What Will We Tell the Children?

Inspired by The Skeleton Key, K-punk has posts about beliefs and disavowed beliefs here and here.

In the film, Caroline, a young woman with no interest in the supernatural, finds herself in the swamps of the American South. There hoodoo is practiced, which is presented as a kind of bad magic that only has an effect on those who believe in it. To help an old man who thinks he is under a spell, or at least Caroline thinks he thinks he is, she performs some of the rites and this makes her vulnerable to the magical rituals. By acting as if she believes, she has become a believer.

K-punk convincingly links this tension between the direct belief and the belief in the other's belief, between the believers and the people who will only perform the ritual practices if they are confident that they 'know they mean nothing', to commodity fetishism. But he also writes "that there is no 'naive consumer' who believes commodities are animate beings," and this made me wonder: aren't disavowed beliefs always articulated against the background of the naivety, the innocence of children? Perhaps it's no coincidence that in a key scene of the film - the primal scene, so to speak - parents are violently upset, not by a hoodoo ceremony taking place in their home, but by the fact that their son and daughter witness it.

Similarly, nobody worries for their own sake about violent computer games, pornographic images or news of depraved presidents. These concerns are formulated in relation to the point of view of children. And maybe the same is even true for commodity fetishism: while not many people think much of their own continuous exposure to advertisements, there is definitely something disturbing about marketing and publicity that is aimed at young kids.

The role of the child is crucial here, as Octave Mannoni wrote in the essay Je sais bien, mais quand même: "Many adults are ready to admit - though the absurdity of the thing sometimes makes them hesitate - that they are not religious for themselves, but for the children. And the important place children have in the organisation of beliefs cannot be explained only in relation to the care for their spiritual development." The same thing can be said about this particular commodity, the horror film, which after all is usually taboo for young audiences. Ratings not only exist to protect innocent souls against terrifying stories, but at the same time help to convince others that children will really believe those tales.