Strange Pleasures: Little Children
Strange Pleasures: Little Children
By Beatrice Loayza
This is the inaugural essay of Strange Pleasures, a regular column in which writer Beatrice Loayza shares unconventional desires found across underground and mainstream cinema alike.
Beatrice Loayza
It’s telling that Todd Field’s 2006 film Little Children begins with a presentation of the décor: the faces of several ornate clocks staring back at the camera, confrontationally; then, a tiered shelf full of tchotchkes—the titular little children as miniature porcelain figurines in darling caps and suspenders. The film, Field’s second, belongs squarely to a sub-genre of American cinema about the deceptive veneers of suburbia, which as a rule cultivate “bad” behavior. In the world of Little Children, one can easily imagine a Rock Hudson-type gardener romancing the wealthy widow; a Mrs. Robinson wooing the recent alum; an upstanding vet harboring Nazi paraphernalia in his home office’s étagère.
The dramas of Little Children are similarly scandalous: stay-at-home parents Brad (Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet) enjoy a hot summertime affair; a pedophile newly released from prison struggles to suppress his urges; a flailing ex-cop, desperate to rebuild his image, terrorizes said pedophile and his geriatric mother. It’s a stereotypically “dark” portrait of the American dream, which explains the film’s popular appeal—great drama and intrigue within the banal strictures of middle-class existence. But there’s something more specific that draws me back to Field’s film time and time again.
Adapted from the novel by Tom Perrota (who co-wrote the screenplay with Field), the film unfolds with the kind of hyper-seriousness that bends back on itself, its stately voiceover narration lending a certain heft to events that, given such dignified treatment, often register as absurd. In the tradition of the classic Hollywood melodrama à la Sirk, sincerity and satire coalesce. Then add a bit of trashiness: Brad and Sarah, butt-naked and fucking in the washroom; a women’s book club discussion of Madame Bovary intercut with images of Sarah’s fleshly abandon. It’s an airport novel of a film, with literary overtones and a vulgar literal-mindedness—Sarah is no ordinary suburban mother, announces the narrator, she’s got an English masters and fills the endless hours at home with her readings; himbo Brad, emasculated by his breadwinning wife and his repeated failure of the bar exam, would rather relive his quarterback days and dream about skateboarding, should there be any question about the (fragile) state of his ego.
Funny, given TÁR’s (2022) relationship to cancel culture, that Field should structure his work around the urgency of an inevitable “time’s up!”
In In the Bedroom, Field’s 2001 feature debut, it’s only a matter of time before a murderous ex-husband destroys Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson’s happy couple, and when Wilkinson’s aggrieved father exacts his revenge, he can’t wait—he shoots his son’s killer dead earlier than planned. In Field’s latest, Cate Blanchett’s conductor Lydia Tár is haunted by a ticking metronome, its pulse assuming the paranoic momentum of a time bomb. Funny, given TÁR’s (2022) relationship to cancel culture, that Field should structure his work around the urgency of an inevitable “time’s up!” Little Children is no exception, its various storylines presided over by the inevitability of a reckoning, thus its page-turner pleasures. Field’s three films form something of a triptych plumbing distinctly American mythologies of individualism: In the Bedroom, about the pathological need for justice; TÁR, about the delusions of the meritocracy; Little Children, about the paradoxes of bourgeois desire.
In a brief aside, the film’s omniscient narrator turns his attention to Sarah’s checked-out husband, Richard (Gregg Edelman), whose only passion in life is the internet porn star Slutty Kay (Sarah Buxton). Passion isn’t common—or at least not in the kind of suburban bubbles the characters of Little Children inhabit. Bourgeois fulfillment—the spouse and kids, the massive home with the yard—is a matter of embracing the pleasures of relativism.
Little Children (2006)
If divine glory or universal renown is beyond reach, more achievable are the comforts of stability. With a tempering of expectations, with desires conformed, satisfaction can be realized; hunger, sated. No wonder that Richard is driven wild by Slutty Kay. For him, the ache is irresistible; the “hunger for an alternative,” to use Sarah’s reading of Madame Bovary, a sign of life. But such yearning is automatically limned with tragedy: Slutty Kay exists merely as an image, suspending Richard in a state of unquenchable desire. Looking but not touching, like the pedophile, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), taking a dip in the public pool and admiring the chubby legs of floating children, or Sarah, contemplating a photograph of shirtless Brad that she keeps tucked in a book of poetry. It’s not just about the impossibility of materializing the fantasy, but of denying that it exists in the first place—one must consider the little children.
Predictably, Little Children was a great favorite of mine as a teenager in the suburbs of Washington, DC, its sweaty sensuality playing out against a recognizable backdrop of babysitting and nap-time and evening power walks along sleepy McMansion-lined residential roads. The difficulty of consummation, the thrill of sneaking around is, after all, an intrinsic part of adolescent sexuality, or at least for the cloistered among us.
Today, more beguiling to me are the film’s surface details, its objects: the jester’s hat worn by Brad’s son; the snorkel and goggles that Ronnie uses to swim, like the world’s most impotent Jaws-like predator. Then there’s that bathing suit; remembering that the “Prom King,” as the other mothers in the playground have dubbed Brad, frequents the public pool daily, Sarah flips through a catalogue and purchases a red halter-style one-piece, a tummy-tucking model that she decisively orders one size down. She wears it all summer, performing the possibility of another version of herself—the fictional her contained in her books, the one who skips town with her lover and doesn’t chicken out. Similarly, Lydia Tár used to be Linda from Staten Island but now she’s someone else—her Berlin apartment, slick with Euro-cosmopolitanism, her worldly wisdom apparent in her “third-world” engagements. Has she rejected her true self or refused to settle? Will Sarah retire the one-piece or hold it tight?
Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to The New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Artforum, 4Columns, and other publications.
Little Children (2006)
