By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Conflicting Messages About Sex with Teenagers: The Reader vs. Towelhead
I wrote about The Reader in my review last week, but I wanted to delve a little more into what I consider one of the more interesting aspects of this film: that it centers around a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old boy and a woman who’s more than twice his age — and that not a lot of folks seem to have much of a problem with that. In the film, teenage Michael Berg (David Kross) crosses paths with the much older Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) when he gets sick in the entryway of her apartment building. She matter-of-factly cleans him up and sends him home; when he returns to thank her a few months later after recovering from a nasty case of scarlet fever, the two end up falling into a sexual relationship. In the pivotal scene that shifts the tone of their interactions, Michael has gotten covered with coal dust after Hanna sends him down to fill up her coal bucket. Naturally, she needs to clean him up before sending him home, so she has him strip down while she draws a bath; he soaks in the tub for a while, and when he gets up so she can wrap his naked body in a towel, he finds that she is naked too. And one thing leads to another, and so on and so forth.
And really, nobody seems to have much of an issue with this whole aspect of the film. In fact, in reading interview after interview with director Stephen Daldry, the interview questions all seem to focus on much the same things: tell us about how you wanted Winslet first, then thought she couldn’t do it so were going to get Nicole Kidman, but she got preggers so you went back to Winslet; tell us why all these German people in your film speak English with faint German accents (answer: because Kross was cast first, and he doesn’t speak English all that well, and he speaks it with an accent, so everyone else had to match him — which doesn’t explain, really, why not to just let Kross speak German, and have everyone else cast in the film match that, except that apparently someone felt the film would do better at the box office with well-known, English-speakers heading the cast); how do you feel about a bunch of Brits making a film about German guilt? Pretty much the same questions, over and over, and not a lot of addressing the issue of the sexual relationship between a boy and an adult woman at all. You can find a few reviews here and there that make mention of what amounts to statutory rape in the film, but it’s certainly not been a prevalent issue in much of the critical response.
In fact, in one of the few interviews I found that even goes into the issue of sex and The Reader, over at New York Magazine’s Vulture blog , Daldry himself, when asked if he thought the film is “a bit of sexual abuse tale,” responded, in part, “But I don’t honestly think, even in Mr. Schlink’s book, nor in the film, it is a tale of child abuse, although [within] the issues about all the relationships with younger people, there are inevitably elements of control involved in them.” Really? Try telling that to any of a number of older women who have been caught (and prosecuted) for having sexual interactions with teenage lovers. Or to a teenage girl who’s found herself pregnant after having a sexual relationship with an older married man.
Compare this, if you will, to Alan Ball‘s Towelhead, which started out as Nothing is Private once upon a time. That film concerns the sexual awakening of a 13-year-old girl who, in addition to having her first sexual relationship with a boy around her own age, ends up entangled in a relationship with an older neighbor (Aaron Eckhart) that’s at first, dangerously flirtatious, and then ends up with a sexual encounter that becomes the penultimate moment of the film. There was considerable ballyhooing from conservative quarters over the sexual portrayal of a teenage girl in Towelhead, and considerably more critical squirming over that aspect of the film, than anything I’ve seen with regard to The Reader.
The question is, then, why is a sexual relationship between a teen boy and an older woman perceived to be acceptable, but the same relationship between a teen girl and an older man is not? If The Reader had the gender roles flipped, and we were talking about a 15-year-old girl in a controlling sexual relationship with an older man who turned out to be a concentration camp guard, would not there be considerable more talk about that aspect of the film? I think so. And if the older character in the film had been an adult man awakening the homosexual longings of a teenage boy, we’d no doubt be hearing rallying cries from the religious right that would exceed even their histrionic response to Towelhead — a gay male concentration camp guard having sex with a teenage boy in a mainstream, Oscar-contending film? Can you even imagine?
Yes, The Reader is supposed to be much more a film about German guilt over the Holocaust, and the boy Michael having to come to terms with his own feelings of guilt for having loved and been in a relationship with this woman who he really didn’t know at all, who turned out to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Jewish women and children, but the sexual relationship is certainly a big part of that, and intellectualizing the guilt while overlooking the sexual nature of their relationship is, I think, to sell things very short. Underneath that surface, the response to The Reader, and the very lack of any sort of moral brouhaha over the sexual aspects of the story, speaks a great deal to underlying societal issues concerning the sexual nature of teenagers, and when it’s appropriate (or not) for an adult to be involved in the sexual awakening of a young person.
To a certain extent, the relationship between Jasira (Summer Bishil) and Travis (Eckhart) in Towelhead also has an undertone of guilt, though that’s not the fulcrum around with the story revolves; he’s a veteran of the war in Iraq, she is the daughter of a Muslim man (Peter Macdissi) and an American woman (Mario Bello). There’s a certain degree of racial tension underlying the relationship between Jasira and Travis that’s amplified by the fact that she’s a 13-year-old girl and he’s an adult, married man, and many have noted that the scenes between the two are uncomfortable enough to often make the viewer feel like squirming in their seats — particularly their final encounter in the film’s third act. Yet on that level, the sexual scenes between Michael and Hanna are not particularly different on any level; in both films, you have an older adult taking sexual advantage of a sexually awakening but vastly inexperienced child. So what’s the difference in how we respond to them?
Is it more societally acceptable for a boy to get his first sexual experience from an older woman? Look at the prevalence on the internet of the term “MILF,” which started out (so far as I can glean, anyhow) as a term teenage boys used to describe the hot moms of their female friends, and which more than a few female “mommy-bloggers” embraced as a term affirming that, even though they were in their 30s or 40s and had a couple kids, they were still “hot.” I recall when my oldest daughter’s friends first started using that term several years ago, asking her and her friends if there was a parallel term teenage girls used to describe their friend’s fathers, to which the response was pretty universally, “No, gross!”
Even when older women (usually teachers, or the mothers of friends) have become entangled in sexual relationships with teenage boys and end up prosecuted for it, there’s often this sense of “oh, it’s not that bad” that permeates discussion of those situations. I think a good many adult men look at such situations through the rose-colored glasses of teenage nostalgia, thinking to themselves that they wouldn’t have minded, really, having their first introduction to sex be in the experienced hands of an older woman. But if those same men had teenage daughters, would they consider it desirable, or even remotely acceptable, for their virginal female offspring to be deflowered by, say, a male teacher, or the father of a friend, or one of their own adult male friends? Probably not.
None of this is to say that I don’t like The Reader; I actually liked it more than several other Oscar-contending films on the end-of-year slate. Generally, I found it an interesting take on the concept of the guilt a people bear for a horror like the Holocaust, and I appreciate the care both Daldry and screenwriter David Hare took in expressing the sense that things like the Holocaust, or genocide in Rwanda or Uganda or anywhere else, happen not because a particular country has an excessive population of moral monsters, but because ordinary people get caught up in the cogs of a much bigger machine, and our societal morality overall is a constantly shifting balancing act and not something carved in stone, however many people in it may believe in commandments emblazoned on stone tablets. And I get that Daldry wants the focus of The Reader to be on this much larger moral issue than on the smaller, interwoven issue of an inappropriate relationship. But nonetheless, it’s there.
If the gender roles in The Reader were reversed, and an older man offered a 15-year-old girl a hot bath, then wrapped her in a towel while naked himself, and then took her to his bed and took her virginity, I don’t care how much the girl seemed to enjoy the sexual experience, how much she willingly came back for more, how much reading aloud took place before the sex — the sexual nature of the relationship between the characters would be perceived as at least as much, if not more, of an issue as the whole Nazi-guilt angle. The underlying reasons why the sexual portrayal of a teen-adult sexual relationship cause more of a stir in a film like Towelhead than in The Reader, though, are a refraction of our overall societal sexual values and views on gender roles; they say as much about us, perhaps, as they do about the films.
