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rachelmanija Feb. 1st, 2023 09:22 am)
rachelmanija Feb. 1st, 2023 09:22 am)These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven't told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.
A memoir in the form of six essays on various aspects of memory, trauma, and the body, very well-written. Polley was a Canadian child actor who grew up to be a director, a mother, and a political activist. You don't need to be at all familiar with Sarah Polley's other work to read this; she explains all the necessary context. It works well as a whole and should be read in order, but I did have specific essays that were my favorites.
I listened to this on audio, read by Polley, and I recommend that. She's an unsurprisingly excellent reader, does voices for characters, and made me laugh out loud at the two essays that have funny scenes - probably not coincidentally, those were two of my three favorites, "High Risk" (about the her high-risk pregnancy with her first child) and "Run Towards the Danger" (about a concussion and her recovery from it.) The third was "Mad Genius," about her hellish experience acting in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as a child.
"Mad Genius" is harrowing on so many levels. Polley was nine when she acted in the movie. She worked for twelve or thirteen hours a day - why is that unacceptable for a child in a factory, but fine if it's a movie set? She was put in some situations that were genuinely dangerous, and some that maybe weren't but terrified her, and no way to tell the difference. (I kept thinking of the three child actors who were killed on the set of The Twilight Zone - the Movie with no consequences to those who were responsible.) She had to act when she was sick.
And all of this in service to the genius of Terry Gilliam, who not only gets away with exploiting and endangering a child because he's a genius, but who is seen as even more of a genius the more irrational and childish he acts. As Polley points out, this only works for white men. Women and people of color who act like lunatics on the set and are awful to their crew get immediately drummed out of the business. You don't have to be an enormous asshole to make art, so why do we elevate white male assholes above literally everyone else?
But the essay doesn't stop with the expose. It goes on to interrogate Polley's memories, her tendency to placate people who abused her, and the way her understanding of what happened and what it meant changed over time. This is typical of the essays in this intense, fiercely intelligent book. Polley is very willing to dig deep into events and their meanings; I kept thinking an essay was over, only for her to go further or look at the event from another angle.
It convinced me that child labor is illegal for a reason and the entertainment industry shouldn't be an exception. Polley says that the only two former child actors she knows who weren't drastically fucked up by the experience came from such abusive homes that being in an exploitative work environment was actually an improvement, and I believe her. I'm no longer convinced that the artistic benefit of movies, television, and films to have children in them is worth the harm done to the actual children doing the labor.
Her account of being famous as a child had weird resonance for me. I was famous as a child within an extremely small in-group, and had several of the same bizarre experiences, such as adults angrily telling me that they met me as a child fifteen years ago and I was rude to them.
But the book isn't all darkness. Her accounts of becoming a parent and remembering her mother are very beautiful and loving, and some essays have some extremely funny scenes. Unexpectedly, "High Risk" is the funniest. I literally burst out laughing at her account of a roomful of angry, hungry expectant mothers with gestational diabetes going berserk on a hapless nutritionist.
I recommend this memoir if you're interested in trauma and memory, parent-child relationships, mind-body issues, and/or the darker side of the entertainment industry.
Content notes: Exploitative and dangerous child labor as an actor, mother dies of cancer, lots of medical trauma, a miscarriage, a high-risk pregnancy (but her baby is fine!), rape (in "The Woman Who Stayed Silent"), abuse of women by the legal system.
A memoir in the form of six essays on various aspects of memory, trauma, and the body, very well-written. Polley was a Canadian child actor who grew up to be a director, a mother, and a political activist. You don't need to be at all familiar with Sarah Polley's other work to read this; she explains all the necessary context. It works well as a whole and should be read in order, but I did have specific essays that were my favorites.
I listened to this on audio, read by Polley, and I recommend that. She's an unsurprisingly excellent reader, does voices for characters, and made me laugh out loud at the two essays that have funny scenes - probably not coincidentally, those were two of my three favorites, "High Risk" (about the her high-risk pregnancy with her first child) and "Run Towards the Danger" (about a concussion and her recovery from it.) The third was "Mad Genius," about her hellish experience acting in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as a child.
"Mad Genius" is harrowing on so many levels. Polley was nine when she acted in the movie. She worked for twelve or thirteen hours a day - why is that unacceptable for a child in a factory, but fine if it's a movie set? She was put in some situations that were genuinely dangerous, and some that maybe weren't but terrified her, and no way to tell the difference. (I kept thinking of the three child actors who were killed on the set of The Twilight Zone - the Movie with no consequences to those who were responsible.) She had to act when she was sick.
And all of this in service to the genius of Terry Gilliam, who not only gets away with exploiting and endangering a child because he's a genius, but who is seen as even more of a genius the more irrational and childish he acts. As Polley points out, this only works for white men. Women and people of color who act like lunatics on the set and are awful to their crew get immediately drummed out of the business. You don't have to be an enormous asshole to make art, so why do we elevate white male assholes above literally everyone else?
But the essay doesn't stop with the expose. It goes on to interrogate Polley's memories, her tendency to placate people who abused her, and the way her understanding of what happened and what it meant changed over time. This is typical of the essays in this intense, fiercely intelligent book. Polley is very willing to dig deep into events and their meanings; I kept thinking an essay was over, only for her to go further or look at the event from another angle.
It convinced me that child labor is illegal for a reason and the entertainment industry shouldn't be an exception. Polley says that the only two former child actors she knows who weren't drastically fucked up by the experience came from such abusive homes that being in an exploitative work environment was actually an improvement, and I believe her. I'm no longer convinced that the artistic benefit of movies, television, and films to have children in them is worth the harm done to the actual children doing the labor.
Her account of being famous as a child had weird resonance for me. I was famous as a child within an extremely small in-group, and had several of the same bizarre experiences, such as adults angrily telling me that they met me as a child fifteen years ago and I was rude to them.
But the book isn't all darkness. Her accounts of becoming a parent and remembering her mother are very beautiful and loving, and some essays have some extremely funny scenes. Unexpectedly, "High Risk" is the funniest. I literally burst out laughing at her account of a roomful of angry, hungry expectant mothers with gestational diabetes going berserk on a hapless nutritionist.
I recommend this memoir if you're interested in trauma and memory, parent-child relationships, mind-body issues, and/or the darker side of the entertainment industry.
Content notes: Exploitative and dangerous child labor as an actor, mother dies of cancer, lots of medical trauma, a miscarriage, a high-risk pregnancy (but her baby is fine!), rape (in "The Woman Who Stayed Silent"), abuse of women by the legal system.
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And there's also an article/interview with her on it: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/30/sarah-polley-interview-memoir
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How could any of these adults do this to a child...
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I have heard that it was once considered normal for local directors to hit child actresses if they thought the children didn't perform to their satisfaction. I wish that it was only a rumour, but sadly it's easy for abuse to happen when everyone only cares about the bottomline.
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Train of thought from this:
"I wonder if it would be possible to make it not exploitative?"
"Hmmm, that would probably involve a lot of rules around the hours they can be required to work, and safeguards put in place when doing certain kinds of scenes, and people just changing their behavior around the culture of filmmaking in general . . ."
". . . all of which might be good for actors in general, regardless of age."
Alas, probably none of that will happen.
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Even with safeguards, there's still the problem that we do not consider children able to meaningfully consent nor for it to be appropriate for them to work in almost any other circumstance.
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I think one of the big problems is a segment of the society tries to glorify Assholes (like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Silicon Valley is full of them) who go out of their way to be assholes to workers -- the more vulnerable the worse it gets, and who's more vulnerable than a child -- and it wouldn't be forgiven in most people, but is forgiven in men of certain type who sell the Eccentric Genius label. Although definitely not always men, and not always white.
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It wouldn't be legal for an eight-year-old to be hired as a regular employee on a huge commercial farm or in a factory, which is closer to the situation with children working on movies and television.
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I'm just saying that I could meaningfully consent as a child to work -- in certain scenarios. But I'm not sure the scenarios that she was involved in would be really "okay" even for an adult (e.g. when she thinks her harness broke but it's only a rip in the dress), or the situation with the horse -- and the adults around her preyed on the fact she wouldn't complain.
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With professional child actors who are, say, eight or older, you can direct them basically the same way you'd direct an adult. You've probably seen kids acting in school plays and other not-for-profit theatre which is for the kids' own benefit and which is totally fine, IMO - if they're old enough, you direct them the way you'd direct anyone. Under eight, and you're basically herding them around the stage. That's why we didn't let kids actually act onstage in the Virginia Avenue Project (for not-Yoons: a not-for-profit theatre mentoring program I was involved in for many years) until they were eight, though they could take classes and workshops when they were younger. They didn't have the emotional maturity, attention span, and cognitive level to be able to do the sort of theatre we were doing until they were a bit older.
So for very young children, or even pre-teens who aren't professional actors, getting them to act is basically leading them through the scenes. You give them their lines and actions, and say, "You're feeling very sad. What would make you sad?" They say "Not getting dessert." And you say, "Okay, walk slowly to that tree, pretending that you just found out you're not getting dessert tonight."
But sometimes imagination isn't enough. In those cases, you want to get a genuine emotional reaction. For a non-horrible example, in the movie The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the director didn't let the child actress playing Lucy on to the Narnia set until they actually shot it. When she sees Narnia for the first time, she really is seeing it for the first time; her expression of amazement and delight is real.
Obviously, this sort of thing can also go in horrific directions. When 11-year-old Sarah Polley's mother died in real life, they wrote in all this stuff about her grieving her long-dead mother into the show she was on.
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When 11-year-old Sarah Polley's mother died in real life, they wrote in all this stuff about her grieving her long-dead mother into the show she was on.
!!!!! Holy paragliding Shinjo, that's terrible. :(
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I know I'm blown away when I want to then read all the essays and write essays myself. She's a screenwriter as well, as you probably know given she's been nominated for best adapted screenplay for Women Talking.
I bet she'd be a great narrator.
I hope she writes more essays, in time.
With the book's publication, the Jian Ghomeshi essay got a lot of attention here, because he was in the news so much. It's a hard read but that essay (like the others) is really well done.
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Fuck Jian Ghomeshi. Her essay is an extremely good explanation of a lot of issues surrounding rape and the legal system, but seriously, fuck that guy. I got interviewed by him once and found him extremely charming. Luckily for me, it was done long-distance so I had no other contact with him, because if he'd invited me over to his place, I'd probably have gone.
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I actually really liked him as a host of the Radio program, and I was incredibly conflicted about the trial case because of it.
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aw fuck. I loved that movie and I especially loved her performance. Finding out this is how it was produced makes me feel ill.
I am making a note of this book.
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The general argument with regards to representation that has arisen with groups of children who are already mostly represented by animals etc has not held this; particularly as it would be in contrast to another group being clearly represented by and as human.
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I mean my cousins were child actors and did not experience any of this; I know others who similarly did not, one of whom who gets quite angry at people who insist that she must secretly have, Because Everyone Does. I don’t know of any robust study of experiences and outcomes, so I can’t speak more authoritatively one way or the other.
There is certainly a pervasive Hollywood BS that will allow those with the most social power to flaunt the rules to the harm of those on set, across the board; I think by and large the entire industry is like hanging out with bears and hoping you don’t get mauled. It’s a huge problem and people die of it regularly. I don’t claim to have a broad answer; I’m just alert to the fact that cutting an entire demographic out of being realistically repeated by other human beings of their identifiable type in one of our major storytelling arenas (well, multiple really, as it would also apply to TV and targeted TV and…) is likely to have some broad impacts.
ETA: Nnn - actually, I revise somewhat: as someone actively working in the fields of early literacy and also the development of social skills and self-regulation etc, there is a significant measurable difference in what children derive on these issues when shown actual photographic renderings of actual other humans (ie: children, who look REAL, and like them) in terms of using books or video as teaching material, vs pictographic or even computer illustrated material. This is why Scholastic has a billion photo books about Feelings and Sharing and Actions and other contexts we use for kids in that context.
This does not definitively state that representation in symbolic form is not going to be good for all the other things we want representation for, but it is a thing we know, and is suggestive about what the overall majority of children derive from actual life-like recording of Other Children, vs artistic rendering.
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