The Child in Film

Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales

Karen Lury

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781845119683
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Ghastly and ghostly children, 'dirty little white girls', the child as witness and as victim, have always played an important part in the history of cinema, as have child performers themselves. In exploring the disruptive power of the child in films made for an adult audience across popular films, including "Taxi Driver" and Japanese horror, and 'art-house' productions like "Mirror" and "Pan's Labyrinth", Karen Lury investigates why the figure of the child has such a significant impact on the visual aspects and storytelling potential of cinema.Lury's main argument is that the child as a liminal yet powerful agent has allowed filmmakers to play adventurously with cinema's formal conventions - with far-reaching consequences. In particular, she reveals how a child's relationship to time allows it to disturb and question conventional master-narratives. She explores too the investment in the child actor and expression of child sexuality, as well as how confining and conservative existing assumptions can be in terms of commonly held beliefs as to who children 'really are'.

Chapter One

Hide and Seek: Children and Ghosts in Contemporary Japanese Film

At the door of her kindergarten a little girl waits and waits and waits in the pouring rain for her mother. But who is she: the mother, the daughter, or the ghost?

In the house, on the stairs, just behind you, glimpsed from the window of a lift, reflected in a glass door, a little boy plays hide and seek. Under the table, in a cupboard, on your bed, he curls up tight, his chin on his knees, anxiously drumming his fingers. Is that him, there, in the corner of the room as you turn your head? Does he look at you while you sleep?

The naked feet of a little girl can just be seen from under the hem of her plain white dress. We never see her face which is always just out of sight, or covered by the veil of her long dark hair. Is she victim or demon?

Black hair swinging, the tiny girl clambers crab-like out of the locker, creaking and groaning, striking terror into the college students who scuttle back on all fours in ghastly mimicry of the little figure before them. There is no escape: she will scare them to death.

These four scenes are played out in a series of films produced since the late 1990s in Japan, marketed in the West as ‘J-Horror’. Dark Water, The Grudge 1 & 2, Ring, Ring 2, Ring 0: Birthday and The Locker 1 & 2 are part of an escalating series of filmed stories, told and retold in a variety of different media (novels, manga, television series, films) for the original Japanese and later for the American market. The films, which borrow various themes and motifs from traditional Japanese ghost stories and earlier classic films (Kwaidan, Ugetsu Monogatori) also incorporate a range of non-Japanese influences, from American horror films of the 1970s and 1980s (Nightmare on Elm Street, The Evil Dead); British Gothic films from the 1960s (The Haunting, The Innocents); and European art-house films (Don’t Look Now, Dekalog).

The prefix ‘J’ is understood in the Western context as a reference to the Japanese origin of the films (although increasingly this is often merged or confused with Korean and Taiwanese films). In a more precise definition of ‘J’-culture the Japanese critic, Tomiko Yoda, represents this mode of production as a ‘subculturation of the national’.¹ That is, whilst the form (the borrowings, what she calls the ‘patchwork of citations’) of ‘J’ culture may be global in its scope and potential dissemination, the ‘content’, the symbols, objects, props of the mise-en-scene are recognisably local or national (Japanese), producing a sense of ‘visceral proximity’ for their target audience. As she notes, when such forms are marketed (or remade) for a non-Japanese audience, these symbols and props can be replaced with objects familiar to the new local/national context. Or they may be reconfigured: one such symbolic figure in these films that enacts a specialized function is the child – the child who can variously appear, as I have indicated, as ghost, monster and victim. Whilst the child remains and performs a broadly similar function in these stories, whether the films are initially made for a Japanese or American market, there is something distinctive about the use of the child in the Japanese versions of the stories. My argument is that the child figure is used so frequently and resonates so tremendously in these films because it represents a particular preoccupation for Japanese national identity.

Figure 2 ‘Hide and seek’: Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) plays in Ju-On (The Grudge) (Dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

Ghostly Thoughts

First, a brief detour to investigate the nature of the ghost: in the West, ghosts have been predominantly represented as visions of dead people who return seeking justice or acknowledgement from the living. Often the ghost betrays or serves to reveal a secret (a murder, a wrongdoing) that must be solved before he/she can properly and finally ‘pass over’. As Colin Davis notes, this presents the ghost as a symptom which can be solved via a method akin to the psychoanalytic process, where once the ghost (secret) has been uncovered, acknowledged and finally ‘spoken’ it will no longer haunt or terrify the living. Many well-known films which feature haunted children, such as The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist and The Exorcist, follow this model: the child is only safe once the ghosts or demons which terrorise them are named or acknowledged. In some films, as in The Others (where the children finally learn that it is they who are the ghosts), the ‘naming’ and speaking to – or for – the ghost is more ambiguous in terms of its redemptive effect. Equally, is it an act of love, therapy or violence that causes the governess in The Innocents to scream; ‘Say his name! Say his name!’ at Miles, the little boy in her care, who is apparently haunted by a malevolent male spectre? Tragic certainly, since the shock of being forced to speak the ghost’s name results in Miles collapsing and dying in her arms.

Davis goes on to outline an alternative understanding of the ghost by following Jacques Derrida’s investigation of haunting in his Spectres of Marx. Here, Davis claims, Derrida represents the ghost as not so much a return from the past, but more as a representation of something ‘other’, something that precisely cannot be spoken. Contrasting this ‘spectre’ with the psychoanalytic model which restores the ghost to its proper place (to the ‘other side’, to eternity or elsewhere), Davis suggests that:

Derrida wants to avoid any such restoration and to encounter, what is strange, unheard, other, about the ghost. For Derrida the ghost’s secret is not a puzzle to be solved ... The secret is not unspeakable because it is taboo, but because it cannot (yet) be articulated in the languages available to us. The ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought.²

Further, he claims: ‘Derrida’s aim is not to reveal the content of the ghost’s secret, rather he aspires to learn to attend to its mystery, to hear within it the rumbling of what has yet to be understood.’³

It seems to me that it is this kind of spectre – an unknowable, persistent un-presence (as opposed to a ‘presence from the past’) – which is closest to the ghosts found in J-Horror. In Ring, for example, there is a false ending which plays exactly on the audience’s pre-existing understanding that the ghost in a horror story is a problem that can be solved and thus escaped from. At a climactic point in Ring, the central female character, Reiko, is desperately seeking a way to protect her son (Yoichi) from the curse of a malevolent female ghost – Sadako. Reiko and her ex-husband (Ryuji) have successfully uncovered Sadako’s story and ultimately locate her unburied remains (she had been entombed in a well). Having found Sadako’s body and rescued it, both characters and audience believe that the curse will now be lifted and that Yoichi and Ryuji (who is also in danger) must now be saved. However, the following day Ryuji dies (clearly a victim of Sadako) and it is clear that this ghost cannot be stopped or resolved simply by an acknowledgement of past wrongs. In fact it emerges that the curse can only be escaped by being transferred or passed on like a virus to another victim. Sadako’s ghost – or the un-presence that is Sadako – is therefore not a secret to be revealed but is something other, inescapable and unknowable. Intriguingly, like many of the ghosts in this genre, she never speaks and simply creaks and groans (rumbles?) whilst confronting her victims, thus uttering or speaking in a way that cannot be translated.

Equally, in The Grudge, uncovering the identity of the little boy (and his mother) does nothing to release their victims from their terrible, inevitable deaths. Indeed, there is apparently no logical rationale for the selection of the ghosts’ victims (who include police officers, social workers, school girls and a teacher); they simply seem to have necessarily, or accidentally, inhabited the same ‘space’ as the ghosts. This random malevolence is repeated in The Locker, where the girl-ghost is understood to be the manifestation of an abandoned baby (who had been left in the locker to die). Despite the acknowledgement by the students of this tragedy and the enacting of several attempts to resolve it through a quasi-religious ritual – they rebuild a damaged idol and light incense in her memory – she continues to pursue her victims.

Dark Water might at first seem to be the exception here: it does appear that the mother’s ultimate sacrifice (she allows herself to become the mother of the dead, abandoned little girl) serves to protect her actual daughter (Ikuku) from the ghost’s evil intent. However, as the film’s epilogue reveals (when we see, ten years later, Ikuku now a high school pupil, returning by chance to find her mother still living apparently unchanged in the haunted apartment), the ghost has not gone away, rather the mother and the ghost are now in a kind of terrible, melancholy limbo where nothing ever changes, but in which the ghost now has a mother who ‘will never leave her alone again’.

Ghosts as relentless, a-temporal others are also discussed by Bliss Cua Lim in her essay, ‘Spectral Times: the ghost film as historical allegory’. Here she states:

The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles the boundaries of past, present, and future, and cannot be written back to the complacency of a homogenous, empty time.⁴

Cua Lim’s argument, which I build on here, also refers directly to Derrida and suggests that ghosts act as un-presence, disturbing our sense of what is possible, and remain fundamentally untranslatable. Furthermore, she suggests that one of the ways in which this is played out is that the ghost disturbs our (modern) sense of temporality. The ‘empty homogenous time’ she refers to here is the concept of a modern, historical temporality in which events proceed in a linear, teleological manner, allowing for a rational interpretation of events, and thus underpinning and naturalising the ideology of the modern narrative which is committed to presenting as inevitable the idea of development or progress. The time of modernism, therefore, organises a world that is necessarily disenchanted, since both gods and ghosts (who manifest time as eternal or cyclical) cannot be incorporated. Since gods and ghosts cannot be assigned a ‘place in time’ in the time of history, there will necessarily be, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, a tension between the ‘general secular time of history and the singular times of gods and spirits’.⁵ What I am suggesting is that the relentless ghosts of J-Horror are akin to the gods, demons and spirits excluded from the time of history/modernity. Their presence is therefore not simply about the representation or re-emergence of the past in the present, instead their activities, demands and desires actually threaten the apparent coherence or unquestioned naturalness of the now that we understand as the present. This is perhaps particularly pertinent in relation to Japan since its adoption and adaptation to the construction of a historicized time was relatively recent and spectacularly rapid. As Stefan Tanaka observes:

By the end of 1873, the government had completely transformed the calendar. This was a terrific opportunity: not only did it introduce the possibility that the past is old and must be changed, but it reconfigured time markers to shift attention from the spirits and gods to the emperor, the centre of the emerging nation-state.⁶

Like other nation states, Japan adopted a universal, rational mode of time-keeping (moving from a lunar to a solar calendar) so that it could become a recognisably modern nation state, organised and interpreted via a historical, rational and disenchanted time. As Tanaka suggests, it is now difficult to imagine what effects – social, emotional and cultural – this change might have incurred, but is probable that:

The time of the solar calendar was completely alien to the inhabitants, unsettling the knowledge and customs that revolved around the lunar calendar. Those inherited ideas and customs that explained the connection of humans to humans and to the environment now became anachronistic ...The significance of this new time is that it is abstract; it opened up the possibility for the transformation of myriad communities that had somehow coalesced in a ‘Japan’ into a unified nation-state that is rational, scientific, and efficient.⁷

Thus the beliefs, forms of knowledge and rituals associated with pre-modern Japan were effectively reinvented as tradition which, once reified, could become the history of ‘before’. Of course these forms of belief did not disappear – indeed they served to illustrate, in part, what it meant to be Japanese. Yet, since it is firmly located in the past, the concept of tradition also (safely) identified those beliefs and rites as other to the new modernising nation state. The previous ‘heterogeneous worlds of temporalities’ were now confined to one time, and thus to one space, the homogenous and unified nation state. Under this new homogenising temporality it was now possible to track Japan’s development along a linear path from pre-modern, to modern, to post-modern. Japan’s phenomenally successful passage along this trajectory became a fundamental aspect of its national self-identity. Yoda writes:

For over a century the ruling elites of Japan, the nation reputed to be the most successful latecomer to modernity, had been intensely self-conscious about their relation to the West, measuring themselves against the time lag to the dominant Other ...The challenge that Japanese economic advances posed on Eurocentric history and the mapping of the world in other words, was perceived as the nation’s triumph over modernity and over history itself.⁸

Japan’s tremendous economic success after the Second World War was therefore seen as both a challenge to, and in effect a surpassing of, Eurocentric dominance and the modernist narrative of development. Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s was represented by many commentators in Japan and elsewhere as the epitome of the giddy symbolic density and inflated economics of post-modernism. However, by the late 1990s, Yoda points out:

The self-congratulatory exuberance that accompanied the bubble economy and the boom of post-modernism in Japan had fizzled by the mid-1990s, replaced by the debilitating air of anxiety (fuan). The structure of feeling of posthistory has remained, but in the 1990s it became associated with unbearable fragmentation, opacity, and paralysis. Japan in the recessionary decade seemed arrested in the seemingly paradoxical state of unending and entrenched present coexisting with momentous instability.⁹

In this time of anxiety, of paralysis, of an unending, entrenched but threatened present, there is an obvious context in which ghosts – as indicators of other temporalities and as traumatic remainders or reminders – are likely to surface. The question I will next pursue is why, in these films, these ghosts so often manifest as children.

The Modern Child

The category of childhood and the figure of the child are caught up in and enact the ambitions and ideology of modernity in the West and elsewhere. In her book, Strange Dislocations: childhood and the idea of human interiority, 1780–1930. Carolyn Steedman eloquently details how, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the West, the child figure came to represent in a variety of discourses (education, history, psychology, anthropometry and biology) a symbol of both the ‘interiorised self’ and the historicity of the individual. Thus, certain narratives which might be said to characterise modernity – those of the self (psychoanalysis), of the human race (evolution), of the necessity and inevitability of development and progress (history) – could be illustrated by the evidence provided via the apparently natural being and development of the child. The usefulness of children within these forms of discourse necessarily led to an increasing desire to map out and control their apparently natural and universal attributes. Thus, different forms of progressive social policing – such as mass schooling, specialist children’s hospitals, curbs to children’s labour and the development of special societies for the prevention of cruelty to children – might all be understood as ways in which the child and childhood were increasingly distinguished and fixed. As Steedman suggests, this meant that ‘The late nineteenth century fixed childhood, not just as a category of experience, but also as a time-span’.¹⁰

Set apart in terms of time and experience, the child and childhood became paradoxically other to adult human life – childhood was a special, if restricted, time period in which children were different from adults and should be treated accordingly. Yet the child also served as both evidence and ground for the interpretation of everybody’s individual self, in that what happened to you ‘as a child’ determined how you would act and think as an adult. In addition, by mapping out a narrative of progress and a series of developmental milestones for the normal child, it also became possible for the child to act as the personification of development itself, whether this was applied to the individual or the human race. As Stefan Tanaka observes:

Childhood ...becomes a temporal category with specific meanings, a category that cuts across spatial divisions and experiential categories and facilitates the unity of previously disparate categories into a whole. It is seemingly universal because it is tied to the body and ‘experienced’ by everybody (i.e. it is a period through which all adults pass).¹¹

This process identified by Steedman and others as occurring in the West was also adopted in Japan and, as both Tanaka and Andrea Arai attest, was tied sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Tears, Fears and Fairytales and Other Stories of Childhood
• Chapter One Hide and Seek: Children and Ghosts in Contemporary Japanese Film
• Chapter Two Dirty Little White Girls
• Chapter Three Mud and Fairytales: Children in Films about War
• Chapter Four The Impropriety of Performance: Children (and Animals) First
• Notes
• Bibliography