“It teaches a lot of things,” says another, euphemistically. It intercuts clips of giggling teenagers from 1980 talking about the movie’s appeal: “I liked it because I have a lively imagination,” smirks one. Visually, the documentary revels in the beauty and eroticism of young, thin, naked Shields, but verbally, it skirts the obvious and uncomfortable truth that the clips are sexually arousing. They could not recognize the transgression while they experienced it at the same time.”īut intercutting clips of the film with criticism of it doesn’t make it less sexually charged, and so Pretty Baby serves up the same appeal as Blue Lagoon once did: offering transgression and distance from the transgression at the same time. ![]() Between nude shots of Shields and her costar Christopher Atkins, then age 18, swimming, play fighting, and kissing, cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander explains the appeal of the film: “The audience could engage in erotic fantasies about somebody who’s way underage. The internal contradictions of the documentary are most acute during its segment about Blue Lagoon, a 1980 film starring 14-year-old Shields as a damsel stranded on a tropical island with her cousin. The documentary seems to ask: Isn’t she beautiful? Doesn’t she deserve better than this? Shields’s image is on the screen, it’s almost impossible to look away.” Even as Pretty Baby seeks to reveal the human being behind the sex symbol, it can’t help but draw its audiences in with images of Shields’s youthful beauty, thus reinscribing the terms of her worth. As Rhonda Garelick wrote for the New York Times, “When Ms. However emphatically it argues against the objectification of its subject, its endless stream of glamorous images has an undeniable aesthetic power that short-circuits rationale. And that always just seared me.”īut there’s a tricky problem that Pretty Baby, directed by Lana Wilson, who previously directed the 2020 Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana, never quite addresses. “Over and over and over and over and over. “The entirety of my life, it was, ‘She’s a pretty face,’’’ Shields says. ![]() Now Pretty Baby gives Shields the chance to reclaim control of her narrative, and she’s eager to offer something more than just her looks. ![]() She’s been famous ever since - beloved, reviled, obsessed over, and scrutinized. By the time she was 10, she was touring the talk show circuit by the time she was 16, Time magazine declared her the face of the ’80s. Brooke got into modeling early - her first gig was an Ivory soap ad at 11 months old - and quickly became her family’s breadwinner, then an icon of classic American beauty. She was raised by a single mother, Teri, a former model who managed Brooke’s career but had an alcohol addiction. This is a woman who has never known life outside of the public eye.įor those unfamiliar with Shields’s story, Pretty Baby offers a meticulous biography. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photos from her long career as a model and actor - selling gym equipment, gracing magazine covers, starring in movies, giving interviews. During the two-hour-and-13-minute runtime of Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a new two-part ABC News documentary streaming on Hulu, viewers see Shields’s face and body at every age, from every angle.
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