I literally haven’t posted in ages but someone mentioned Hard Candy so HERE THE FUCK I AM. It is my favorite movie. Of all time. It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The acting, the writing, the direction, the cinematography, it’s all stunning.
I first watched it when I was a fourteen year old girl, the same age as Elliot Page’s character in the film, and I was disturbed certainly, it’s a disturbing story, but it’s also the story that most single handedly made me a feminist.
I, like a lot of girls at the time, eschewed the label of “feminist.”
“Oh I believe in rights for women but I’m not a feminist.”
Like it was a dirty word. We were taught culturally that it was a dirty word . Feminists were crossing a line. They were annoying. They were queer. They were gender nonconformist. They lived outside of the expectations for girls and women. They did not play the game of wanting to be wanted by men, of existing for male excitement. Feminists weren’t hot. And even as a young teenager I knew that to be a woman and not be hot, not be wanted by men, was to live in absence of a very specific kind of power and acceptance.
I watched Hard Candy on a whim. I had just seen Elliot Page in Juno and I was crazy gay for him (though denying this at the time) and picked up Hard Candy at a local dvd resale store because I saw he was in it.
For context, I grew up on Law and Order SVU — SVU specifically. From an inappropriately young age it was one of my favorite shows. And as much as I think SVU can get the trauma of rape and assault right, being a child aware of what a constant threat sexual violence against women and girls was fucked me up. Rape has been one of my biggest fears from the time I was ten. It still is.
And here was this movie that put the power in the hands of the teenage girl who was so at risk for abuse. The movie starts out and you think you know where it’s going. Man lures young girl he met online to coffee shop. Man makes girl feel older and mature. Man takes girl home to his apartment.
Sitting there, a high school freshman in my living room on a Saturday night, I was waiting for the turn, for the teenage girl to become the teenage victim. Then when the turn finally came it was like I could suddenly breathe again. A grown man exposed for his indecency by underestimating a teenage girl, that girl lecturing a grown man on his predatory behaviors, a teenage girl refusing to be played with or manipulated, one who takes matters into her own hands because no one else has.
So many moments in that movie were utterly formative for me.
And almost every man in my life who watched it could not understand the poignance of it. They absolutely felt Elliot Page played the villain. Sure, Jeff did some bad things, but he didn’t deserve what he got! That girl was psycho! She’s crazy! And I played along with this, talking at great lengths about how the ambiguous morality of the film was ground breaking and how it was really about vigilante justice. I wanted so badly to prove it was the art I knew it was. Why wasn’t it being heralded as a seminal psychological thriller like Memento and Se7en? It impacted me more than either of those films.
It’s not even a particularly violent film! There isn’t any gore! There are some blurry shots of a surgery, but no real blood, no graphic brutality. David Slade, who frankly should be a more acclaimed director than he is, intentionally shot close ups of the actors faces during these intense and disturbing scenes. He focused on the emotion and the performance. He didn’t want to show the violence of it, but rather the mental game and the psychological impact of that violence. And yet men cannot get through this movie without wanting to throw up.
Do you know how many horrific and lengthy rape scenes I’ve watched? How many dead women with mutilated bodies I’ve seen larger than life on movie screens? Horror and mystery are my favorite genres. I have to look up the content warnings for every fucking horror film I wanna watch to prepare myself for potential triggers. And cis white men, self proclaimed film aficionados, can’t handle the SUGGESTION of serious violence being done to another cis white man on screen. Then it becomes too out there. Too gratuitous. Too fringe to be anything but a controversial indie flick relegated to the bargain bin at second hand dvd shops.
The refusal to acknowledge the brilliance of Hard Candy as both a work of art and a cinematic statement infuriates me. I sigh everytime someone asks me what my favorite movie is, waiting for the uncomfortable look I’ll get. Hard Candy is a disturbing movie because of its subject matter and it’s frank discussion of pedophilia and sexual abuse. But the character of Hayley Stark, a 14 year old girl who takes back symbolic agency for women and young girls as a whole, who gets revenge on a sexually violent predator, is 100% a sympathetic character. She is a part of me. I feel her rage and I feel her unspoken motivations. I get it. I get her. And I’ve long since grown tired of trying to make it a movie “film buff” dudebros will respect.
It’s not for them. It is not about them. And they can’t stand it.
If Liam Neeson indiscriminately tortures and murders people to save his daughter from being sold into sexual slavery, he’s a badass. A hero.
So why is Hayley Stark a monster?
“I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed,” she says toward the end of the film.
And she absolutely fucking is.
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