antipopper

I’ve been meaning to declare that despite everyone’s collective need to whine about American pop culture’s inane fascination with precocious kids, I think Dakota Fanning — the compulsive PDA-fetishist girl from Cat In The Hat, and now child star of the moment in Hide and Seek — is actually quite cool, and not annoying at all.

But what does Fanning’s capacity to play beautiful, damaged pre-teen girls mean in the scheme of things? There’s a consensus that in Hide and Seek, Fanning’s performance stands alone in a film that’s otherwise either risible or even morally objectionable in its unrelenting child-fetishism. While the film is quite idiotic (hey, I’ve had knives out for director John Polson since he vetoed one of my designs back in the day), it still makes me wonder. Hide and Seek generates a pervasive mood of “proprietorial vouyerism”, in which every adult male seems to have a dodgy daddy-complex with Fanning’s character, in seeming complicity with the camera. But is it a simple slippage, a hypocritical recapitulation of fetishism that’s common to most “exploitation” movies? Sure, it made me squirm, but mostly because of the film’s implication of complicity, rather than its cementing of its own. As it lingers on each moment where a man seems to want to own her, the camera creates panic. But it dramatises the panic of the guilty. It implies that you only see “sick fucks” everywhere in the way that you do because you youself are one — in the most everyday terms, it’s like people who act in the most clawingly selfish manner when the situation presents, because they assume everyone else is like them (god, I hate that). This has interesting implications for particular characters and the audience.

Meanwhile, Dakota Fanning’s apparently doing voice acting for an English language rerelease of My Neighbour Totoro. Yay! I think.

[ technorati tags: dakota-fanning, hide-and-seek, film, paedophilia, moral-panics ]