I realize looking over this bunch of cool film children that I don't really hate kids, just the no-neck monsters the way 40s-50s Hollywood sacharinized them. The fact is, most children are monsters, capable of extraordinary savagery unless their empathic response kicks in or they are effectively subdued by strong adults. Pregnant women are often kept away from the crops and gambling tables in small villages because children are considered to be demonic until old enough to be initiated into the tribe and thus recognized as actual people. The only equivalent we have today to those initiations is christening and that which goes beyond the symbolic, circumcision.
Of course it's not that simple in modern times. Circumcision and christening guarantee nothing, and even if empathy is developed, it can often be stunted, intentionally or otherwise. There are those who only care about themselves and their family, and 'God' and every other living organism is either food or an enemy. At the extreme are the PETA member crying in the meat aisle at the carnage everyone else sees as food. There are some kids better off not having an empathic response, like the hero of Lord of the Flies.
The list below rounds up an array of 'wild' children, the ones who either refuse to be inducted into any society which attacks them for being bad athletes, scary hybrids, or casual drug users whose word is never believed if it conflicts with even the shadiest of parental authority's second-hand opinions; or there is no adult society to offer this induction, or the adult supervising them is her or himself an outcast (The Piano, Paper Moon).
But no matter what the root of it, we secretly thrill to see amok children. We all still harbor resentments against the adults who symbolically castrated us--teachers, cops, parents, neighbors, bullies--a secret stash of inner savagery just waiting to come out, as evinced by the amount of young men who harbor big stashes of automatic weapons. After all, as kids we're expected to lay down our arms and surrender to a system that, in the end, expects us to follow rules it itself doesn't follow, to be truthful even though it will never believe us anyway, and to make no fuss or argument when our basic human rights are stripped away in the name of our own 'safety.' No wonder NRA members are so paranoid about having their guns taken away! They feel like they finally have their balls back, and now Obama wants to cut them off all over again.
But these archetypal children embody much more than balls. We exorcise and exercise our repressed inner child vicariously through them, and the result is both cautionary and exhilarating. Like our previous entry, the Outlaw Couple, we go along for the ride like nervous virgins in the back seat of a metalhead's Trans Am. These kids are within all of us, for the 'inner child' is neither good nor evil, but exists outside of those notions. A sweet angel of a girl might torture her gerbil on a royal whim; a boy who's normally nice to his little brother may suddenly sucker punch him and never really think out why. These children are not all vicious or violent, but all are 'free' more or less of the confines of the social order. They either openly attack, exploit, or avoid the adult world. They live out our secret wish to blow things up, to lie, cheat, kill, and steal in the time before things like guilt, empathy, and responsibility for our own actions soured up our sense of freedom.
It's important to note that OVER THE EDGE changes the usual math of the parent-kid divide by siding itself with the kids... all the way, and allowing us to exult in the little moments of true rebellion, even if they are ultimately pointless: Richie standing on the hood of Doberman's car as he tries to haul off Claude; the retribution against the Leif-y narc; the kids locking the parents in the PTA meeting, etc. --it's all cathartic as hell, but then as the cars in the parking lot erupt in flames and the kids rage Lord of the Flies-like we start to become afraid of ourselves for the primal inner wild child joy of seeing the school--the kid equivalent of a soul-deadening prison-- destroyed. We fantasize about blowing up the school, but when we actually blow it up, we see the ugly core that drives that fantasy. We devolve along the Hawksian axis all the way out of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and find ourselves in MONKEY BUSINESS, with the drugged Cary Grant as the painted savage preparing to roast his rival. By then it's too late to save the baby in the boiling bathwater, the wild chaos of death and anarchy tails childhood idealism like a dogged detective and the reactionary rabble roll over everything like a tide, shedding the old skin of the country as they come ripping through the amber waves like a sloppy zipper. (See: Vandal in the Wind -2011)
Im these two examples the 'only' child rides around with an unhinged single parent: Flora is the translator of her weird mom's sign language, and though mom has a hard time adjusting to the stark oddness of the wild swampy New Zealand landscape and sweatily repressed husband, Flora becomes--with the help of some amateur theater fairy wings--a diminutive Ariel / Caliban of the forest, finally even bonding with the repressed father and ratting her mom out about her affair with Harvey Keitel to demonstrate her heedless ambivalence as far as consequences to her own jealousy. Like Keitel's character she takes on a Hearts of Darkness-style going native quality, but fits in with the white world too, as needed.
Con artist Addie hooks up with her dimwit father and moves through the landscape with similar ease while he struggles and flails. It's great to see her smoking in bed and listening avidly to Jack Benny on the radio (O'Neal played a similar character, a few years older / later to drunk dad Walter Matthau in our next choice...
As a kid I was always picked last for teams at gym and recess--my scars still haven't healed. For all I suffered, the Bad News Bears would be my chosen team. It's pretty cool how many of them have the same long blonde hair, like an army of Viking rejects. A couple of ringers almost win the big game for them, but then coach Walter Matthau says fuck it and lets the bench warmers take a turn; who cares if they win? The beers that continually flow along with the curse words help keep the game in cosmic perspective. Robert Aldrich might have directed this with a little more vitriol, but in its own sloppy way, the film is just about perfect and these snarling little ragamuffins are like a slightly less violent and organized version of the Over the Edge bunch; rather than compete for the acceptance of a society that has rejected them they prefer to reject society. When Tanner (Chris Barnes) says 'take that trophy and shove it up your ass!" at the end of the film, I still feel a fighting thrill. Every kid in the theater I saw this with back in 1976 let out a triumphant woop at that line; we never forgot it. (for more - see Walter Matthau - Great 70s Dads)
Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST never quite counts for this cinemArchetype as she is fully socialized and 'normal' prior to her possession; indeed her possession seems to be triggered in part by puberty or the onset of menstruation, which can lead to one's entering a whole new realm of archetypal force, but having been socialized even for a few weeks, a child loses their cachet in the world of the abject, of the chthonic and unassimilated wild. The demon possesses her, while here its the other way around.
Damien, on the other hand, is never assimilated, and remains an evil blank slate. We only see him when either of his parents are present, and then they're half the time rushed out of the nursery by his big black dog or servant of Satan maid. Everywhere he goes his lack of socialization, castration into the social order, causes a row. He can't even get near a church, or a baboon.
Though never speaking except in grunts, the Feral Kid becomes a pretty vivid character in George Miller's influential classic. Following Max around like he's Shane, cutting off fingers and killing bikers with his razor boomerang, grinning uninhibitedly from the sound of a simple music box, he becomes the focus of the picture when it all boils down to him reaching across the massive hood of the truck to retrieve Max's fallen shotgun shells. In his relative benign savagery and loyalty to the enclave around the tanker (no one seems to have claimed him as theirs, so he must have just showed up) he shows that the wild child in and of itself is not evil. It takes an evil parent (or guardian, like in THE OMEN), or a gang, to turn them rabid. And in a wilderness where the law of the outback reigns supreme, the Feral Kids' wildness is simply--and without bitterness--what is needed to survive.
"Taking The 400 Blows to another level, François Truffaut's 1970 feature considers a child who is literally wild, with the filmmaker himself starring as an 18th-century country scientist molding his charge in civilization's image. Shot in neat black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the historically based movie is measured out by Dr. Itard's orderly account of the experiment, even as his momentous study finds an opaque mirror in the near-mute boy, never truly knowable. Shaggy Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) starts off not fierce but blindly wriggly, like a penned-up puppy, before assuming more control and becoming a piece of silent cinema under the reserved scientist's direction. (His solitary learned word is emitted in an unforgettable squeak.) He's both pure—communing with rainfall, unexpectedly showing affection—and something incomplete, a tension echoed in the film's regimented path of discovery. All is fodder for Itard's journal transcriptions (a remove later tweaked for comedy in Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist's optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in." - Nicolas Rapold - Village Voice
..How we love to hate little Rhoda. And for some of us (myself included), how we love to love her…she’s just too damn full of vicious personality. I even go so far as to nearly (I say nearly) champion her actions and wish she would invoke more harm (film wise) before her inevitable demise.
Living with her mother Christine (an understandably neurotic Nancy Kelly) and mostly absent father (William Hopper -- Hedda Hopper's son) Rhoda's life is one of privilege and attention. When kissing her father goodbye he asks “What would you give me for a basket of kisses?” Rhoda coos back: “A basket of hugs!” Landlady and supposed expert in psychology, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden) dotes on Rhoda, applauding her out-moded manners and showering her with presents -- one being rhinestone movie star glasses that Rhoda, of course, loves. As she prattles on about Freud and abnormal psychology, the rather ridiculous Breedlove cannot see the freakish behavior in front of her. She's blinded by all that bright, beauteous blonde. (Kim Morgan - Sunset Gun)
Henry: I feel sorry for you, Mark. You just don't know how to have fun.
Mark: What?
Henry: It's because you're scared all the time. I know. I used to be scared too. But that was before I found out.
Mark: Found out what?
Henry: That once you realize that you can do anything... you're free. You can fly. Nobody can touch you... nobody. Mark... don't be afraid to fly.
Mark: You're sick...
Henry: Hey, I promise you something amazing, something you'll never forget. Where's the gratitude?
"Virgins, I love 'em!" Tully narrates with a mouth gone to mush from endless deep tongue kissing and cunnilingus. The film follows him and his buddy Caspar over the course of a long summer day and night and they're a terrifying duo - one a half-asleep alcoholic rapist, the other HIV positive, anti-condoms smoov-tawka who's always fixin' to deflower yet another virgin. He'll never run out of them, because these kids are always recruiting new kids to their clique; all the parents in New York are never around so the kids raise themselves; the old teach the young how to roll blunts and boost 40s.
By buddy Max. I really connected to this film as we were very similar in our dynamic to Tully and Caspar. We still talk in some of Tully and Casper's comedic rhythms. Max was the driven seducer (though avoided virgins) and I was the Caspar (avoided raping), more concerned with getting fucked up. I often woke up at big keg party sleepovers like the one in this film, and like Caspar I'd wake up wherever I passed out -- the couch, the floor -- and immediately start seeking more booze and a cigarette, just as Caspar does. After seeing Kids I even did while singing Caspar's song:
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| that's a foamy 40, not milk, playa |
The merits of Kids can really only be gauged by another film in its class, and the only one besides Larry Clark's other masterpiece, Bully, is this film written by Nikki Reed and starring her as a bad influence friend on the impressionable young Even Rachel Wood. Director Catherine Hardwicke shows why she was the perfect choice to direct the first Twilight, and why they suffered in her absence; she gives teenage girl angst the rare combination of operatic emotion and escape velocity it deserves. Thirteen received an even more alarmed outcry from parents than Kids did, and worried moms demanded someone tell them that Reed had made it all up, that she hadn't actually done any of those things in real life. That it was all a dream. Their concern said more about the modern see-no-evil approach to parenting than anything else, how adults don't want their guilty conscience attacked -- lie to them so they can sleep at night.
What really bugged them, of course, was that Hardwicke neither demonizes nor celebrates the girls' 'bad' choices -- she merely tries to film the exhilarating feeling of going from outcast to insider, to what it's like to be suffering from depression and launch into an extended manic spree. If there was no giddy thrill there would be no emotional investment at all and the film would be little more than an after-school special. Instead, Wood is never judged even as she proceeds to burn down every last trace of good will from their parents and friends, rushing into sex and drugs and all that other jazz, at a dizzy-from-anorexic-hunger speed; Hunter's mom finally has no choice but to tackle her and hold on tight, for however long it takes for the humanity to seep back in.
This weird Disney film deals with a very interesting issue involving the pre-empathic state that we all spend the bulk of our infancy in, where the world is a candy store, and only the mom's nearness matters, all else is but a dream. If such a being in such a state is put in a position of total power over the world, look out, they can destroy it all just because they're grumpy and need a nap. As the great Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote " Credibility is strained by the safe bet that no one will get killed, even though the near deaths are so plentiful that the plot comes to resemble a tricked-up theme park ride. Still, the allegorical possibilities of infantile innocence run amok (particularly as a view of this country in relation to the remainder of the globe) are amusing and potent,"
And this from EW's Ty Burr: "Judging from the reactions of the kids in the screening theater, it's clear that they see what happens to Adam as a power trip of primal proportions: He plays when he wants, he sleeps when he wants, he goes where he wants — and if mom and dad don't like it, he puts them in his pocket and toddles on. By the time he rips the 85-foot-tall neon guitar off the facade of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe and starts playing it, they're with him completely, screaming in anarchic delight."
The unease created by movies such as Who Can Kill a Child?, the Children of the Corn series, and the wild-running orphans in Logan's Run and that gang that shouts "bop! bop!' on that one Star Trek episode hinges on two elements, one is explained in the 1976 films' title; apparently we're hard-wired to not kill children and though they may have gone rogue and be trying to kill us. That's the unease number two, for as adults we're expected to reach them, bring them around through strong leadership and mature nurturing. If we fail, and have to resort to violence it means either we are, or our social order is, weak. Who can kill a child? Only a monster, like them. Kids are, at heart, sociopathic, until they learn empathy. Many of us develop this empathy while torturing insects.
Me I was torturing Japanese beetles (the US was infested in the 70s) with a friend, when seeing that poor thing dragging itself along the driveway, leaking black blood, I suddenly felt ashamed, and that I couldn't do it anymore. I left that kid in disgust, right where he was crouching with his little batch of fireworks. Yeesh, kids are nightmares. But there are levels of developmental empathy - if you doubt just go to your local supermarket some time and hang out in the meat section; none of those shoppers give a shit about the organic beings that were butchered; there are no sad cow faces hanging above the steaks.
My offhand diagnosis is that empathy is a 'luxury' in brain chemistry, a sophisticated neural upgrade the mind takes when it feels safe, when it feels supported and surrounded by people it can trust. Once the empathy kicks in it can never go away (except on cocaine) so the brain doesn't want to bust it out too soon if the brain feels it might be a hindrance, as in needing to be free of empathy if it is going to have to kill others to survive. But sociopaths tend to be loners, so what you have with a mass, a gang of unsupervised kids, is fascism, mass hysteria, of being desperate to connect to the point you need to kill all outsiders without conscience lest you be branded outsider next.
The rhythm of this phenomenon is apparent in all group human interaction. I've witnessed and been caught in three different riots over the course of my life. I never could catch the insane spirit of it all - I hurried away as the opposing ranks were drawn, embarrassed. The cops and the rioters had more in common with each other than with me; it was like I was intruding on their very private meeting.
The most highbrow of the above-listed films in this entry isn't really a horror movie, the events are mostly described by a progressively more hysterical Elizabeth Taylor; we don't see any gore. It's pretty clear just the same that these crazy kids have eaten their cruising tourist sugar daddy in a fit of mass hysteria and hunger.
I love this post from Brenda Tobias about the changing attitudes towards children and the eternal power of the no-neck monsters to horrify:
Just imagine the shock of the 1950s adult (children did not attend the theatre) audience upon seeing those no-necked monsters. Those grating little characters were hauled out and scattered like confetti on a parade. There they are playing Dixie at the airstrip to greet Big Daddy (who reacts with the same horror/disgust of the audience.) There they are “performing” at Big Daddy’s birthday party to which adult friends have been invited. (Big Daddy voices our wishes and asks for an intermission.) There they are barging into bedrooms and demanding adults engage in play. And there they are repeating hateful remarks to their aunt. It’s enough to evoke a gasp. That it still does that today is remarkable.Children are not sequestered today. In fact if anything the world has become theirs and adults are seen but not heard. Adults can often not be heard over the din of children in restaurants, theatres, museums and funerals. Babies and children are not so much integrated into adult lives, as adults are integrated into the lives of children’s. We’ve created retail empires for babies and children. Broadway has discovered the steady income stream of children and the white way is dotted with flying people and talking teapots. Infants and children unfamiliar with the term “indoor voices” are dining out at 7:00, 8:00 and even 9:00 PM. They don’t shy from the highest end restaurants either. A simple dress code of: No Pull-Up Pants would put an end to that; but we digress. The point is that the world has changed tremendously since Mr. Williams created those no-neck monsters. Yet they still have the power to horrify. That is partly due to the scenic background of their terrorizing. They are clearly in an adult environment. The house in which they are running rampant is stately; there is no great room, there are no toys. It is clearly adult space. (more)
The original, the classic, written by William Golding based on his own WW2 experience and a report from a teacher about how allowing his students total freedom in a debate led to a violent altercation in class. Peter Brook's film adaptation uses scintillating black and white photography to create a naturalistic mythopoetic beauty wherein you could see how the ambivalent strangeness of unbridled nature acts on the boys' vivid imagination (a small boy expresses fear about a demonic figure in the woods, the boys' own symbolic WMDs if you will, and its this fear that overrides Piggy and Ralph's common sense and leads Jack to a Hitler-esque rise to power. It's funny how our current situation in this country hasn't changed overmuch from this sad dichotomy - the republicans (Jack) whipping up things to be terrified about and sounding the war drum while the Piggy/Ralph democrats try to keep things calm and rational.
The main issue of course is that people gravitate to the figure they're afraid of. Fear is a high, and it makes you feel secure in your mass mind panic / hate contingent as you continually find straw dog enemies to attack - Piggy (and the wild boars on the island) all come to represent the Lord of the Flies by proxy. The trouble is, the enemies have to keep coming to keep up the momentum of a despot's power.
The arrival of the adults at the very end brings a presumed end to the madness, just in time and it's interesting to note the similarity of the ending with that of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I'm sure Mel doesn't mean us to read it as the reverse of his intention - that the Spaniards are there to educate the savage Maya and protect the neighboring tribes from being wantonly sacrificed. What we know is that the Spaniards wiped out hundreds of thousand of Mayas via disease, enslavement, and religious persecution and destroyed most of their books and records. Nice. Nice going assholes! The Maya (and Aztecs) were woefully unprepared to deal with things like canons and muskets but they could have repelled the initial landings of Spaniards easily had they not been expecting a visit from the 'white' gods and thought these were them. It's a good moral and one that repeats throughout history, never trust the voice in your head just because its shiny and scary! As we huddle by the fire and wonder who we can trust, our urge to be rational and compassionate fighting the urge to blindly lash out, wondering whether to vote for Jack's conservative circle-the-wagons worldview or Ralph's let's go talk to the natives and make friends approach. It just shows you we have not progressed too far from the savage, and maybe never will.
"When there is an invasion of otherworldly evil it is common for the main character to have some sub-Freudian link with it, some barely tangible connection that only the weird old, cackling old woman at the bar can see. It was the boiling over sexuality of 1950’s teenagers that caused the giant insects in all those old bug movies; the strange love of Melanie Daniels intruding on the domain of icy mom Jessica Tandy in The Birds, always in an oblique butterfly effect kind of way the film never directly analyzes. Gordon's desire for a child so late in life indirectly creates this invasion and so he cannot reconcile the reverse-Oedipal urge to kill his kid with the buried suspicion that his wishing brought the stork of Satan down upon them all. So rather than admitting he made a mistake, he wants to find some good therein. He starts arguing that the Midwich spawn are not inherently evil, but just at that pre-empathic stage of all infants; there is good to be found in them, and fun things to study and learn about the human mind.
Gordon's brother-in-law, the Major, is concerned: “What if we can’t put the moral breaks on them?” This is a legitimate worry—if they know you can never spank them, why should they ever listen? And Gordon’s unwillingness to condone their extermination distinctly sets the field of science/eugenics up against humanity’s own survival. The sense of taboo that resulted in the Intuit and Mongolian children being killed at birth doesn’t exist for the civilized man, who has to wait until the children have grown so big powerful only nuclear strikes will do the trick (which becomes the fate of two other damned “civilized” villages). In this context, Gordon becomes his own bad guy, like Dr. Carrington in The Thing (1951) shouting: “You’re wiser than we are, you must understand!” The comic book/movie series X-Men follows a similar tack, with the mutants finding refuge at a school operated by a master of mind control. It’s that misunderstood teen fantasy of letting all the freaks go live together since the adults hate them so much. Like some pint-sized biker gang, the Hitler Youth or a rock band, they “all want to dress alike,” and walk around the streets like they own the place. They are part of a new movement, the dawn of the eugenic-counterculture. At one point Gordon even asks them; “What do you kids want?” The kids reply: “We want you to leave us alone!” This request which would later become immortalized in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a 1982 rock film chronicling a fascistic rock star’s childhood in post-war England. And as in that film, the adults simply cannot leave their little Nazi progeny alone. When faced with a higher or different intellect than themselves, the parents must try to understand, meddle and control and failing that, destroy them rather than be made irrelevant.
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See also: WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD (1933)