But I do remember: My thin naked thighs and the humiliating white glow of my panties and my urine turning green the blue water of the toilet bowl and the ice-clinking party sounds of far-away downstairs, and wanting it to be a nothing thing that isn’t happening, here. He is very large, standing in the doorway, and I want to think there is nothing to fear, because, after all, I am in control; I have lured a grown adult man into pursuit of me, away from a party, up a flight of stairs, into standing in a bathroom doorway gazing upon a young girl in an intimate moment. I have driven behavior — see how alluring I am, how powerful?
But I don’t feel powerful; there is no glory in this. The assurance of the moment is not mine, I have no mastery, I am no Beatrice, no precious muse to inspire poetry, or great art, or love. I am a toilet honey, a dirty underwear girl, a crushable cockroach child. This adult man’s. . interest? temptation? depraved appetite? is no comment on me, of course — I am in no way responsible, I’m only a little girl.
But in that moment I can’t know that. I’m only a little girl.
“The finest delicacy New Orleans has to offer!” is Violet, the virgin girl-child being auctioned off in a 1917 whorehouse in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby.15 And good lord, is she delicious, beyond merely pretty, beyond jaw-droppingly beautiful; twelve-year-old Brooke Shields is simply the most exquisite human being I have ever seen. The film begins and ends with a lingering shot of Violet’s face, meant to bookend and illustrate the character’s emotional arc, and while the young actress can’t quite pull off the shifting nuances of Violet’s inner life, that face is mesmerizing. It is a woman’s face, with its thick eyebrows and cleft chin and photogenic bone structure (young Elizabeth Taylor rocked her child face the same way), but it is the combination of that seemingly mature façade with the vacuous inscrutability of Shields’s expression that both disturbs and delights: This child (Violet or Brooke?) is still a blank slate, we can project and imprint anything onto her we might like, and that is exactly what the men attending this whorehouse auction — and we, the audience, as witnesses to it — are being invited to do. The inner-life of this child (Violet or Brooke?) is irrelevant; it is the experience she can create for us that raises her price, commands our interest.
And Violet has been well trained to do this, by the brothel girls who coach her on how to play her role (whimper and cry, then act as if it feels good) and especially by her mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon), who uses her still-virgin daughter as a lure to arouse her own customers, “inviting” her into the bedroom to stand and watch. Keith Carradine enters the story as Bellocq, a photographer hoping to capture on film the madonna/whore quality Sarandon so gorgeously exemplifies — and he is so fascinated by — and his gentle attentions to her mother inspire a jealous Violet to try out her skills of seduction; initially, her childish flirtations come off as mere brattiness. But by her big Auction Night — where she is brought in to customers, displayed on a platter like a roast pig — she has become a pro; handed over to the stone-faced man who has paid a small fortune for her, she knows exactly how to deliver her lines:
VIOLET
I’m glad it’s you. . you look nice. I can feel the steam inside me, right through my dress. .
We cut away from the actual scene, to the other prostitutes waiting for it to be over; we hear Violet scream, but when we all rush in together to check on her, she laughs off the obvious trauma of the experience, affects a matter-of-fact detachment. This is her destiny, after all, the role she was born to play; no reason to make any fuss.
But Bellocq, whose fascination has shifted from Hattie to her little girl, doesn’t want whoredom to be Violet’s destiny — at least, not as a commodity available to other men. Hattie scores a marriage proposal from a customer and abandons her daughter; Violet runs away to Bellocq, pleading to live with him:
VIOLET
And will you sleep with me, and take care of me?
BELLOCQ
No. .
VIOLET
Why not?
BELLOCQ
’Cause. . ’cause I’m not sure why, actually. .
VIOLET
You’re afraid of me!
BELLOCQ
Perhaps. .
Give him some credit for being conflicted, I suppose. She pushes him down on the bed, climbs on top of him — again, the illusion of control, this little girl overpowering this adult man:
VIOLET
I want you to be my lover! And buy me stockings and clothes.
BELLOCQ
You don’t know what you’re saying, Violet.
VIOLET
I won’t even charge you anything at all. . I know those things better than you. You always know those things about men when you’re a woman.
BELLOCQ
Some men are different. I’m different. Well, maybe not after all. . I’m all yours, Violet.
And so, he gives in to this temptress. She kisses and caresses him, recites her dialogue:
VIOLET
I’m going to make you so happy! You’re just my kind of man. You really are. I’m really good you know, cheri—
BELLOCQ
Don’t talk to me like that! Please! Don’t talk like a whore!
He will refashion her as the innocent maiden he wishes her to be — or whatever he wishes her to be. He gets her a maid, so she can play the lady of leisure; he buys her a doll, “Because every child should have a doll”; he slaps her when he is “tired of having to deal with a child!”; he photographs her alluringly naked and posed Sandy-like on a divan; he ultimately marries her, making her at last all his. Are they daddy and daughter, husband and wife, artist and muse? She will be anything he wants — he has “safely solipsized” her, as Nabokov’s Humbert boasts of his Lolita — and that’s the point. When Hattie returns with her now-husband, who wants Violet to come live with them, go to school, lead the life of a normal little girl, Bellocq is devastated—“You cannot take her! I cannot live without her!”—but even more so when Violet so cavalierly shrugs him off (that emotional mutability and detachment have become her nature), chooses to leave with her mother; that final shot is this new nuclear family at the train station, Violet’s new “daddy” posing his wife and new “daughter” for a photo, Violet’s exquisite, inscrutable face — is she wondering who or what she is supposed to be now?