relationship is, but he doesn’t push Violet away, he doesn’t discourage her advances, and though he may not mean to, he only confuses her more. He writes her notes that she cannot read, he buys her a doll that she likes but is unsure what to do with, and right when she feels most like a child being taken care of by a father, he marries her. Violet is pimped out, poked at, preyed upon, and is introduced to concepts that her undeveloped brain can hardly fathom, and yet perhaps the most confounding and upsetting thing she endures is this relationship with Ernest, whose irresponsibility and predatory nature outweigh his good intentions and refined disposition. It’s a shockingly nuanced dynamic on display here, especially for a film that, at first, seemed most concerned with provocation. But this was allegedly all by design, as Louis Malle made great efforts in the marketing of this film to make it all seem far more salacious than it actually is. The nude scenes of young Brooke Shields, though brief, were incredibly unnecessary, but in Malle’s mind, I’m sure it added to his “artistic argument.” Pretty Baby’s pre-publicity included a lengthy article by Joan Goodman in New York Magazine which described it as “Lolita, only in period costume and much more explicit” and Shields’ feature in Playboy. Film scholar Nathan Southern wrote that Malle “realized that by leading viewers to expect ‘sophisticated kiddie porn’, but carrying the film’s content to the opposite extreme (inexplicitness), the contrast between audience expectations and onscreen reality would make the film’s message of relativistic ethos that much clearer in the audience’s mind.” I’m not sure if this was actually accomplished, as the film was still highly censored, chopped up, refused release in many countries, and maintained a pretty lukewarm box office result. (Despite its $3 million budget, the film was unable to generate enough ticket sales to cover its production costs.) Pretty Baby won the Technical Grand Prize at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival (of course), and in the decades that have followed, few people have brought new perspectives and insights into this troubling movie, except for Brooke Shields. She has spoken publicly about how safe she felt on the set (despite her troubled mother’s presence), how much she learned on her first acting job, and, while majoring in French literature at Princeton University, she wrote her senior thesis: The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, Pretty Baby and Lacombe, Lucien. She goes further into her experiences as a child sex symbol (barf) in the documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, which I highly recommend watching. There’s not much that I have to say about this movie, other than the fact that Shields is a genuinely incredible actress, the costumes were lovely, and like most movies directed by French men (that I’ve seen), Pretty Baby was all subversion, and very little substance.

Next I watched a film called Naked by Mike Leigh, which wasn’t actually as taboo as it’d been sold to me. So I opted not to write about it, and instead just ended up watching three unpleasant movies for no real reason. What I finally landed on for my second choice, is a film with subversion and far more substance(s) than I would’ve preferred, this is Todd Solondz’ 1998 film Happiness. I’ve avoided the films of Todd Solondz for a long time, because of the pastel-colored putridity that protrudes from them, but considering just how stinky the films of my last taboo double feature were, I figured I was finally woman enough to handle one. Happiness opens on a woman named Joy Jordan (Jane Adams) who is suffering through an awkward date with a man named Andy Kornbluth (Jon Lovitz), who has somehow made his voice sound even more ridiculous here. Kindly and gently, Joy tells Andy that this isn’t working out, but he nervously offers her a gift anyway: a 40-carat gold, special edition ashtray with her name on it. Even though Joy doesn’t smoke, she happily accepts the gift, only to be told by Andy that, just kidding, he’s gonna give that to the woman who actually loves him for him, he just wanted her to know what she’d be missing. We then cut to a man named Allen (Phillip Seymour-Hoffman) who is describing to his therapist every vile thing he’d like to do to his next door neighbor, who doesn’t even know he exists. “I know I’m boring,” Allen admits, before we turn to his therapist, Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker), whose internal thoughts are, “milk, eggs, check Billy’s homework...” After his session, Allen attempts to chat up his attractive neighbor, Helen Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle), and even though he privately plans to say and do aggressively sexual things to her, all he can muster up is a petrified, “H-how’s it going?” We’re then shown Joy again, shellshocked by her unfortunate final date with Andy, now venting to her suburban ideal of a sister, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), who says what she really needs to do to turn her life around is to start eating red meat. Later on, Trish tells her husband, Bill the therapist, that, “I worry for Joy. She doesn’t have it all like I do, she’s always gonna be alone.” But something that Trish doesn’t know, something that not even his own therapist knows, is that Bill is a pedophile, who is nervous but eager to act on his desires. The only thing more disturbing to watch than the dream sequence of Bill opening fire on a park full of happy people, is when he goes to the corner store, buys a kid’s magazine, then masturbates to it in his car. I wish I could tell you that this is the only time Bill acts on his perversions, but things only get much, much worse when his young son Billy has his friend Johnny spend the night. Bill keeps trying and failing to molest little Johnny, Allen keeps trying and failing to rape Helen, Joy keeps trying and failing to get her life together, in a dark comedy of errors that I might not be mentally ill enough to fully appreciate, but I could sense the layers of humor and irony that these atrocities were steeped in. Happiness also stars Ben Gazzara, Louise Lasser, Elizabeth Ashley, Camryn Manheim, Rufus Read, Jared Harris, Marla Maples, and Molly Shannon (in not a big enough role.) It’s probably obvious which plotline caused the biggest stir, but I’d venture to say that every storyline, character, and frame has the potential to make you feel deeply uncomfortable. It’s not just the fact that Todd Solondz chooses to center this story upon pedophiles, rapists, and generally unlikable people, it’s the fact that he sympathizes with them, that really put people off. But I did sort of appreciate this point of view, because if you’re going to tell a story about pedophiles, rapists, and generally unlikable people, it would be far less compelling to just shit on them and call out their depravity the whole time. I can’t fault this film for its twisted sense of humor or its sympathy toward degenerates, but I still can’t appreciate it the way some people do. Solondz succeeds in getting under the viewer’s skin, and he doesn’t fly through the discomforting or disquieting moments he dreams up, instead he sits in them. He’s known for his nauseatingly colorful aesthetics—even in the prettiest, most pristine settings of this film, you can’t fully relax. Was I the target audience for this movie? I’m not sure. Was anyone the target audience for this movie? I’m also not sure, but I know there is a community of people who love this film, and I love that for them. Cannes loved Happiness, Sundance refused to screen it, and the original financier for the film ended up dropping it from distribution once the bad press began. Happiness was released on VHS and DVD after its very limited theatrical release, but to this day it remains unavailable to view on any streaming service (but it is on YouTube!) I wish I could be like my edgy buddy Roger Ebert, who gave the film four out of four stars and said, “In a film that looks into the abyss of human despair, there is the horrifying suggestion that these characters may not be grotesque exceptions, but may in fact be part of the mainstream of humanity... It is not a film for most people. It is certainly for adults only. But it shows Todd Solondz as a filmmaker who deserves attention, who hears the unhappiness in the air and seeks its sources.” In my opinion, Happiness is not as grotesque as it had always been sold to me, I didn’t hate it as much as I’d assumed I would, but I definitely didn’t enjoy it. That’s to say nothing of the phenomenal performances and consistently compelling writing, though, which I can still recognize. Well, that’s enough of all that, and thank you, sincerely, if you read all of this. This blog continues to be a judgment-free zone, but I reserve my right to talk my shit. It wasn’t an easy double feature to digest—you know it’s bad when the movies both‍ ‍have extensive, heated Reddit threads surrounding them—but it was, as always, illuminating and mind-expanding. A bad time was had by all! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go take a shower. Ta ta!