Hollywood and Child Abuse

Child abuse, especially in the sexual nature, is a topic rarely explored by Hollywood films. And Hollywood has its reasoning — this isn't the stuff of romantic comedies or action spectacles; this is serious business that the American public is not going to flock to the theatre to see. So the independent filmmaking community already has an advantage when dealing with this controversial topic, in that budgets will often be lower, and therefore not as big a concern in recouping, as compared with their Hollywood counterparts.

Two films that deal with this weighty issue are Mysterious Skin (2004, dir. Gregg Araki, distributed by TLA Releasing) and Georgia Rule (2007, dir. Garry Marshall, distributed by Universal Pictures). An obvious difference in these films is that, though Mysterious Skin was not widely distributed (and had a gross revenue of $697,181) and Georgia Rule (gross venue $24,991,167) was shown in theaters throughout the country, Skin was much better reviewed than Rule. Mysterious Skin has been called "an uncommonly accurate portrayal of the long-term effect of child sexual abuse on boys" (psychologist Richard Gartner) and "at once the most harrowing and, strangely, the most touching film I have seen about child abuse" (Roger Ebert). Georgia Rule, however, has been deemed "a sit-com about sexual abuse" (Ebert and Roeper guest critic). This lies in the way that sexual abuse is presented in both of these films, both dealing with teenagers who were abused in their past. In Mysterious Skin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet's characters cope with this tragic experience by not really knowing how to deal with it — Gordon-Levitt's character continues to sleep with older men, eventually hustling himself on the streets of New York City, and Corbet's character remembers the incident as an alien abduction, and spends his young adulthood trying to piece his childhood together. Yes, these boys "grow" because of the experience, but it is presented entirely as destructive in nature, in how it affects both their lives and their (in-)ability to connect with others around them. The plot and the characters of Mysterious Skin grow organically from this childhood trauma; Corbet's character comes to acknowledge the fact that he was abused, but there is no "recovery" presented in this narrative. What happened is something that these boys will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

Georgia Rule is, well, another story. Lindsay Lohan portrays a rebellious teen who is sent to go stay with her grandmother. Lohan wreaks more havoc during the visit, and in a similar vein of Gordon-Levitt's character, attempts to seduce an older man, to whom she admits she was abused by her father. This allegation of abuse is eventually proven to be true, which unites the women of the family in a stance against the abusive father, and brings them closer together than ever before. So the abuse in Georgia Rule is presented as a possible cause for destructive teenage behavior, but instead of showing the lack of true closure and recovery possible for those who have experienced such, Rule, in the Hollywood fashion of needing a happy ending, ends up presenting child abuse as something that brings families closer together. So, in a way, as a good thing.

So Hollywood, with its need to please the public and the box office, really cannot deal with such tricky topics as child abuse in as a respectful and honest fashion as the independent film sector.