Just saw the film Hard Candy, directed by David Slade (who has done almost nothing but music videos previously), and starring Patrick Wilson and a remarkable Ellen Page, who comprise almost the entire cast. Rated R for no good reason. The story revolves around the relationship between a precociously intelligent 14-year-old girl and a somewhat creepy early-30s photographer who pursues her online and then in person. When they meet, she suspects he is a pedophile responsible for the disappearance of another teenage girl – and then turns the tables on him in an act of revenge or vigilante justice.

The movie is somewhat unevenly paced – the first half hour is a tour-de-force of acting from both main characters, as they alternately engage in an exploratory flirtation and then each retreat to more age-appropriate demeanors; the moment when the plot takes its definitive twist and goes off in a new direction is also the moment when the director seemingly forgot what the movie was about, however. The second half is less a psychological intrigue than a straightforward vengeance tale. The result is a weird mashup of Lolita and Death and the Maiden, as directed by David Cronenberg. However, leaving aside the inconsistency, there are some provocative things in it, and some questions raised about how we are to understand young sexuality, our revulsion by pedophilia (and our protective impulses toward young girls especially), and our common impulses toward destructive retribution in response.

The castration scene was notable, too.

In order to discuss the moral/philosophical issues raised by the film, it is necessary to discuss the plot content. The material below the jump contains plot spoilers. Please come back after you’ve seen the film, if you prefer not to have the plot revealed.

The movie opens with an online chat session, with obviously suggestive and flirtatious exchanges leading to an agreement to meet in person for the first time. It’s understood that one party is a 14-year-old girl and the other is an older man. They meet at a cafe, and the first thing the man does is wipe chocolate icing from a pastry off the girl’s lips with his fingers and suck his fingers clean. That sets the tone for their relationship. The girl proves to be smart and mature, a typical precocious teen in certain ways. Ellen Page does an amazing job moving back and forth from little-girl to sophisticated adult, sometimes with nothing more than a smile; it’s an absolutely great piece of acting. The conversation proceeds, the older man playing it cool but making clear overtures for the girl’s affection, the girl becoming more and more impressed with him and more aggressively flirtatious – at one point raising her shirt in the doorway to the women’s restroom and momentarily flashing him in her bra. Eventually he offers to give her a live MP3 recording he happens to have of her favorite band, but unfortunately only has available back at his house; she insists on going there over his apparent objections, and off they go to his home, just the two of them. At his house, she continues aggressively winding him up, and he puts up less and less resistance. She invades his bedroom, snoops through his stuff, and gets him to reveal his ongoing obsession with an old girlfriend. She finds he’s a widely-published fashion photographer who specializes in teenage girls, and insists that he photograph her in his home studio. She also makes herself a drink – coyly refusing the OJ he poured for her because “they teach us young things not to drink anything we haven’t mixed for ourselves” – and tops hers up with vodka from his freezer; she makes him one too and teases him to “keep up” as she gulps her drink down. He chugs his and almost immediately begins swaying and slurring, then passes out. That ends the psychological dance, and the most engaging and effective piece of the film.

When he wakes up, he finds he’s tied to his own chair; the girl explains she slipped him a Mickey from her doctor-father’s drug supply, and taunts him: “Didn’t they ever tell you not to drink anything you hadn’t mixed yourself?”. She accuses him of being a pedophile. He denies it, and offers plausible explanations for the evidence she gives (he takes photos of young girls because it’s his job; he also takes photos of other things; he hasn’t tried to do anything to her; his interest in her in the chat room was just friendliness). She knows more about him than he realizes: that he has pursued several young girls in other chat rooms, that she contacted him using aliases and he always broke off the relationship if she claimed to be any older than 14; he has explanations for this too (“I was lonely”). She accuses him of being responsible for the death of a girl who disappeared; again he denies it, and when she searches his entire house she can find no evidence of wrongdoing of any kind. That, of course, seems suspicous in itself (“You don’t have any porn. Don’t all men have porn?”); she assumes he must keep the really bad stuff somewhere secret, but still can’t find it. Finally she stumbles across his hidden safe, and guesses the combination using psychological insights straight out of the Hardy Boys Book of Detecting (his ex-girlfriend’s photo is marked with the date he first slept with her; his online screen name contains the same numbers: guess what the safe combination turns out to be?). Opening the safe, she pulls out some photos we are not allowed to see, and remarks “This is what they have those federal laws for”. There is also a CD-ROM, apparently containing more child porn, and a snapshot of the missing girl. She now knows he was connected to her, though he insists he just happened to meet her once and knows nothing about how she disappeared. At this juncture, he panics and tries to escape by knocking her unconscious with his chair (to which he is still tied) and threatening her with a gun she pulled out from under the bed. He almost succeeds, but then she pulls a plastic bag over his head and suffocates him into unconsciousness. When he wakes up for the second time, things are worse: he’s tied hand and foot to his stainless-steel kitchen table, and has a big ice pack on his crotch. The girl is wearing surgical scrubs, holding a scalpel, and consulting a fat book of surgical procedure borrowed again from her father. She explains that she’s convinced he’s guilty of killing the other girl, and she’s going to castrate him for it. (“It’s one of the easiest surgical procedures there are. I mean, farm boys all over the country geld their own pigs, so how hard could it be?”) There follows a very lengthy sequence in which she menaces him with potential castration, he alternately begs, wheedles, and screams his head off, and she finally gets on with it and cuts him, then holds up the severed pair in shot glasses. (She tosses them down the garbage disposal – there is a brief grinding noice, and she remarks “I guess they weren’t brass.”) This is the emotional crux of the movie, and it’s an effective sequence, but not as effective as you might think – in part because you never see what she’s actually doing, so the scariest part of the castration scene is the dialog, which is not actually the scariest part of castration. At any rate, she tosses off a few “eunuch” jokes (including a lame “eunuchs/unix” pun that I’m sure was missed by virtually all the audience and possibly the director) and then leaves him alone to take a shower and clean up. He escapes from the bindings, trepidatiously reaches down . . . and finds he’s not really castrated! (This catharsis scene also was not very effective, because it was so obvious that the supposed castration was not going to be the denouement of the movie.) He sobs “I’m all there. I’m all there.” for a few minutes, then picks up the scalpel and heads for the bathroom to get his own revenge on the girl. (We can forgive him for this, I think.) He bursts into the bathroom, rips back the shower curtain Tony Perkins-style, and . . . gets jumped from behind by the girl, who was waiting for him behind the door. She knocks him into the shower and repeatedly stuns him with a Tazer device, then drags him down the hall. When he awakens this time, things are worse still: he’s balanced on a chair; a noose, attached to the ceiling beams, is around his neck and his hands are tied. (This makes the third time this guy’s gotten clocked by a 14-year-old girl, in this case when he had every chance to escape but didn’t do it. It’s easy to lose sympathy at this point.) From here the movie stumbles to its conclusion: the girl methodically wipes the house of every trace of her presence, and washes every surface to remove fingerprints. She uploads the incriminating digital photos into an e-mail to the photographer’s ex-girlfriend, and threatens to reveal his porn secret to everyone, ruining his life and career. She then makes a pretext phone call to the girlfriend, urging her to come to the house immediately because of an unspecified emergency. She also writes a fake suicide note. There are now several options open, but none of them are good for the man: she can hang him and leave the suicide note, letting the police find his kiddie-porn stash and ruining his name posthumously. Or she can send the incriminating photos to the girlfriend, destroying him with the one person he cares most about and also ruining his career. Or she can show them to the girlfriend when she shows up, forcing him to confront the girlfriend in person just as he’s been ruined. Or, she offers him: he can kill himself voluntarily, and she will promise to wipe out the evidence of his crimes so at least no one will know what he did. He continues to plead his innocence: he insists he had nothing to do with the disappearance of the other girl, and he has done nothing wrong except collect some photos. He offers to confess the photos to the police if she’ll just let him go. The acting from both characters is good enough that his pose seems plausible even as she amasses evidence against him, while her mania seems just enough over-the-edge to make her seem questionable even though she’s ostensibly the “good” one of the two. Finally he escapes – again – and doesn’t try to get away from the girl – again. He chases her around the house waving a knife, trying somehow to bring the whole thing to a conclusion that will not require revealing his kid-porn collection. They both wind up on the roof of the house – the girl with the gun and, conveniently, yet another noose tied to the base of the chimney – just as his ex-girlfriend shows up and starts ringing the doorbell. The man tries to threaten his way out, insisting that if the girl causes trouble for him he’ll track her down somehow – she points out he still doesn’t know her real name and has no way to prove that what she told him about herself online was true. Now he’s trapped: his ex-girlfriend is moments away from discovering the real truth about him, and if he tries anything preciptate the girl on the roof will blurt out everything. She offers him her deal again: if he puts the noose around his neck and jumps off the roof, she’ll arrange everything so the whole story never comes out. He once more insists he had nothing to do with the other girl’s death. She knows he’s lying. Finally he admits that he was present when the girl was killed, taking pictures, but it was another guy who actually did everything, and he offers to give her his name if she lets him go. She says “I already know his name. Aaron told me you did it, right before he killed himself.” He sees she knows everything. He has no other options. He puts the noose around his neck, then hesitates on the edge of the roof. She assures him again “I’ll take care of everything” . . . and he steps off the edge . . . just as she muses: “. . . or not.”

So much for the plot. (I have finally realized there’s no way to review this movie without sounding like that whacko CAPAlert guy. Hmmmm . . .)

The movie dwells so much on the mechanics of the vigilante/revenge motif that we miss almost entirely the psychology of it, unlike the deeply engaging first half of the movie. (We never find out exactly why the girl is so hell-bent against this guy, or how she identified him in the first place. Does she have a personal history that motivates her? Is she just cleaning up the community? No idea.) There is an tenuous moral balance to the scenes, however: unlike with the castration sequence (which you always suspect is going to turn out to be a put-on), the director manages to keep the male character’s moral ambiguity, and thus the tension between the two characters as they alternately appeal to the audience’s sympathy, intact until the final scene. It was easy to believe, throughout the movie, that the character is not so much a grossly perverted sicko as a relatively decent guy who knows he has somewhat warped tastes, but keeps them under control. (He offers a tear-jerking story about his own early abuse to explain why.) Until he finally confesses to photographing the sex murder, or snuff killing, there was no evidence he had done anything untoward other than download forbidden pictures and do some inappropriate flirting. In the end he dies a manipulative, devious monster, but until that point he is someone who could have been, and appeared to be, relatively harmless and in many ways sympathetic. Similarly, the girl, by killing the confessed monster (as well, apparently, as his partner), becomes a kind of heroine or savior of oppressed innocence – Buffy the Pedophile Slayer – but before that, she appeared to be reckless, impetuous, and not a little crazy. (Honestly, it’s hard not to be seen as a castrating bitch when you invade a guy’s home, toy with his love for his ex-girlfriend, mock his porn collection, drug him, suffocate him, threaten him, and cut his balls off.)

I prefer to think of the movie with the last scene deleted – with the moral equipoise of the two characters still intact. That puts the audience, and possibly the female character, in the same position we are usually in in real life, when we suspect the worst about someone who may in fact be innocent, or at least not terribly bad. How are we to respond to people like this photographer? There is an increasing mood of vigilantism in the country that has grown in parallel with the wave of attention to, and stiffer penalties for, pedophilia and child porn. Already we have gun-toting range riders out along the Southern border, intimidating and sometimes fighting with illegal immigrants in the desert. Since 9/11, there have been repeated complaints of suspicion, harassment, and occasionally violence directed at anyone who “looks Muslim” – including Sikhs, Indians, Turks, and others; the common opinion seems to be that it’s too bad they sometimes get “the wrong person”. Regarding pedophilia, it has always commanded a titillated and shocked reaction, and the legal climate regarding not just pedophilia but even ordinary teenage sex is becoming more repressive almost as fast as it can be made so. Legislatures are in a race to increase penalties for cross-age sex to all-time highs, and to make them permanent, and sometimes extra-judicial: not merely to impose lifelong sex-offender registration, but in some cases mandatory lifetime psychiatric incarceration in addition to prison sentences, and without legal finding of mental incompetence or overt danger. Many states maintain registration of anyone accused of underage sex, with or without conviction. In this environment of diminishing due-process rights and increasing sexual repression, it is hard to propose a penalty for suspected pedophiles that would not be regarded as too harsh: actual castration has been proposed many times, and “voluntary” chemical castration has been imposed in many states. If someone were to take the matter into her own hands, as it were, I suspect there would be considerable support for that action.

But these are legal speculations. There are medical-ethical issues to be addressed as well.

One has to do with the nature of sexual attraction. It is interesting that those who support the harshest treatment of pedophile sex offenders – arguing for psychiatric incarceration on grounds that anyone with a sexual urge toward young partners is incurably dangerous – are often the same people who argue that adult homosexual attraction is voluntarily chosen and can be both resisted and changed at will (with a boost from Jesus, of course). But leaving that aside, it is a very delicate thing deciding what attractions are or are not beyond the pale. “Underage” is an entirely culturally determined concept, of course – a look at the range of ages considered acceptable for both intra-cohort and cross-age sexual activity in various countries, and at various times, proves that beyond question. But today there are attempts to raise the age of sexual consent in many states, and to penalize relationships with “underage” partners even where both partners are youths within a few years of one another’s age. The range of combinations of ages and relationships that meet the test of legality is decreasing, and the “access” young people have to sexual expression is diminishing.

In other words, the increasing attention paid to pedophilia is part of the general hostile trend toward sexuality in all forms, and especially to the sexuality of the young. Age-of-consent laws originally served the purpose of legalizing relationships between adult men and young girls (the age of consent to sex was almost always lower than the age of legal adulthood for all other purposes). As the average age at marriage has grown, and inter-generational marriages become much less common, they now serve to criminalize sex even between teenagers near to one another’s ages. Increasingly, too, they are being used against women in sexual relationships with teenage boys – once considered a rite of passage for a young man, and now a felony. In such a climate, cross-age sex is not merely taboo but, in some sense, “ultra-taboo” – it violates the law, it violates the prohibition on “taking advantage” of youths (especially, but not only, girls), and it violates the current de-facto prohibition on intergenerational relationships. As this hostility extends to more and more forms of sexual relationships, and further across the age range for such relationships, the sexuality of youth becomes increasingly prohibited and also pathologized.

It is not merely wrong, but sick, we are told, for adults to be sexually attracted to teens or children – and therefore for young people to engage in sexual behavior with adults. From there it is a short step to seeing the sexual behavior of children as itself sick. There is a common perception on the political right that Freud has been “refuted”, and that therefore anything that smacks of “Freudianism” – especially of the power of sex and its ubiquity at all stages of human life – is false. The vision of children as sexless, and thus of their “exposure” to sexuality as being somehow “corrupting” or invasive, has returned, particularly within the politically-motivated wing of cultural/medical criticism. (This partly explains the feverish resistance to sex education, particularly for young children. There are those on the right who truly believe that if you just never mention sex to children, they’ll not only never learn about it but will never have any sexual feelings or be “recruited” to any forbidden sexual desires.) Pedophilia is thus not merely harmful, by way of betrayal of trust or of actual physical injury, but it is an intrusion of demon sex into a field in which it was not previously present, and is thus corruptive. (This again explains the fear on the right for “impurity” or “loss of innocence”: it’s not just your hymen you can’t get back if you make the fateful mistake, but your previous condition of sexlessness. Once corrupted, youth are permanently sexed up: like a drop of ink in a milk bottle, the stain remains, and spreads to everything it touches.) But it is not merely pedophilia that is the problem. Since sex is corruptive, any indulgence in sex – by children at play, by teens with teens, by older teens with younger adults – breeds corruption. Ordinary sex play, and teenage sexual relations, are as corruptive as pedophilia (though the latter may bring other dangers as well).

The fear of pedophilia – a widespread, and probably somewhat reasonable, cultural taboo that is by no means universal today or in history – in today’s climate makes it hard to see what a healthy sexual life could be for a young person. The range of relative ages is narrowing for teens (there are repeated stories of high-school seniors arrested for their relationships with their high-school junior partners), and the “floor” of minimal acceptable age is rising, while more and more relationships now qualify as “pedophilia” that would not have been seen as such in the past. What’s a healthy, horny teenager to do these days?

Considering the pair in this movie, there’s certainly something very off-putting about a 32-year-old pursuing a 14-year-old, however flirtatious she is. (As she herself points out in the movie, when a kid does things that are inappropriate, the adult is supposed to say “No”. But then again, her merely saying so proves she is aware of the inappropriateness of the behavior she has been flaunting outrageously throughout the movie. Does she bear no responsibility – and no autonomy – in that context?) But the same relationship they exhibit – which never becomes in any way intimate (until she fakes a castration on him) – would be perfectly appropriate between two teens close to the same age. And I wonder at what age, of the younger girl, this creepy adult becomes non-creepy for pursuing her? Given the intelligence and maturity of the character in the film (somewhat overdone, I think, but nevermind), an 18-year-old who behaved similarly to this 14-year-old might be not a transgression, but simply a hell of a catch, for a 32-year-old with an eye for youth and beauty. What if she was 16 years old (the age of consent in many states), and a bit precocious, and right on the cusp of legal maturity? Creepy, or sexy? What if she’s 16 and he’s 25, not 32? What if she’s a somewhat immature 18, and he’s 25 and on the make? I’m not sure the numbers tell us anything (but I realize, too, that that is in large part the voice of my long-dead teenage-boy-self, who would have been delighted to meet an 18- or 25- or 32-year-old woman with transgression on her mind, but sadly never did).

I’m not arguing for a relaxation of the concept of pedophilia, or even of the restrictions on legal age combinations (though there may be something to be said for a more realistic view of the latter). But I want to know how to develop a clear, and accurate, and healthy, and accepting view of teen sexuality – of its growth and maturation, of the experimentation and play that makes that possible, of the variations in opportunity, experience, and desire that impinge on teens and adults alike and make each one’s process of sexual growth different and unique, of the necessary risk-taking (and necessary boundary transgressions) that are part of that process, and especially how to do so in an environment in which all teen sexuality is now under siege, and more and more of it is construed as “pedophilia”. This movies gives a picture of a sexually knowing – even if inexperienced – young woman who can only view her own sexual response to an older man through the lens of corruption, and feels she must take a stand on that ground because it’s the right thing to do. (I’m reminded of the female columnist – I can’t remember who – who wrote years ago about hugging her grammar-school-aged son to her chest and being pushed away by the boy, who said “that’s child sexual abuse!”. He’d been taught in school that that was the name for any touching of “private parts”, and he must be sure never to let anyone do that to him.) Since the girl in this movie initiates all the sexual moves, and is firmly in control throughout (would it be too much to say she had him by the balls?), she could have protected herself from any true sexual threat simply by not pursuing the contact, or breaking it off at her choosing. She knows this. (In saying this I’m not making the pedophile’s plea that “she invited it” – simply pointing out that the girl in this movie was not, in fact, in danger from the man she eventually killed for being dangerous to girls like her.) But she cannot accept this relationship as part of the territory open to her for exploration – it has to be part of the danger zone, even though she, at least, is not naive, vulnerable, or even necessarily a target of this ambiguous pedophile. (I’m again ignoring the last-moment confessional scene.) For a girl who is mature, intelligent, and widely-read, and has a commendable sexual knowledge base, she seems curiously sexually incurious – her come-ons to the older man were a sham, and there’s no hint she has a boyfriend or a dating life of her own (though we know she has several female friends). She has been taught to see her own sexuality like the columnist’s little boy saw all “private parts” – as a source of danger.

I think more and more we are being marched unwittingly into seeing all aspects of sex that way, and especially youth sexuality. Pedophilia has become a tool of fear for the further pathologizing of youth sex, and of the de-sexing of childhood psychology. That has to be a mistake, however much repulsed we are by sexual violation, or how protecting we want to be of our children.

Any thoughts on those issues, or this movie – or should I just step off the roof?