MISS JEAN BRODIE
Little girls! I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders. And all my girls are the crème de la crème! Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!
And those unformed little girls, pudgy or scrawny, spotty or velvet-cheeked, with their unfortunate juvenile haircuts and baggy school uniforms, gaze at her adoringly, fully under her spell. I adore her, too — whatever the crème de la crème is, it is obviously the best thing to be. Miss Brodie offers a secret knowledge beyond spelling and geography and math; she seeks to illuminate “all the possibilities of life,” of art and poetry and love, to her girls, “to provide you with interests!” she promises, to nurture their natural proclivities for romantic passion, above all else, and I am eager to be privy to these teachings — even if I don’t understand everything that is happening in this movie, Miss Brodie’s destructive emotional manipulations, or the intricacies of academic politics. I am almost jealous of the special attention Miss Brodie pays to her four favorites — Jenny, Sandy, Monica, and Mary — especially Jenny, whom Miss Brodie deems prettiest, the one who “could be magnificently elevated above the ordinary realm of lovers,” the girl most destined to be famous, one day, she says dreamily, “for sex.” I do not understand what being famous for sex could possibly mean, only that it is, like being the best crème, clearly the thing to aspire to, and so I am determined to pay extra good attention that I might learn.
Miss Brodie has recently ended a love affair with Teddy Lloyd, the art teacher with a wife and a flock of children; their once-glorious time together has turned prosaic, lost its idealized sheen, and while he is in despair at losing her, he doesn’t hesitate to call her out: “The truth is, Jean, you bounced into bed with an artist, but you were horrified when you woke up with a man!” Miss Brodie is not done with him, however; she sees an opportunity, in pretty-but-bland young Jenny, to create a romantic scenario, a Dante-and-Beatrice-esque love affair between the fortyish Teddy and the budding teen, a relationship that will rejuvenate and reinspire an older man to greatness and awaken the young girl to the glory of sexual maturity. And so, over the next few years, she grooms the clueless Jenny to replace her in Teddy’s bed.
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 in 1976, 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.11 But 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: