LOVE IN MOTION

Mindfuck of the week is the newest music video from SebastiAn, directed by Gaspar Noe, and featuring an under age Dutch child-model of name Lente Tresor. The rumor has it that it got banned from youtube 3 times and now it's back, proofread against pedo-content by a scads of youtube experts who decided that, for now, it's not child pornography after all. I bet they'll change their minds soon yet again since you might get fooled by looking at the off-set photos alone. The video is presumably to be read in the context of the recent awarness raising amongst the French public on the damaging influence of the lolita entertainment industry on little girls' psyches. Tresor prances around in her pink room, wearing devil horns, while being filmed by a little boy (her brother?) with digital camera. In a slightly more aggressive manner, she reduplicates the sexuality of minor performers launched into 5-minute stardom by the cyber media. Her smudged face carries the seriousness of the 10-year-old French supermodel of haute cauture Thylane Blondeau while the kitschy poses bring to mind an average minor youtube female artist aspiring to the title of  the pedo-mascot of the month. Excluding herself , since she's sort of cuddly and innocent when she sings those pop covers in her sweet cacophonic voice. Love in Motion reminds me at points of Noe's other works, especially Enter the Void and We Fuck Alone where juvenile orphan protagonists are also enclosed in nauseously shifting interiors, left alone with artificial toys of sensual self-annihilation ad infinitum. At the very least, the video is Noe's grim wink at the unconditional greviousness which surrounds debates about the safe sexual development of contemporary children. I can't help but recall James R. Kincaid's superb Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting in which he notices that with the end of archetypal notions about female chastity, the child has become  the last vestige of innocence for radical purists which, in the context of our times, has led to a paradoxical situation: "[t]he laughing child has been replaced in our cultural iconography by the anxious, fretting child - really, a grotesquely sexy little adult. Not a kid, a not a companion, not an ally; just an unhappy undersized thing, tormented by being cast in terms that allow it no room to move: the child is the sexual being whose essence is that it has no sexuality at all."[1] All at once playful and sexual, tiredsome and restless, ridiculous and grave, Tresor is an avatar of those schizoid beings whose very appeal is their prismatic sexuality.


[1] James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham University Press: Durham and London,1998: 282-283.

Here's Love in Motion: