Review of Little Children (2006) by Al M — 25 Jan 2013

Little Children is a pitch-perfect drama/satire with elements of bone-dry or even black humor that explores suburban life and the forces of desire that can so easily rend asunder the perfectly ordered lives that seem to fit so well amongst the immaculately ordered and manicured streets of suburbia. Little Children follows an adulterous affair that takes place against the background of a neighborhood driven to the brink of paranoia by the release of a local pedophile from prison. What unfolds is simultaneously disturbing, funny, heartbreaking, intelligent, and provocative.

The rest of my analysis contains SPOILERS.

The film features voice-over narration. An always potentially fatal choice aesthetically when it comes to film, the narration was executed perfectly provided a lot of the bone dry, dark humor I found in the film.

The pedophile, Ronnie, serves as the central symbol of the film, and he serves several purposes. A.) He is representative of forbidden forms of desire and identity (a theme throughout the film that is forcibly brought to the surface during the discussion of the novel Madame Bovary). B.) He is the scapegoat, and this probably is the easiest of the readings. He is the community's sacrificial altar upon which they lay all their deepest held fears, for it is a film about fear--fear that holds people together and tears them apart. They also subtly perhaps suggest how the War on Terror's ideology is based upon the scapegoat function--the terrorist (and the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, in particular) has replaced the commie. They bring this point out somewhat by subtle references to the war and through the timeframe in which the film was released. C.) Finally, and perhaps, most importantly is is an exploration of the abject (as Kristeva defines it)--he is a being who is denied full subjecthood because of his illicit, dangerous manifestation of desire, a manifestation that is perhaps not even his fault. And I think the film does a good job not delving into the background of his pedophilia or even very explicitly describing the act of exposure that he committed. We get mostly scenes that humanize him but also a few that distinctly dehumanize and darken his character. The film does not give us the easy social/environmental factors that might allow us to excuse his behavior. He is the abject--neither the subject nor even the object but one that exists outside society's signifying matrix. Hence, he castrates himself to eliminate the signifier of his desire that forbid his entry into society's system of meaning--now he can "be a good boy." Madame Bovary faces a related but distinctly different dilemma--she wants to be treated as a subject instead of a mere object but cannot be (at least in her mind), so she makes herself abject. Madame Bovary is a problematic character, and I did enjoy their discussion of it because I have read the novel twice and had a whole host of feelings for her. She is trapped and so I feel for her. But her husband is a genuinely loving man who far outshines the flashy jerks she hooks up with, but then love is not the point--feeling like the subject (and like the subject of a romantic novel in particular) is what Emma craves. I love Emma or hate her depending on my mood. I have less sympathy for her than for Anna Karenina or Edna Pontellier, the two other most famous 19th century adultresses (only one of whom actually appeared in a book by a woman).

All of the themes or functions that the pedophile serves coincide with the themes present throughout the film, for--like Blue Velvet--it is a film about what lurks beneath the Stepford surface.