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.
Foster embodies that intriguing juxtaposition just as charismatically in Bugsy Malone, yet there is a reverse dynamic at play; in Alan Parker’s bizarro-world parody of 1920s gangster films, all roles are played by child actors (their tommy guns shoot cream-pie “bullets”), running around in 1920s adult costumes and talking like Jimmy Cagney and Jean Harlow.12 Foster plays Tallulah, the shimmery, smoky-eyed, speakeasy chanteuse; she is a little girl meant to “pass” as an adult woman, her youth is meant to be entirely obscured rather than exploited, and yet that is still the wink-wink conceit of the film: Look at this child in the dress of a grown-up gangster moll! I am as fascinated by Tallulah as I was by Iris, and there is no creepy Keitel-threat to discomfit me here, no too-graphic sexualizing of Foster’s youthful beauty — but she is still suggestively erotic in a way that enthralls me. In her big number, Tallulah slinks around the club in her satin gown, singing oh-so-knowingly and world-wise:
TALLULAH
Lonely. . you don’t have to be lonely. .
Come and see Tallulah
We can chase your troubles away. .
When they talk about Tallulah,
you know what they say:
No one south of heaven’s
gonna treat you finer.
Tallulah had her training
in North Carolina. . 13
She drains a cocktail, she perches on a table and strokes her fingers down male patrons’ faces and slides hankies from their breast pockets, and all the “men” present (who seem all the more boyish in contrast to Foster’s innate maturity) are clearly in thrall to her, too. She is the crème de la crème of the speakeasy, the leading lady and star of the show, of this whole movie, for me. I am just as beguiled by Sandy and Iris and Tallulah as all those men are, but I want to be these child-women. I want what they have; I want to capture and channel and emulate their satiny female mastery of the world. I am beginning to understand, I think, being famous for sex—and, thanks to these cinematic Lolitas, I have determined that power lies in being an innocent little girl with the empowered sexual assurance of a grown woman.
Thank Heaven. . for little girls!
Those little eyes, so helpless and appealing. .!
— Maurice Chevalier in Gigi14
It is later in that same Iris-and-Tallulah year, I am still twelve years old, and I am sitting on the toilet, peeing, my white cotton panties at my feet. There’s a party downstairs — family, friends, very festive — here in my grandparents’ house, and I’ve chosen the upstairs master bathroom to considerately leave the downstairs one for guests. And because it is secluded, I haven’t bothered to lock the door. There is a knock, but not much of one — enough that I stop peeing, startled — and the door immediately opens, and my cousin Morris is standing there. He is a cousin by marriage, some lineage through my grandmother’s many siblings I can never keep straight; he is fiftyish, a leisure suit, a graying pompadour. He puts on a show of startled—“Oh, sorry, didn’t know you were up here, honey. .”—but then lounges in the doorway, studying me, an appreciative smile on his face, while I mumble something like “Oh, that’s all right.” I even apologize, perhaps, for being there. I am frozen, I am sitting on the toilet, staring at my white cotton panties at my feet. I have never liked this cousin Morris — too huggy, too kissy, too much honey—and I am unsure what to do; he is not the candy-offering, trench-coated stranger in the dark alley I have been warned about, he is doing nothing wrong, really, not advancing on me, nothing like Teddy’s initial grab-and-kiss assault on Sandy, nothing more wrong than the rudeness at walking in on someone in the bathroom and not immediately retreating. As one should. I can’t call for “help”—help for what? What can happen? He is just standing there in the doorway, smiling and studying me. He is a cousin, he is male, he is the adult, the adult male. He finally leaves after a frozen forever, and I pull up my panties, I flush, I wash my hands and count to ten and hurry downstairs, where I hug the wall at the opposite side of the room for the rest of the evening, and tell no one, because: tell what? It is a minor incident, a nothing happened; it is a ridiculously trivial thing to remember, after all these years.