Well, you think a movie about preteen girls dancing suggestively is controversial – how about a movie about a preteen girl getting paraded around naked?

If you’re wondering how this 1978 movie even got made…so am I. I do know it got banned in several countries, and censored in the UK, but apparently there were no such issues in the US. Part of it might be that it’s a small arthouse movie and many audiences didn’t know about it. Made it much harder for conservatives to scream about Hollywood causing moral decay. Nowadays we have social media and things can “trend”.

I guess today’s conservatives wouldn’t know phrases as complex as “moral decay”, though. They’re more likely to say, “Celebrities are a bunch of libtards and should stay out of politics”, all the while attributing fake quotes to the likes of Harrison Ford and getting excited that “celebrities” such as Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato Jr. are on their side.

All venting aside, I’ll try and share some thoughts on how the filmmakers could make this movie happen.

Shortly after my favorite movie American Beauty came out, someone asked Roger Ebert in his “Answer Man” column how Thora Birch was able to do a topless scene despite being under 18. Ebert said that her parents were on set, as were representatives from the ratings board, to make sure the scene met the standards of decency.

A couple of years later I saw the topic come up on a message board I was obsessed with at the time, DVD Talk Forum. Someone talked about how the American Beauty scene was not sexual in nature, was tastefully done, and was appropriate in context. Someone else claimed none of that meant anything and that Birch could take her bra off for one reason – her parents signed off on it. The first person replied that context absolutely matters – if parental consent was the only necessary thing imagine all the sleazebags who would sign up their children for kiddie porn.

That leads us into this movie. Susan Sarandon portrays a resident of a New Orleans whorehouse. Brooke Shields is her daughter born into that lifestyle and getting groomed for it herself. When mom finds a husband who will rescue her and her baby boy from white slavery, Violet gets left behind, as the husband will be stepfather to a baby but a preteen would be pushing it.

Violet is hurt but the others at the whorehouse feel like family to her, given it’s all she’s known, and she shows little reluctance once it’s time for a client to get to deflower her. It’s really disturbing seeing the older madams trumpet how Violet is as pure as the driven snow, yet the direction doesn’t present the events that way. Rather, since it’s the only life she knows, she continues to act like a happy-go-lucky child, going through what feels to her like a rite-of-passage for all little girls. Violet does feel modest and put a towel in front of her body the first time a madam bring a male client to see her while she’s bathing, but when the madam takes the towel away Violet seems just fine letting herself get gawked at naked since that’s what the trusted adult wants.

Violet’s issue comes not from having to provide sexual services to clients, but from getting a really hard spanking with a strap from an employee when she acts willful. She decides to run off from the whorehouse and move in with a charming photographer (Keith Carradine), called “Papa”, who had been taking pictures for the brothel. Papa looks to be in his 30s, and while at first he tries to resist being Violet’s adolescent crush, he can’t help being attracted to her and he chooses to give in to temptation. This goes to show why laws are necessary to not only protect children from predatory adults, but to protect children from harm their own young minds might cause them.

Of course such laws are all too rare in the United States. While I’ve seen memes pointing out Republican hypocrisy on saying a minor is not old enough to decide whether she wants to have an abortion but old enough to be a wife, by no means can this be a case where I solely attack conservatives. Only FOUR states in the entire country ban child marriage with no exceptions. Not only is my home state of California, such a vaunted liberal mecca, not one of them, it ranks far behind oft-ridiculed Florida.*

At least New Jersey has become one of the four, after replacing Chris Christie with a Democrat governor.

Some people might want to believe that child marriage with “parental consent” allows modern-day Romeo and Juliets to start their lives together immediately, but the sad reality is that child marriage, which happens to tens of thousands of American girls annually, often takes place between an underage girl and a much older man. Even more insidiously, it’s often to get the man out of statutory rape charges, especially with a child whom he baby-trapped.

Getting back to the movie, I was able to watch it with much less discomfort than I did Cuties. Even though here the preteen was completely naked in two separate scenes, instead of simply wearing revealing clothing, it was a very different experience considering this wasn’t someone young enough to be my daughter but rather someone a decade and a half OLDER than me. I actually remember being a teenager in the 90s and thinking of Brooke Shields as the hot cougar on Suddenly Susan.**

Thus I will now calmly say that, in addition to what I mentioned about the tone of the film being eyebrow-raising but perfect, the set design is exquisite, transporting you to the NOLA of the time. The cinematography and the score are also great, and the script hits all the right notes. Shields truly shines as someone trying to be an adult, as only feels natural to her in her environment, but unable to help being a little girl. She gets terrific support from the stellar performances Carradine and Sarandon also deliver, and director Louis Malle turns the whole film into one beautiful, moving work.

What about people who say this serves as child pornography? I suppose the nude scenes were allowed because there was no sex involved and, although the adult characters do, we the audience aren’t directed to view 12-year-old Violet as a sexual being. It’s much more jarring than 11-year-old clothed girls twerking in Cuties or a 16-year-old girl showing her breasts from across the street to her loving 18-year-old boyfriend in American Beauty. Nevertheless, I understand the nuances of why Pretty Baby was permitted to do what it did.***

Could pedophiles still get off on watching this? Of course. Brooke Shields shows everything. As Mr. Skin would say, her butt, breasts, and bush. Except she had yet to even grow any bush and had barely started developing her breasts, which speaks for itself as far as how unsettling this is.

You know what else could get pedophiles off, though? Having sex with a girl who’s far underage, getting her pregnant, forcing her to have the child because her parents won’t give permission for an abortion, keeping her baby-trapped and trapped in every other way because she’s not old enough to sign any legal documents on her own, and getting away with all of it because you married her. Everything I just said is allowed in much of our country. I feel the last shot of this movie shows that, regardless of how young she is, someone can’t be an adult’s sexual partner and then successfully try to be a child again.****

Bottom Line: Very well done look at a VERY difficult subject.

*Thanks to the work of this incredibly brave Floridian victim of child marriage.

**Based on the commercials; I never watched the show. I just learned from posting the video that Richard from Lost was a regular!

***Of course it wasn’t the last time Brooke Shields was presented as a sexual object while still a minor, and I can’t give any sort of artistic justification for this infamous later one. Yet all of this makes me wonder why we’ve never been able to get a Lolita adaptation where she was prepubescent like Vladimir Nabokov intended.

****On the male side of things, this guy’s beyond-tragic story shows that.