Director Lana Wilson’s disturbing and fascinating documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields reminds us of just how far we’ve come in the women’s movement, and just how far we still have to go. Filtering the story of Brooke Shields through the lens of her own experience, the film examines not just Shields’s star persona, but the obsessive and damaging nature of stardom itself.
Part I examines Shields’s career as a child model and actress, especially focusing on the (very early) sexualization of her in ad campaigns for the likes of Calvin Klein. This section combines the memories of Shields’s friends and family (including Laura Linney, fellow child star Drew Barrymore, and Judd Nelson) with feminist and cultural analysis of the contemporary media fascination with Shields from the time she was a small child. It clearly sets Shields’s story in the context of the Backlash against the women’s movement; as one interviewee points out, once it became clear that women would no longer be controlled, the sexualization of young girls rose.
The film teases out the effect of this early kind of sexualization on Shields, who discusses disassociating during sex scenes (when she was fifteen) in Endless Love, as director Franco Zeffirelli twisted her toe to make her expression more ecstatic, and in grappling with a sexuality she didn’t yet understand as an adolescent in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (when she was eleven). But while the focus is always on Shields, her voice and her experience, it draws a broader picture of media in the 70s and 80s, a time when a literal child was depicted nude onscreen, when the world’s biggest box office hit was The Blue Lagoon, and male talk show hosts quizzed Shields and her mother about her virginity.
Shields doesn’t shy away from the reality of what happened to her and the way she had to justify it in her own mind. She openly wonders how she survived (and it should be noted that other child stars didn’t come out nearly as well-adjusted as she is, if they survived at all), and struggles at times to adequately put into words her own experience.
It is this element that makes Part I and sections of Part II so difficult to watch, for this is a grown woman, with children of her own, attempting to unpack her experiences that she knows were deeply damaging. But it is also the only world that Shields has ever known. She struggles, at times, to put her memories into words, attempting to frame an experience that happened when she was too young to fully grasp or process what was happening. While Shields clearly gives her mother, who acted as her manager and agent for much of her young career, benefit of the doubt, the film presents a woman struggling to fully understand her past. Much blame is placed, rightfully so, on the star system at work—Shields was exploited by a misogynist culture that treated her as an object from a very young age, and found ways to blame her or her mother for the straight male obsession with her.
Part II is shaggier, in many ways, than Part I, detailing Shields’s adult career after she graduated from Princeton, her marriage to Andre Agassi, assault by a famous producer (never named), and her struggles with postpartum depression. But while this section is perhaps less compelling than Part I’s dissection of culture and Hollywood via Shields’s narrative, it is also a necessary coda that gives us a sense of Shields herself managing to survive and grow into a well-adjusted person and mother, despite everything that has gone before.
The film would have been strengthened if it managed to set Shields’s contemporary story within the context of MeToo and the most recent women’s movement both within Hollywood and the broader culture. There is a touch of looking backward, as though the exploitative system that abused Shields is no longer in place, or has only changed for the better. This is perhaps why the second part feels less immediate and necessary than the first, for the film begins to move away from a discussion of broad culture and focuses more steadily on Shields herself.
But this is a small objection to a broadly successful documentary. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is a story of survival against the odds. There is no other way to frame what was done to Shields, the massive failures and exploitation of a system run on misogynist patriarchy, that would sexualize young girls and teenagers and almost immediately blame them for their own exploitation. It is the portrait of a woman who gained her voice and agency despite all attempts to control her, but also stands as a powerful indictment of a culture that abuses, exploits, and ultimately destroys girls and women in the name of fulfilling patriarchal fantasies. Brooke Shields survived, but there are many who did not.
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is available to stream on Hulu.
