The controversial 1978 movie Brooke Shields will never regret: “I’m proud of it”
There’s an undeniable danger when entering the film industry at a young age.
It’s difficult enough being a Disney star – just look at the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus – but for Brooke Shields, her entrance into Hollywood was a completely different ballpark entirely.
Making her debut in the horror movie Alice, Sweet Alice, Shields was just 11 when she’d then take on the lead role in the controversial Pretty Baby, directed by French filmmaker Louis Malle. Telling the story of a 12-year-old girl groomed into prostitution while growing up in a brothel with her sex worker mother, the movie instantly garnered many raised eyebrows, not least because of the nude scenes featuring the underage actor.
While the exploitation of children is an important topic, the movie ironically contributed to it by exploiting the young Shields, who was simply too young to be placed in such a vulnerable position. It was banned in several countries and remains one of the most shocking movies of the 1970s.
From that moment, she was frequently in the news, whether she was appearing nude in The Blue Lagoon as a teen or involved in a legal battle regarding eroticised nude images she took for Playboy when she was just ten years old. She was completely failed by her parents, who pimped her out for money and fame, although that’s not the way she sees it.
Shields is actually pretty defensive of these controversial movies, especially Pretty Baby, seeing the retrospective assessment of these films in the #MeToo era as “too much”.
Talking to The Sunday Times, the actor said, “You look at movies such as Pretty Baby, you look at Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, or you look at any coming of age movie that Louis Malle did, like Au Revoir les Enfants or Lacombe, Lucien or whatever. There was always a sexual element to them.”
Sure, the exploration of burgeoning sexuality has always been a big part of the cinematic landscape, especially in France, but there’s a difference between careful portrayals of the erosion of innocence and exploitation and borderline child pornography.
“Maybe the movies I did wouldn’t be made now because of such censorship, and that’s a tremendous loss,” Shields added. “Pretty Baby is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever been in, and I will defend it forever… I wrote my thesis on it, and I’m proud of it.”
Shields might not have had her career if not for Pretty Baby, the controversy it spawned making her an unavoidable figure in the spotlight. The fact that she wrote her thesis – The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, Pretty Baby and Lacombe, Lucien – on the film just shows how impactful the experience was for the actor.
But it’s worrying that someone who was a victim of such exploitation can’t see how problematic her experience of child stardom was – the fact that she believes that certain aspects of the #MeToo movement have gone too far just proves how necessary its existence really is.
