stop denying it. leon: the professional is a pedophile’s fantasy that’s loved and protected by rape culture.
I already knew I was right but I’ve come across some information that I’m really late to and holy shit, the validation!
CONTENT WARNING: PEDOPHILIA & MENTION OF RAPE
“Mehh, the movie can’t be a pedophile fantasy if it’s the child who’s pursuing the adult!"
First of all… Yes, the fuck it can be! And second, the movie really is a pedophile’s fantasy!
The character Leon (Jean Reno) was only written to be emotionally immature and hesitant to young Mathilda’s (Natalie Portman) constant sexual propositions so that trash human beings can feel more comfortable with openly indulging in this gross fantasy.
There are people (usually men) who always want to argue and get defensive about this. They’ll try to excuse it because it’s art (which apparently exists in a vacuum and has zero impact in this world) or they’ll just blatantly deny that there’s any hint of pedophilia with some mental gymnastics.
Sure, the movie has bad ass, visually stylish scenes for the 90s. A cold assassin moved by circumstances to care for a traumatized child and help her get revenge on corrupt law enforcement for the murder of her family is a cool, thrilling plot. Portman, at 11-12 years old, excitedly took on this role for these reasons and had to beg her parents to let her do it. This is the movie that really showed off her acting abilities and sparked her illustrious career.
Of course, some say that we should be more concerned with how a child is involved with graphic gun violence in this film than with the sexual undertones. It’s almost a fair point since our media is actually more comfortable with displaying violence than consensual, healthy images and themes of sex. But sexualizing children isn’t healthy or positive. It’s another kind of violence, that unlike the gun fight scenes, was unnecessary and didn’t really serve the central plot or the characters. (And ew, sexualizing children is just never okay.)
Mathilda’s sharp mind, affection and innate innocence despite her screwed up childhood experiences help Leon and make both of them good character studies. But instead of using a father-daughter relationship, which would have also achieved the art of the characters’ warm development and emotional depth in a grim, violent world (The Last of Us accomplishes this beautifully with critical acclaim), this movie opts for a disturbing romance between the two.
The subtext for the pedophilia isn’t at all subtle and it’s time to stop excusing or denying it. There are scenes with a prepubescent child calling a 40-something year old man her lover and declaring she wants to have sex with him. So many scenes of her flirting with him and in every one it looks like it hurts him to reject her. And there’s one scene that I’m always surprised people miss. It’s the one where Mathilda is in bed with Leon. As she leaves the bed, she’s pulling up her underwear in a way that implies she wasn’t wearing them before getting out of the sheets. The camera forces the audience to actually watch her do it so that they can see this and infer that something happened.
To validate the icky feelings I got from this movie years ago, I just found out that in the original script, Leon was supposed to see Mathilda completely naked after she gets out of a shower. And while nude she was supposed to try to seduce him into having sex again. In another cut scene, before she gets out of bed and pulls up her underwear, they’re having sex and the script describes it as beautiful love making when, really, it’s not even sex. It’s rape.This little girl, whose family had just been slaughtered and is now alone and vulnerable, ends up in the care of a lonely older man whom she later engages in a romantic and sexual relationship with–and oh by the way, he also happens to be a very skilled assassin. How is that not a pedophile’s fantasy?
If the actual movie and original script aren’t enough to convince you how pedophile-friendly and awful this movie is, I also just learned something about Luc Besson, the writer and director of this cult classic.
Before the movie was released, 30-something year old Besson impregnated and married a 15 year old girl who had been isolated from her family, a girl he’d been grooming since she was 12 years old. If we remove the gun fights, Italian mob, and corrupt DEA agents, the movie almost seems autobiographical. It’s art imitating his life of exploiting little girls.
Luc Besson, despite being a sexual predator who’s sick enough to put a movie in theaters inspired by abusing a minor, hasn’t been criticized at large or shunned from Hollywood. Instead he’s been able to continue making multi-million dollar budget, mainstream films throughout the decades like The Fifth Element (1997), The Transporter series (2002-2015), Taken series (2008-2014), and even movies just within the last couple of years like Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Lucy 2 is expected to come out some time in 2018-2019.
In January 2018, Natalie Portman attended a women’s march in Los Angeles. In front of a large understanding crowd, Portman shared her own deeply personal story about the first time she realized that she lived in a rape culture that would target, objectify, and abuse her.
When she turned 13, shortly after Leon: The Professional was released, the very first fan mail she ever received was written by an adult man sharing his fantasy of raping her.
Portman said, “I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy a man had written me. A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the day I would be legal to sleep with.”
Just let that sink in.
Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) was recently named by magazines “one of TV’s sexiest stars.” She’s only 13 years old. Her co-star Finn Wolfhard, who’s only 14, also has experience with being sexualized by adults. Many on the internet have started counting down for their 18th birthdays. None of this is okay. When it comes to our culture’s toxic treatment of children and marginalized genders, not much has changed in the last 30 years. But there is a growing movement of people calling out their abusers, even in Hollywood and politics, addressing the misogyny and sexual terror that they’ve experienced.
It’s my hope that someday abusers like Luc Besson, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and so many others will finally be held accountable. To make that happen, we have to listen to victims and believe them. We have to stop supporting their abusers with our money, denial, and excuses. It shouldn’t be normal for us to live in a culture that protect and reward predators.
