The pessimist's short catechism—"It will get worse, it will get worse, it will get worse"—applies to tennis elbow, OPEC exactions, the seven ages of man, Skylab, the Middle East, airline food, the New Conservatism, college tuition, smog and the length and lack of substance of presidential campaigns. It does not apply to 17-year locusts—they come and they go—or, it is startling to realize, to movies. Just now, for instance, a trend is flowering unexpectedly and delightfully: for some reason that no one even pretends to be able to explain, an unusual number of extremely gifted young women—girls really—are making their presence felt in films.
Typically, these whiz kids were barely in their teens, or even younger, when they started to act. Diane Lane was 13 when she shot her first film, A Little Romance, last year. Mariel Hemingway, 17, who plays Woody Allen's very young lover in Manhattan, was 13 when she began her movie career as the younger sister of the character played by her own sister Margaux in a gaudy and brutal film called Lipstick. Linda Manz, the tough little New York City street kid whose scarred face and back-alley accent gave a saving balance to the prettiness of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, is the oldest of the lot at nearly 18, but she looks the youngest; in the Malick film, shot three years ago, she seems no older than twelve. Brooke Shields, 14, appeared in Alice, Sweet Alice at nine. Tatum O'Neal, who is 15 now, broke into the big time at nine, playing her dead-end father Ryan's dead-end kid in Paper Moon. Some of the roles these child-women have taken are precociously and shockingly erotic, and some are proper and conventional. But whatever they are asked to do, these surprising children and their adventurous directors are showing the camera new ways to look at the young.
It is an unsettling view. An adolescent stumbles through a fog of self-fascination, with no clear view of himself; then, by the time he is grown and has children of his own, a swirl of love and rage occludes his perception of them. Literature offers a useful look, but most often it is a look at that minority of tormented adolescents whose members grow up to write novels about the pain of puberty, not the joy. Films of the traditional sort did not risk truthtelling, largely because of the hoodoo of sex. What they gave us was Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland sipping one soda through two straws. The suggestion that Judy wore a bra, and that Mickey might have wanted to unhook it, would have been so unthinkable that to mention it, even now, seems boorish.
Yet two of the most memorable portrayals in recent films were of twelve-year-old prostitutes, and they were played by girls who really were twelve—Brooke Shields in Louis Malle's misty legend of 1917 New Orleans, Pretty Baby, and Jodie Foster in Martin Scorsese's contemporary shocker, Taxi Driver. Each movie caused a mild outcry, but the general reaction was nervous acceptance. The phenomenon they dealt with was real enough; as Malle took to pointing out, you can hire a twelve-year-old whore any night on Manhattan's Eighth Avenue.