Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

giving the impression she is topless, she looks directly at the camera, over her bare right shoulder. Asked in the interview that accompanies the photographs whether she or Disney were anxious about the shot, she replied she was not because she thought it was “pretty,” “natural,” and “artsy.” When news of the shoot broke, people were calling on the public to burn Hannah Montana products. Disney, desperate to protect one of their most bankable stars—whose personal fortune some put as high as half a billion dollars—then, ironically, accused the magazine of deliberately manipulating the girl for profit. She has released two multi-platinum-selling records, and a live tour gained approximately $1 million per week, with the further success of the 3-D film spin-off. She had previously apologized for photographs of her lying in the lap of a boyfriend with her stomach exposed, circulated on the Internet.⁵⁷ America obsesses over child stars, repressing any sniff of sexuality, yet commodifies celebrities, turning them into highly eroticized love objects, despite denials. The movies are where child erotica is most notable, with figures such as Shirley Temple and Mark Lester, whose body is fetishized in Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968). While Kincaid uncovered young buttocks everywhere, from Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1962) and its remake (Harry Hook, 1990) to Tarzan movies and beyond, likewise some see pedophiles and wicked child abusers everywhere. For Peter Bradshaw, Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) is a distant cousin to Rupert Helpmann’s “lolly-brandishing Child Catcher” inserted into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes, 1968), after Roald Dahl worked on the script.⁵⁸

Horrifically, Kincaid’s book achieved exactly what he set out to do—to put the pedophile in your room, on your sofa. Child-Loving was published in 1992, and by the mid to late 1990s everyone was the suspected pedophile. The monster was no longer the alien outside the clan on the fringes of society, he was your dad, your teacher, your preacher, he was you, whether you were male or female, innocent or guilty (but obviously guilty)—everyone was a suspect, particularly Catholic priests of course, everyone was a “monster.” If you talked to a child, looked at a child, let alone touched a child in any way you were the demon from hell.