Not So Sweet

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of a movie about a pedophile. As a filmmaker, how does one create a compelling narrative about a protagonist whose proclivities place him among our society's most abject criminals? How does one transform the one-dimensional monster of the public imagination into a somewhat likeable guy without giving viewers the impression that the filmmakers - and implicitly any member of the audience who empathizes with the pedophile - condone his behavior? The Woodsman consistently straddles this line. On the one hand, we can't help but feel that Walter (Kevin Bacon) is treated inhumanely for something that he can barely control. Most importantly, we see that Walter's actions are motivated by a need (albeit twisted) for some sort of love and fulfillment, which is a far cry from any fixation on hurting or abusing children. Still, we are reassured that no, he cannot control himself. There he goes again, looking out his apartment window toward the adjacent elementary school. Walking by the schoolyard, stealing furtive glances in the park. He can't help himself; we pity him, yet at the same time we wouldn't invite him over for dinner.

At its outset, David Slade's Hard Candy appears to be playing in the realm of moral ambiguity introduced by The Woodsman. Hard Candy even seems to add a tantalizing twist: Haley (Ellen Page), the 14-year-old victim, is not merely the object of 32-year-old Jeff's (Patrick Wilson) unspeakable desire, but is a developing sexual subject herself. If anything, young Haley is almost (is it possible?) taking advantage of the bemused Jeff - she has upset his pedophile's script by taking control of their meeting, insisting that he take her to his house, playing up and amplifying tenfold his most modest of suggestions. Interestingly, Jeff is noticeably caught off guard, unsure of how to approach a girl who seems all too willing to be approached. Slade opens up innumerable tensions and unasked questions between the two, encompassing ideas of power, desire, age, and innocence (I am reminded of James Bolton's portrayal of Eban & Charley, whose intergenerational love affair is made simultaneously less and more complicated because it is queer). Like one of my favorite movies of the past year, and unlike most films, it looks as if Slade is ready to take childhood/adolescent sexuality seriously - its excitement, its uncertainty, its limits. I was ready to see how he would play with taboo, with repressed and unfulfilled desire (both Jeff's and Haley's), to see a story that dwelled in the middle ground at which The Woodsman only hinted.

Instead, Hard Candy quickly collapses these questions and possibilities into a blunt dichotomy. The message? In a deviant sexual relationship, one can be only the victim or the victimizer. Rather than exploring the unmapped terrain laid out in the first twenty minutes of the film, Hard Candy takes us to the far more disturbing (and frankly far less interesting) territory of sadistic sexual politics.

Whereas we watched Bacon's Walter grapple with his difficult desires, Jeff is quite literally struggling for his life against the object of his desire - at one point, she proclaims "I am every little girl you’ve ever watched, touched, screwed." Like Walter, Jeff is a troubled man haunted by troubling wants, but he's by no means a monster, and we are loathe to see him squirming and flailing before a mercilessly vindictive Haley. Her sadistic torture, meanwhile, drains her of any humanity (her sole desire is to torture and kill the alternately plotting and pitiful Jeff) and robs the victim/victimizer relationship of any of its potential complexity. Maybe I'm just no good at revenge flicks, but subjecting a paying audience to all this – especially the elaborately prolonged castration sequence – felt downright unfair. I had to leave the theater in the middle of it, having slunk deep into my seat, in a cold sweat, vision blurring, to keep myself from vomiting all over the sticky-sweet floor in front of me. What could have been a unique psychological thriller quickly spilled into a visceral mess.

I'll admit that my reaction may just speak to my lack of receptivity to a certain brand of feminism. Of course the castration scene made me squirm! This is exactly the kind of victimhood that I am so unlikely to experience, though young women are frequently faced with the prospect of encountering sexual violence. Haley's clever and fevered dominance of Jeff could certainly be read as an empowering statement, ostensibly turning the tables on those who victimize the innocent and giving them what they deserve.

But what kind of message is this? As the movie comes to a close, Jeff's inevitable fate leads us to conclude that those with aberrant desires had better keep them bottled up, or else those desires will come back to destroy them. So the choice faced by the Walters and Jeffs of the world is black and white: unending masochism versus physical and psychological victimhood, at either the hands of those for whom they yearn or those who protect them. Which, while perhaps not the worst alternative in a society that all too readily writes off sexual violence toward women, is far from a solution to the problem, and hardly even pretends to consider its causes. Hard Candy instead offers a terribly depressing sexual politics through which desire is repressed in the service of safety and an Oedipal justice, (un?)consciously sublimated into sadistic vengeance upon those who dare to dream of that which is forbidden.

No wonder Hard Candy made me sick.