Girl Boss Ex Machina
Halloween Special
Every Shirley Temple movie was a horror film. Shirley Temple Black represented the grotesque Knowing Innocent, the impish trickster, the baby chimera.
As Dali named her, “The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time”
Temple’s direct predecessor, Mary Pickford, was an even more vivid example: a strange “child impersonator” of the silent film era, she was arguably the most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century. Called “the Queen of the movies” and “Our little Mary”.
A fractal of liminality, neither child nor adult, not real nor unreal, innocent and knowing, neither a creature of flesh nor the screen, but something in-between. She began her career playing adolescent roles, but as she grew older, her roles grew younger and increasingly uncanny.
Above she plays Little Lord Fauntleroy, Pickford was nearly 30 at this point. This ability to masquerade as a child made her sexualization “acceptable.” Her roles as an orphan or tomboy, all borderland archetypes, allowed her to behave in ways that might be deemed inappropriate for a young woman.
For the female audience, Pickford’s films were instrumental in normalizing, or modeling, the behaviors of the “New Woman.” But for men, her appeal goes much deeper. Pickford was a simulacrum, a “doll divine”, a shapeshifter with a “Botticelli smile”.
“The people are hungry for this fine and spiritual thing that Botticelli painted in the faces of his muses and heavenly creatures. Because the mob catch the very glimpse of it in Mary's face, they follow her night after night in the films. They are never quite satisfied with the plays, because the managers are not artists enough to know they should sometimes put her into sacred pictures and not have her always the village hoyden, in plays not even hoydenish. But perhaps in this argument I have but betrayed myself as Mary's infatuated partisan.”
—The art of the moving picture by Vachel Lindsay(1915)
As one reviewer declared, Pickford was “so marvelously a child that the truth that she is not a child seems a monstrous fiction.” Modern audiences will often project a “pedophilic gaze” into the performances of Temple and Pickford. At the time, these performances were not viewed through a sexual lens, at least not consciously. Both actresses represented a moral value through a kind of aesthetic superiority, a robust purity that outmaneuvers agents of corruption. Our culture has undergone a paradigm shift, whereas we now understand children to be imperiled by adult predations, childhood innocence once seemed inviolable.
The fame of Pickford and Temple derived from an eroticized consumption of childhood. The eroticized consumption of youth has a long tradition, dating back to the Victorians. These filmic chimeras were tapping a longing for a purity that could blot out the tawdry, smoking, and boozing “New Woman.” It was a “cult of the girl” that mocked the flapper for the inviolable moral superiority of the child-simulacra. This was the Sacred Child that could capture the hearts of grown men, but, for their contemporary audiences, a chaste agape was presumed in the face of a crowned and all-conquering innocence.
That is not to say Hollywood itself was guiltless. Pickford especially was elided by a mechanism of disavowal; a pedophilic audience could be “safely” indulged as she was technically an adult. This child-woman roleplay was extended to publicity portraiture, fan mail, and magazines. Though she was in reality an embodiment of the New Woman—a divorcee and prominent businesswoman with unprecedented control over her creative production—she was able to contort her artefactual body through time, conquering the boundaries of age and sexuality.
