Cherub-cheeked comic Andy Richter coos and tells his wee infant son a joke. The gag, about a family trying to sell its act to a talent agent, begins blandly enough. That’s before it descends into a gag-inducing setup featuring incest, bestiality and bodily fluids.
There is a reason the documentary “The Aristocrats” (opening Friday), about the so-called filthiest joke in the comedy biz, ends with Richter and another young comedian telling their tots the bit of vaudeville nastiness.
What could be more taboo? Or infantile? It’s the movie equivalent of mooning the forces of repression. No matter how sophomoric it is, you get the movie’s final wink and nod. Kids and sex do not go together.
In the world of real bodies, the proximity of dangerous adults to children is more harrowing. The border between adult desire and kid sexuality is territory trawled by pedophiles. Just consult the headlines.
Yet over the past year a growing number of movies – comedies and dramas alike – have taken a look at kids, adults and sex in startling ways.
While most do it in more nuanced, illuminating ways than “The Aristocrats,” few of these films end with the standard lessons that sexual predators are purely evil and their prey purely innocent. That news will strike some as disconcerting if not downright unacceptable. But filmmakers are creating discomfort zones, and they are asking viewers to do some fresh thinking.
Even when focusing on such acts as abuse, they are bent on exploring these issues in ways intended to make us squirm with understanding rather than rise to judgment.
“The Woodsman,” released in late 2004, tried to extend our sympathies to the devil, the child molester. The dark high school satire “Pretty Persuasion” (slated for Aug. 26) features a 15-year-old who gets two friends to accuse a smarmy teacher of molesting them.
Pedro Almodóvar’s recent “Bad Education” gives us a noirish take on the repercussions of a priest’s abuse of a schoolboy. Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin” relies on the unreliable but moving recollections of two young men struggling with childhood sexual abuse.
Asking deeper questions
At this year’s Sundance Film Festival a number of films touched on the subject. Along with “Pretty Persuasion” and “Mysterious Skin,” audiences saw “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” Kevin Bacon’s “Loverboy,” Rebecca Miller’s “The Ballad of Jack & Rose,” “Steal Me,” as well as documentaries “Twist of Faith” and “The Education of Shelby Knox.”
It’s easy to believe that this sort of trend, coming as it does mostly from indie filmmakers and destined for art houses, is out ahead of the rest of the culture, where notions about children and sex are firmly fixed. But that’s a misperception.
These directors are responding to the same glut of information – often conflicting – about sexuality and kids that swamps the rest of us:
On one side are those never-ending headlines about the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. The Amber Alerts and heart-rending stories about repeat offenders and the children they destroy.
On the other are anecdotes about high school girls wearing different-colored bracelets to signal what sort of sexual act they’re willing to perform, and the notion that some kids believe, like a certain former president, that oral sex isn’t sex.
Such clashing bits of cultural information demand to be explored by people who interpret our society through celluloid. Many of these filmmakers came of age after the sexual revolution. A number of them are women or gay.
A different frame of reference – and sharper critical tools – allow these artists to ask different, often deeper, questions. They can engage these issues in hard ways.
These filmmakers often pull off their risky business by doing something actual victimizers never do. They give their child and teen characters a voice.
And what a complicated voice that can be.
In “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” 7-year-old Robby and his 14-year-old brother Peter sit in front of a computer monitor, composing a sexual missive to a stranger. Robby makes a suggestion, and while his words jolt us, it’s the sort of silly scatology you might expect from the sandbox set.
Peter types, laughs and says they’ll never get a response. They do. Later, when Robby figures out how to cut and paste, he conducts his own chat with the anonymous stranger.
It sounds more horrifying than it is. Which doesn’t mean the Sundance audience simply absorbed the scene. There’s a reason it’s called hysterical laughter.
A child’s point of view
“I’m specifically interested in how to create a vocabulary about children’s sexuality. That it exists at all, and that it exists in an adult world,” said Miranda July, whose “Me and You and Everyone We Know” depicts the sexual curiosity of children in some of the most original, riotous and nerve-racking ways to make it to the screen. “There are going to be points of contact. That’s just a fact. That it’s not inherently bad. In reality, the way that the two worlds interact are often very, very subtle, almost inarticulatable.”
Her goal is to frame them for public dissection.
“We talk about heterosexual adult romance in a million different ways,” the director said. “This too is something that exists in the world, and yet there’s really only one way to talk about it: It’s terrifying, and it ends badly. Someone has to recover. Someone has to be blamed.
“It seems like there must be all different ways that this exists, some of them even OK. And quite natural. And it seems if you leave that conversation to pedophiles, that’s where perversion comes from.”
Still, writing the scenes with Robby (played by 6-year-old Brandon Ratliff) made July uncomfortable. “Am I a pervert that I’m even writing about this?” she recalled wondering. “Where am I coming from? Who am I identifying with? Am I getting off? Is that OK? Am I? It’s so complicated to just not feel ashamed. To kind of put myself in the place that Robby is in and just like make it up. If it feels right, it’s OK.”
Araki’s adaptation of the Scott Heim novel “Mysterious Skin” opens as Neil recounts in voice-over how he and his Little League coach fell in love at first sight. While we never buy this dismaying memory, it takes much of the film for Neil to realize that his romantic recollection is an unreliable one.
Black-and-white ideas that all victims share a same tragic fate become shaded with gray. In the film, two young men respond in different ways to their molestations. Brian believes he was abducted by aliens. Neil calls the betrayal love.
“What makes ‘Mysterious Skin’ so unusual was that it was told from the boys’ points of view,” said Araki. “I really felt for the first time you know what that experience is like. With the Catholic Church (the issue of child sexual abuse) is out there but in this very kind of superficial way. It’s like a TV movie cliché. ‘Oh I was abused as a child,’ then you have the violins start to play, and you have a flashback.
“It’s become this cheesy cliché in our culture and your response to it is this automatic pity,” Araki said. ” ‘Mysterious Skin’ was the first time in my life I felt like I understood what it might be like. You really feel what these boys feel, and you go through the aftermath of this trauma with them.”
Two years ago, there was a studio feature that delved into the issue of boundaries breached and trust betrayed.
Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” featured Tim Robbins as a man who never recovers from his childhood abduction and molestation at the hands of two men posing as cops. When the daughter of a childhood friend is murdered, he becomes Suspect No. 1. The victim of a sexual assault is doomed forever.
In a film so insightful about the havoc wrecked by abusive forms of masculine power, this punishment seems unforgiving. Almodóvar’s “Bad Education” was just as brutal. Its abuse victim grows up to be a transsexual heroin addict.
“Mysterious Skin” ends more compassionately, with Neil and Brian holding each other in the former home of their abuser, snow falling outside.
“That doesn’t mean the Neil character is going to move back home and take care of kids in orphanages or that the Brian character is going to be completely sane,” said Heim, who wrote the book that inspired the movie. Abuse, he believes, is “something sort of irreversible.
“But by coming together and being human to each other, they sort of round each other out. And can help each other toward that healing.”
Necessary discomfort
Perhaps the most obvious quandary about directing a film about children and sex is working with underage actors.
“In order to make this movie about childhood trauma, it was important we not traumatize the two children (playing young Brian and Neil),” said Araki. “We always worked with storyboards. I figured out this alternate universe movie the kids were in, so the kids almost had a completely different story. Then as editor, I could get the pieces I needed to put the scenes together.”
On the set of “Pretty Persuasion,” Marcos Siega had to direct Evan Rachel Wood (“Thirteen”) in scenes featuring the 16-year-old actress faking an orgasm. Wood’s over-the-top character puts the “active” in “sexually active.”
“Evan was uncomfortable. So anytime we did a sex scene we knew was going to be uncomfortable, we were very blunt about it,” said Siega. “Being on set you never would have known we were doing something dirty. Before Evan had to moan her orgasm, everyone – crew member by crew member – had to have an orgasm. Then it became funny, and it wasn’t sexual.”
If there were a disclaimer at the end of these edgy movies, it might read: No Children Were Harmed in the Making of This Movie.
Now if there was something to quell the roil we feel about how children fare in the real world.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
