Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

But it is Sandy (Pamela Franklin), now seventeen, bespectacled and plain, the one who has developed a resentful edge and caustic wit, the one Miss Brodie has desexualized by deeming her “dependable” and well-suited for an emotion-free career as a spy, who ultimately plays that role. Viewing Teddy’s portrait of Jenny, Sandy sees, in its resemblance to Miss Brodie, Teddy’s still-infatuated homage; left alone with him, she taunts with her insight, and he, taken aback by her provocative, challenging glare, grabs and kisses her. I am alarmed at this assault, but relieved when she flees safely from the studio, both of us frightened little girls. But very soon we jump back to a scene that jolts and stuns me: Teddy, decked out with paintbrush and spattered smock in rejuvenated, inspired artist mode, is absorbed in a new painting of, it is revealed, Sandy — who is now reclined, womanly and self-assuredly nude on a divan, the artist’s muse, the precocious little Beatrice to his middle-aged Dante, the expanse of her bare flesh glowing startlingly bright white against the blood-red drapery of the faux-Neoclassical tableau.

Pamela Franklin was eighteen when this film was made (and extraordinary — to hold your own against Maggie Smith!), as were the other girls of the “Brodie set,” some even older, but in the early scenes they are entirely believable as thirteen-year-olds, thanks to subtle tricks of hairstyling and makeup, the oversized desks and shapeless uniforms, their girlish postures and child-timbre’d voices. I have invested in and related to these schoolgirl characters as fellow children, even if they are a few critical years older than I am, and it is a shock to now see Sandy on naked self-display to the lustful gaze of this grown man. She is posed as a knowing, sensual woman, yes, but her breasts are tiny childish almonds, and her face, without her glasses, looks even more pubescently fresh-scrubbed here than in her earlier scenes; is she woman or girl? I can no longer define her, the boundaries and implications of her femaleness have blurred, and I am confused. Her exposed tender skin feels all wrong; it is not the clinical nakedness of the pediatrician’s office, or the summertime scampering without bathing suits around the pool under the careless watch of indifferent parents. This intimate scene of adult and child, of man and girl, frightens me, implicates and unbalances me. Sandy’s soft naked vulnerability is now somehow mine, and sitting there in the theatre, next to my mother and father, I feel unsafe. I feel danger, and fear, and shame.

And yet. Sandy tires of posing, stands, stretches — like Teddy we are invited to appraise her bare back, dimpled rear end, slender limbs — pulls on a crotch-length sweater. Teddy tosses away the paintbrush and pushes her back onto the divan, mock-bemoaning and self-chastising that he has “a schoolgirl for a mistress,” and she pulls the sweater away so he might kiss her throat, her breasts, caress those young shoulders that now definitely have an old head upon them:

SANDY

My age does bother you, doesn’t it? How much longer are you going to be tempted by this firm young flesh?

TEDDY

Until you’re eighteen and over the hill.

SANDY

I really shouldn’t feed your depraved appetites. .

she teases, reveling in his passion, and I find myself dizzied again by this next new tilt to the world: She is the one in control, here, I realize, with her deliberate unveiling and offering of her firm young flesh. She is in charge, and this adult man is rendered powerless by his hunger for this alluring child-woman. I am not entirely sure what he is hungry for , what lies at the core of this appetite, or the mysterious delicious force she possesses, but I am allured, as well; I like the satisfied smile on her face and his mumbling delirium. I have never witnessed this before, the little girl as tantalizer, as temptress; it suddenly seems such a desirable thing to be.

This is the perhaps-unwise counsel and secret knowledge that I take away from this film, the new interest Miss Brodie may or may not have wished to provide me; that my little-girlness does not only or necessarily make me vulnerable — it is also a source of sexual power.

Taxi Driver and Bugsy Malone both opened in theatres in1976, and both featured a preternaturally mature, whiskey-voiced child actress named Jodie Foster, who seems familiar to me as a tomboyish Becky Thatcher from Disney’s Tom Sawyer , from suntan lotion commercials and wholesome episodes of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and My Three Sons . 11But that innocent little girl is gone. In Taxi Driver , Foster plays Iris, a twelve-year-old prostitute, whom an increasingly unhinged Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) spends the second half of the movie seeking to save; I am also twelve years old, and, watching this movie, I grimace and hide my face from Scorsese’s blood-spatter violence, I am a little bored by Travis’s pursuit of an older uptight blond lady, but I cannot take my eyes off of Iris and her doll-like ringlets, hustling tricks in her midriff-baring blouse, her hot pants and clunky platform shoes. The overt sexualization of this child is even more disconcerting for me than Sandy’s abrupt nudity, and I try to block out the sinister voice of Iris’s pimp (Harvey Keitel), bartering with Travis for her services:

PIMP

Man, she’s twelve and a half years old, you ain’t never had pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can come on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, come on her face, man, she’ll get your cock so hard she’ll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right. .?

I know just enough about sex, and the words of sex, to be shocked by this speech — made all the more harsh by its sotto voce delivery — but not enough to fully comprehend it. All I can really think is But she’s standing right there, she can hear you, and she’s only twelve, like me! But I don’t know if I am thinking of Iris, the character, or Jodie Foster, the actress — either way, this is all too assaultively explicit for me to process or make sense of. (And what did my parents think, if anything, watching this movie with their Iris-aged daughter?) I want my Becky Thatcher back; I want this little girl romping safely at the seashore, her mother lovingly, protectively slathering on the Coppertone.

However: at the same time, I can wholly relate to Iris as an object of a certain kind of. . interest , as Miss Brodie might say. My own mother, muddy-brunette and Rubenesque, who still cannot believe she has produced a thin, pretty, blond little girl, likes to dress me in miniskirts and snug or strappy tops, she likes me to curl and pouf my straight, stringy hair and put a little makeup on, has bought me three-inch-high cork wedgies and likes to “show me off” this way. She values the male gaze, has encouraged my flirtatious precocity, and takes an especial delight in the attention my prettiness receives from adult men: The guy painting our house, who offers to “keep an eye on” me while my mother goes shopping, then asks me to keep him company so he won’t be lonely while he works (“So, do you like school, do you have a boyfriend. .?”); my parents’ avuncular, Scotch-drinking attorney, who at parties playfully catches me by the waist and pulls me, giggling, onto his lap and holds me close. By now I have learned there are adult men who are friendly to a cute little girl, and that is all. . and there are adult men who gaze at me in a certain way, whose smile has a nervous yet appreciative edge, and I understand there is a difference; there is something some adult men want, or need, from me that I instinctively get . That I enjoy and encourage. That makes me feel important and adult and wise, gives me a heady thrill. That makes me feel powerful — which I otherwise, in my set-the-table, do-your-homework, little-girl life, do not. I might not think to describe their interest as “depraved appetite,” but I recognize the hunger — just as I on some subconscious level understand that Iris’s prostitute outfit is designed to enhance the childishness of her undeveloped body rather than hide it, because her value lies in the specific, illicit alchemy of her youth and her sex. In later scenes, when Iris is dressed like a “regular” adolescent — androgynous T-shirt, no makeup, hair as stringy and straight as my own, an ordinary girl I might be in seventh grade with — I find her far less interesting. And I am entirely creeped out, even more than I am by the film’s violence or sexually explicit language, to see the scene of this regular-kid Iris slow-dancing with her pimp; “I don’t like what I’m doing, Sport,” she hesitantly murmurs, now an uncertain little girl, and he reassures her she is his woman, he wishes every man could know what it’s like to be loved by a woman like her, how lucky he is to hold close a woman who wants and needs him as she does, the coaxing mantra of woman woman woman purred in the ear of this sad child. I recognize and am revolted by the obscenity this so clearly is — but I still relate more comfortably to the Iris dressed in her child-prostitute work clothes, with the assured throaty voice and knowing streetwalker dialogue that makes her seem so adult, so wise and in control. She is a grown woman in the body and skimpy dress of a sweet baby doll, and Travis’s chivalric, gory, climactic shootout with her pimp confirms that this is something worth killing for.