Natalie Portman, at 13, experienced ‘sexual terrorism’
I can’t write much about this only that it really hit me hard and that I think it’s really an important time to listen and to admit that it raises really tough confusing issues for me. (I try to keep telling myself it’s not about me, but I’m all I have.)
This is essentially what Natalie Portman said yesterday.
Portman remembered turning 12 on the set of “Léon: The Professional.” It was her first film. She played a young girl who befriended a hit man in hopes of avenging the murder of her parents, she said.
A year later, when the movie was released, she opened her first fan letter. It was a “rape fantasy” from a man.
“A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday — euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with,” she said. “Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews. I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually I would feel unsafe and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort.”
Portman said she adjusted her behavior, rejected roles with kissing scenes and emphasized her “bookish and serious” side. She built a reputation as a “prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious” young woman in order to feel her body was safe and her voice heard.
“At 13 years old, the message from our culture was clear to me,” she said. “I felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit my expression and my work in order to send my own message to the world that I’m someone worthy of safety and respect. The response to my expression, from small comments about my body to more threatening deliberate statements, served to control my behavior through an environment of sexual terrorism.”
This is all horrible and it all definitely happened. The only x number of years until she’s legal jokes have always been widespread and sickening, but here’s an admission and I hope that Portman talks about it more someday.
I didn’t discover Portman in The Professional. I discovered her in the movie she played a couple years later Beautiful Girls. Now clearly she was 15 and if she regrets doing this movie I feel really sad, but the movie addresses exactly that issue and does it really tenderly.
She plays a 13 year old girl from Massachusetts named Marty who is in love with a character played by Timothy Hutton, whose character is 29 at the time. She is absolutely irresistible in this movie.
I’ve never read or seen a version of Lolita by Nabakov and the whole thing has always sounded a little sick to me, but Natalie Portman was so good in this movie that she makes you think that if you were Timothy Hutton that you would wait for her, because she is incredible and smart and funny. She isn’t sexualized at all – all of her scenes she is bundled up in winter’s clothing.
Also this was written by a man and it is I suppose a male fantasy. I found some comments from Portman from 2007 when she was 26 about it.
In 2007, Portman talked to this paper’s Simon Hattenstone about the effect on her life of playing Marty in Beautiful Girls and the very similar Mathilda in Léon in 1994. It made for uncomfortable reading.
I’m trying to think of a sensitive way to ask about playing all these sexualized children, but fail miserably. “Were you aware that you were a pedophile’s dream?” I blurt out. She nods. “Yeah!” She giggles, perhaps a little uncomfortably. “It was weird, and it dictated a lot of my choices afterwards ‘cos it scared me.” How did she become aware of it? “When you’re a little kid you get really excited about it and you think being famous is pretty cool, and you get a fan letter and you read it, and then I’d be, like, ‘Eeeeeugh!’ Terrified.” What did the letters say? “You can imagine. I stopped reading them obviously, but it made me really reluctant to do sexy stuff, especially when I was young.”
Of Beautiful Girls, she said: “It definitely made me shy away from that kind of role. And there’s a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealized purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one.”
So clearly in 2007 she was being polite and the effects on her were even worse than she said at that time, but that performance in that movie is incredible and I don’t know any other actress in history that could have done that role.
Molly Ringwald was similarly spectacular in 16 Candles which hasn’t aged well, except for her performance.
The history of child performers in Hollywood is an ugly one. Most end up a mess. I don’t know the solution to it. Some children like Tatum O’Neil and Corey Haim were incredible in their onscreen debuts but Hollywood was a horrible place for them. Drew Barrymore was a mess at 13, but has seemed to have survived and flourished.
Maybe all child roles should end in movies, especially ones that deal with sexual issues, but I personally love those type of movies because they remind me of how tough it was for me growing up and how shy and behind physically and sexually I was and how much I was dying to fall in love with someone.
Clearly, a guy sending a 13 year old girl a rape fantasy is sick, but am I complicit for falling in love with Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls? I just have no answers. I guess it is a time to listen and discuss and hopefully things will get better. The whole thing makes me sad. Art is awesome, but they are only movies. Actual human lives are more important.
Good sensitive movies about their teen years can help teens get through those important times, but at what cost?
Hopefully, everybody makes their own films and the good one’s thrive, and people especially young women stop being hurt, but I always thought that Natalie Portman was the best case scenario. If she was scarred then everybody needs to reevaluate. Time to listen.
