Furor Over 12-Year-Old Actress’s Rape Scene (NYT)
Jan 21st, 2025 by Viviane
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 19 — Dakota Fanning will turn 13 next month, and she has a short answer for anyone who questions her decision to play a 1950s girl who gyrates in her underwear, wakes up as her naked father climbs into her bed, demands that a prepubescent boy expose himself to her in exchange for a kiss and, finally, is raped by a teenager who lures her with tickets to an Elvis concert:
She’s growing up. Get used to it.
Ms. Fanning, best known for leading roles in children’s movies like “Dreamer” and “Charlotte’s Web,” thrillers like “Man on Fire” and “War of the Worlds,” and the horror film “Hide and Seek,” now is starring in “Hounddog,” an independent film that is to have its premiere on Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. It has already won attention far out of proportion to its budget of less than $4 million. (more…)
Would it be too much to ask that we actually see the movie before condemning it? From what I understand, the only thing we see of Dakota during the rape scene is a close up of her face. Then again, I haven’t actually seen the movie so I can’t honestly comment on it. But I do find it very disturbing that so many have chosen to condemn it without knowing the actual facts.
So a question for movies in general - many movies have depicted bad things happening to children, including abuse, neglect, hunger, bullying, murder, etc. Rape may be horrible, but so are these. For example, in Schindler’s List Ralph Fiennes brutally murders children in cold blood onscreen. In Hide in Seek, psyhotic Robert DeNiro murders his wife at the beginning of the movie, then attempts to kill his daughter (portrayed by Dakota Fanning) at the end of the movie. I would think that Dakota’s character in this movie would be just as traumatized by her father attempting to kill her, as her character in Hounddog being raped. But did either Schindler’s List or Hide and Seek spark such an outrage? I don’t think so.
So is it just rape being portrayed in a movie specifically that raises objections, or should anything horrible happening to a child not be depicted in a movie?
“I have to say I have started to feel very sorry for these people who are out to silence this,” the film’s writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, told The Los Angeles Times. “These are really wounded people, just like the characters in the film.”
Couldn’t have said it better.