Capitalist Childhood in Film: Modes of Critique

This paper explores the latent political meanings of cinematic representations of capitalist childhood. The films it examines—three adaptations of the Oliver Twist story, Slumdog Millionnaire and a lesser-known Korean film, Treeless Mountain—have much in common: they feature abandoned or orphaned child characters who negotiate precarious existences in a rapacious crisis-ridden capitalist world. But the filmmakers’ evolving imaginings of childhood—from the Victorian vulnerable child to more postmodern understandings of children as agents in their own right—invite distinct political responses. While the Dickensian mode of critique rests problematically on an abstract idealized notion of childhood, attempts to update the image of childhood on screen—as in Slumdog—lead to a depoliticization of childhood within the text. Treeless Mountain and other similar “global child” films, however, forge a new—and newly political—filmic approach to childhood. In exploring children’s subjectivities, they pick up on children’s creative, sensual and active engagement with the world, a way of being in the world that Walter Benjamin explores and that children’s geographers have documented in numerous field studies. As such, they reject abstract, idealized conceptions of children as victims or agents. Yet, in capturing the imaginative, embodied ways in which children (re)produce their lives in the neglected landscapes of global capitalism, they retrieve the political, critical, potential of childhood. Rather than the sentimental paternalism of the Dickensian critique, “global child” films suggest a politics of transformation and solidarity. This paper explores the latent political meanings of cinematic representations of capitalist childhood. The films it examines—three adaptations of the Oliver Twist story, Slumdog Millionnaire and a lesser-known Korean film, Treeless Mountain—have much in common: they feature abandoned or orphaned child characters who negotiate precarious existences in a rapacious crisis-ridden capitalist world. But the filmmakers’ evolving imaginings of childhood—from the Victorian vulnerable child to more postmodern understandings of children as agents in their own right—invite distinct political responses. While the Dickensian mode of critique rests problematically on an abstract idealized notion of childhood, attempts to update the image of childhood on screen—as in Slumdog—lead to a depoliticization of childhood within the text. Treeless Mountain and other similar “global child” films, however, forge a new—and newly political—filmic approach to childhood. In exploring children’s subjectivities, they pick up on children’s creative, sensual and active engagement with the world, a way of being in the world that Walter Benjamin explores and that children’s geographers have documented in numerous field studies. As such, they reject abstract, idealized conceptions of children as victims or agents. Yet, in capturing the imaginative, embodied ways in which children (re)produce their lives in the neglected landscapes of global capitalism, they retrieve the political, critical, potential of childhood. Rather than the sentimental paternalism of the Dickensian critique, “global child” films suggest a politics of transformation and solidarity