This Brooke Shields biopic traces her career as a beautiful young model and actress, and the complicated relationship with her mother. She narrates the story of her life that is often in stark contrast to the impressions about her as a celebrity shown by the media. We break down PRETTY BABY: BROOKE SHIELDS by Lana Wilson in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: Premieres
Distribution: ABC News on Hulu on April 3, 2023
From Sundance’s website: Brooke Shields, ’80s icon and household name, was a child model before she came to prominence in Louis Malle’s controversial film Pretty Baby at age 12. With a series of provocative Calvin Klein jeans ads and leading roles in 1980s teensploitation hits The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, Shields’ early career was defined by a sexuality that she could neither claim nor comprehend.
In this two-part documentary, director Lana Wilson (Miss Americana, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) reveals Shields’ story through media appearances and archival footage, bringing full context to the time when Shields was coming of age in public. Wilson creates space for the adult Shields to share her intelligence, vulnerability, and humanity while reflecting on her career and life, including her complex relationship with her mother, Teri, her marriage to Andre Agassi, and her own struggles with motherhood. Honest and incisive, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields critiques a toxic culture and power structure that perpetuates misogyny and is complicit in the sexualization and objectification of young girls. But, above all, it tells the moving story of Brooke Shields discovering and embracing her own identity and agency.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our series of looking at the Sundance documentaries from 2023. In today's episode, we're looking at Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields by Lana Wilson. This is a two-part documentary that goes into the life of Brooke Shields. She's a child actress who is a model and hits this super celebrity status. There's a lot of ways in that she's used as this icon of feminine sexuality. She started very young and actually was in these films where she was like sexualized before she's a teenager. It's tracking her evolution into this and giving her voice into her journey, but also going through the different phases of her career as she's becoming this sex symbol and icon and super celebrity while also doing films. And then she goes off to college and there's this whole other aspect about this film that shows her relationship to her mother and the complicated relationship to her mother. In the description, it says that Wilson is creating a space for the adult Shields to share her intelligence, vulnerability, and humanity while reflecting on her career and life, including her complex relationship with her mother. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your first thoughts on Pretty Baby Brooke Shields.
[00:01:32.817] Wonder Bright: I was keen to watch this documentary because my own personal relationship with Brooke Shields is that I was born in 1970. She's born five years before me in 1965. So I grew up with her basically because she was, as you said, a child model and actress. So by the time I was a teenager, she was out there and like widely regarded. And I have brown hair and thick eyebrows and I'm conventionally attractive from our culture's perspective. People would tell me I looked like her. So I always was sort of like vaguely interested in her. And I also was on the receiving end of unwanted male attention from the time that I was a child, like 12 years of age. in ways that were really often confusing and hard to repudiate because it's always being told to you like it's this nice thing that like people are loving you they're adoring you oh you're so beautiful and like that's the thing that is valued about women in this culture. So who are you to like not want to be told that? Right. So I was curious to see how that got unpacked in this film. And, you know, I haven't really followed Brooke Shields career that avidly, but I do know that I got very curious about her when she started to break away from that mold. Right. Like in the film, they document that progression in her career. Notably, I think the first instance is an episode she did where she guest starred on Friends and She creates this maniacal laugh in reaction to something that one of the friends says to her. And the notes from the director was, oh, you need to tone that down. And she's like, do I, though? And then she just did it and it got a huge laugh. And so she entered this like comic era and this era where she was breaking the mask of, quote, beauty. especially if it's someone like Brooke Shields, who was supposedly upholding this burden of idealized white femininity, which, you know, come to find out watching this film, spoiler alert, wasn't really all that great to begin with. It's not exactly a job that you would sign up for if they really spelled out what it was going to be all about. So that's my first response to it. It's just can't help but be from this very personal space because dealing with that unwanted gaze and desire was something that really marked my early life. And because it was my early life, it just kind of like extended into my life, you know, and so there's always a relationship to my beauty, That is it real when I was young like what are they looking at because I don't feel beautiful inside I feel honestly like often really ugly and miserable so like what is it that they see when they look at me because I'm not Feeling that and then as you get older and they stop looking at you like that. It's like there's an immediate loss of power and which in my own personal life I've provoked by gaining weight at different points and like doing all kinds of things because I didn't want this power that I had a lot of questions about to begin with. But also it is weird to disappear after having been so visible when visibility for beauty is the thing that is prized amongst women. It's funny because I remember the first time anyone ever said that I was beautiful, it was a stranger. Like I remember specifically at 12 years of age being at the opera with my mom and this grown adult man like capturing my hand as I descended the staircase when I was at the opera with my mom to say, you're the most beautiful woman in the building tonight. And I felt like I was being wooed by a suitor. There was just this like romance in the air. And yet it was undeniably odd. You know, he had gray hair, like he had to be 30 or 40 years older than me. And then I got down to the bottom of the staircase and my mom grabs my hand that he'd just been holding. And she said, what did that man say to you? And so I began to attach danger to this, but that I also like, I asked my mom once why she and my dad never told me I was beautiful. And she said, well, we didn't want you to think that was the only thing that was important about you, which really thank you. Thanks mom and dad.
[00:06:21.254] Kent Bye: Um, yeah, I want to just jump in here just to kind of.
[00:06:26.026] Wonder Bright: Bring it back to the film. Go on.
[00:06:37.191] Kent Bye: So, a big part of this film is the relationship between Brooke Shields and her mother because her mother, as she's being born, she's like, you're born a star. And so, her mother really is at the forefront of getting her all these like child acting and modeling gigs and also becomes her manager. And it's a two-part film. And so, the first part is really up to the point where her mother's still working with her. And the second part is the ways that she needs to break away from her mother and the ways that relationship isn't serving her. But I was really struck by hearing Brooke talk about how her mother would take her to these art cinema films. And so she really came to appreciate the artistic aspects of the medium of film. And so she ends up working with a lot of what could be considered controversial or illegal child pornography situations, having her prepubescent body naked on film. And The subject matter is perhaps historically accurate for what was happening in the red light districts of New Orleans as an example. But as she's putting herself in the situation, it was really interesting to watch the reaction to this and the cultural critics who were helping to give that additional context of how the mother was being attacked for some of these different decisions that she's making. whilst the male filmmakers are working with impunity and being exalted and praised for their artistic vision. Whereas it's really being driven by that male gaze and being sexualized in this inappropriate way. So you have this weird tension between the art that Brooke sees that she's servicing versus the ways in which that it's crossing various different boundaries that She learns to compartmentalize these different aspects and just turn aspects of herself off, which we kind of see later. She goes through her life, she goes off to college in 1983 to 1987. She takes a break from her modeling and film career to go back to Princeton University to get a degree. That's where she discovers these different aspects of improv and finding her voice of what she actually wants to communicate as an artist. And yet, as she comes out, she's met with Hollywood is not rewarding the combination of beauty and intelligence. And so she kind of falls off the map. And she's also testifying in this film for the first time, how what appears to be either Harvey Weinstein or someone like Harvey Weinstein, who gets her into a situation as she's trying to break back into the film industry, and ends up being sexually assaulted and raped. She comes out in this film talking about that here for the first time. And so, it's about this journey of her path trying to fight against the ways in which that culture is expecting what they want her to be, even as she gets back into acting, into these aspects of comedy. It kind of ends up being this superficial slapstick version that doesn't really go into these other dimensions of the comedy in it. doesn't end up having like a long lasting aspect there. And then there's her relationship with Andre Agassi and different ways that she's trying to break away from her mother, but yet replacing one abusive relationship to another abusive relationship. And just the ways that her mother is dealing with different substance abuse issues and the pain that she had to go through in order to kind of make this separation. And yet also separate herself from the type of abusive relationship that she was repeating with Andre Agassi. So for me, as I'm watching this film, I'm seeing the ways in which the culture is having all these ideas of beauty, and she's doing these Calvin Klein commercials, and again, being hyper-sexualized as this teenager in a way that is reflecting this larger objectification of women and she's playing into it and benefiting from it. But yet from her perspective, she's also seeing it as these artistic expressions of her own creativity. And there's a mismatch between what she's thinking about what she's doing versus how the culture is receiving it and how also she's being received by the broader culture. So I felt like by hearing her narrate the story of her life, we get to reclaim what her perspective and what she was experiencing through all these different phases.
[00:10:50.927] Wonder Bright: Well, and I think as part of that reclamation project, what we have to witness in her story is that she was distanced from her own autonomous, naturally arising response to circumstances in two ways. One, through her natural beauty, which fit a conventional mold and allowed these grown men to project their fantasies onto her. This was happening to her from a very early age. And for her to be able to interpret this as part of an artistic endeavor where her work and her performance is part of producing a director's artistic vision requires her to dislocate her own experience in her body around what it was like to have her first kiss on screen as a child with an adult actor. who apparently was very sweet to her, but no, no, no. I'm just going to say it. That's what I was feeling. And I know she didn't have that. She couldn't say that. She wasn't allowed to say that. And she was so removed from her capacity to say it because she's on the receiving end of the projection of all this desire and fantasy from all of these adults in the room. And there's another way in which she's completely dislocated. While I agree with what you've just said, and the film itself is at pains to point out that her mother got lambasted for things that the men that were adults in the room never did, it's also true that Brooke was responsible for her mother. Her mother was an alcoholic and couldn't take care of herself, you know, much less a child, at different points in Brooke's life. And that means that Brooke had to be the adult in the room, even though her mom was responsible on paper for her. So Brooke was distanced from her own first-person experiences in two ways. And the ways in which her mom put her into situations that were dangerous and distanced herself from her own autonomy is paralleled by the fact that Brooke's survival necessitated her distancing herself from her childhood so that she could parent her mother. So there's two dislocations that happen to this young woman. And it's arguable that that's the only way in which she could accept that dislocation that occurred to her through these experiences with this male gaze from these directors in her life. You know, like I was so confused when this man approached me on those stairs. And it was my mother's voice, what did that man want from you, that introduced an analysis of the circumstance that allowed me to pull forth the unease that I was experiencing in that moment. And that was a good and worthy thing. You know, in the moment, I also was upset because the sort of romantic vision had been dispelled. And I can only be grateful because my mother parented me. She was looking out for me. And I wasn't alone in that moment. Brooke was alone on those sets in a fundamental way. Her best interests were not being looked out for by the people that should have been doing that.
[00:14:33.626] Kent Bye: Yeah, she talks about in the film how when she was on set is when she felt the most safe because she didn't have to worry about whatever was happening with her mother. And so there was a bit of ways that she was escaping the trauma of being at home with her mother by being in her professional career. There's so many different moments here where she's being put into these interview situations and being interrogated and asked all these hard questions. There's an unflappable nature to Brooke Shields where she was, again, compartmentalizing some of these deeper things and sticking true to this commitment to her own artistic expression and artistic vision throughout this. That was interesting for me to see. And then as we get into the second parts, we have this other split between the personal Brooke Shields life and the image of Brooke Shields as being this sex symbol and object. I think in this blue lagoon, she has a teenage sexual experience when in reality, she remains a virgin into her mid-20s. And so there's this more conservative aspect that maybe is mirroring the split between her father is coming from more of this Catholic religious side. And she's kind of preserving that good Catholic girl type of vibe. And then it becomes a matter of public discourse as to whether or not she's going to have sex for the first time. I felt like that there was a way in which that her private life was a matter of public record. And as a celebrity, she's being put into these situations where it becomes a matter of public interest as to what's happening in her private life. And so there was that angle. And I'd say another thing that was really striking to me after she comes out of college and meets her now husband and has her first baby, she has this whole experience of postpartum depression, which at the time was not really necessarily well understood. And there was a bit of shame that she had in terms of not even wanting to touch her baby and being distant in a way that was confusing because it wasn't widely known about this condition that some mothers have of this deep depression and dissociation and distancing that they want to have from their baby. Again, it was kind of a disconnect between what the story is of what it means to be a mother versus what her own experience of that is. And she has to reckon that by writing a book and really becoming this advocate for postpartum depression and kind of putting it on a map where it was an experience that women were experiencing, but not something that was necessarily acknowledged or spoken about too much because as she was experiencing it, it took like a doula to say, oh, it's probably this type of situation. So it was kind of like from the underground. And thankfully, she was able to hear that. But that's another part of her journey is to talk about this postpartum depression. But I feel like a common theme throughout this pretty baby story is this disconnect between what her own personal experiences from what the image of what she's going through And it was really that stark contrast that you see this recounting of her life through these different phases. And even kind of like this weird connection she had with like Michael Jackson, who was like taking her out and him claiming that they were in a deeper relationship than they actually were, which was kind of like this other weird aspect of this celebrity that she had found herself in. And so, again, going into this part where her private life becomes a matter of public record or a part of the kind of celebrity gossip culture that on the back end just kind of mystified as to why this is happening on some levels.
[00:17:58.981] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I mean, I think this film has in common with many of the films that we watched last week, that it's primarily about your identity and about naming what that is. And if needed be reclaiming it. Sometimes it's a process of discovery often. And this is what we watch Brooke Shields doing as she tells us the story. And what's interesting about Brooke Shields' reclamation project is that she was the recipient of so much objectivity. She is being heralded in her youth and childhood as the pinnacle of feminine beauty. And as the film is at pains to point out, her launch onto the world stage as a child supermodel occurs as part of a backlash against feminists who are, quote, burning their bras. We know that they didn't actually burn their bras, but are reportedly burning their bras and liberating themselves from the need to be pleasing to men and all kinds of things. This is also obviously, you know, in the era, like just post height report as well. Let's point out since we now have that story to reference as well. And so the filmmakers are suggesting that part of the response is, well, if women aren't going to be submissive, then children certainly have to be submissive. So we can do this to a child model. where it will be unquestioned and she'll be as innocent as the day is long. So part of Brooke Shields like discovering her own identity is doing so under the onslaught of a societal tsunami of interest in her but not for her or about her or her at all. It's just a projection of fantasy onto what people think she might look like. And I, you know, on a much smaller level, but it was shocking to me how many young men in high school had crushes on me because it obviously had nothing to do with me. you know, the weirdness that I could say something like that and feel like I need to make some kind of disclaimer as if I'm bragging. But it's just a statement of fact. And it was creepy, you know, like it was just creepy. I'm not saying there isn't privilege that comes with fitting the conventional beauty standards. But there is something very specific that happens when you have a look that sells products. I think they make this point in the film as well, actually, but it's something that I have certainly noticed that if you look like someone who sells people cigarettes and alcohol and cars and whatever, you become a commodity and people assume that they know you because they have fantasies about you.
[00:21:06.567] Kent Bye: Or that they have some sort of ownership over you because they belong to you in some fashion.
[00:21:10.830] Wonder Bright: Because you belong to them. Yes, exactly. And so Brooke Shields is sort of like at the pinnacle of that. So her recovery process is complicated by the weight of not just people she might meet on the street, like, you know, some nobody like me who can get fat if she wants to because my livelihood doesn't depend on it. But by the weight of like entire industries, Hollywood and the beauty industry. And so to have her speaking back to that is a story that's really worth listening to, in my opinion, because it's a firsthand account of what happens.
[00:21:48.757] Kent Bye: I know that as we were watching this film, we were pulling up her astrological birth chart, and you had mentioned that she was just born the day after a total solar eclipse. I don't know if there's any other astrological significations that you feel like are being played out through her life. She's being shot up as this exalted representation of beauty, but yet she has this very enmeshed and tortured relationship with her mother. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
[00:22:18.543] Wonder Bright: Well, I want to mention, first of all, that A, we don't have an accurate birth time for her. So we don't know where these placements occur. And I also just want to be really careful of not projecting my own astrological story onto her or anyone really when it's her story to tell. So with those caveats in place, I'll just say that this eclipsing thing that occurs means that there's like a way in which the light is obstructed in your life and needs to be discovered, which I think she's doing an adequate job of like sharing with us now, like the things that got eclipsed in her life. And it's also notable because in her chart, Jupiter and Venus are configured into that eclipse energy. And Venus is, of course, associated with femininity and with beauty. And Venus is also what traditional astrologers would think of as a benefic. It brings good things. It bestows good things. And Jupiter is the other benefic. So there is this sense in which, you know, when something has a loss of light in an astrological chart, it may take longer for us to live into the potentials of it. And so there's something really wonderful about seeing her in her maturity. publicly claiming the real maturity that she's earned and the real identity that she has uncovered and created for herself in the last two decades, and to be brave and come forward with it. want to acknowledge all the care and love that she's cultivated in her life. Her husband and her children clearly really love her. And I think my favorite scene in the film is a scene that happens towards the end with it's just her sitting around the table with her family at dinner. And I just love the way they are reflecting her light back to her. And it just suddenly feels right-sized, you know, that she's coming into her own light, into a light that she's choosing. And also just the fact that it is the benefics, it does sort of, even if it's a delayed promise, it does promise that this is someone who can sally forth. She is someone who can you know, these are all generalizations, but I don't want to get too specific because I think it does a disservice to the stories of the people. But I do just want to note that she does have this capacity for really good things and bringing good things. And it's not just what people might project onto her, but her own capacity to create beauty in the world that is independent of like being the beauty. to create beauty and love and harmony and also joy and laughter. I mean, the eclipse happened in Gemini. So she has this like clearly quick diverting intellect and curiosity about the world that creates a kind of resilience in a world that doesn't ask her to be intelligent. But I suspect that that really is like a key factor in her ability to dance with the devils that she was forced to.
[00:25:26.078] Kent Bye: I guess as we start to wrap up and bear witness to different things in this film, I want to just bear witness to that process that you were speaking to there of that eclipsed sun, meaning that the sun representing different aspects of someone's identity, their self, their ego in some sense. You have this aspect where she's trying to reclaim different aspects of what her identity is versus what the world has projected onto her. But she's also got this kind of like the moon is the thing that's eclipsing her identity. So you have this aspect of her mother being a big part of this complicated relationship throughout her life. But also you have, as she's becoming a mother, she's being eclipsed in a way that she is not experiencing what the traditional type of connections that she's becoming that mother figure then. And so then she becomes this advocate for postpartum depression. And so there's this theme of both her identity, but also the relationship between herself and mother and as she's a mother to her children. And I do love that scene at the end where her children are really reflecting back to her the zeitgeist of what the normative standards of the proper ethical way to think about some of these different transgressions that she has lived through. And just to hear that reflected back to her in a way that it's almost like her children are helping to more fully contextualize some of the different traumas that she may have been compartmentalizing without her life to just have a discussion at it. And she was really using the Socratic method and asking these questions, but really listening as well. So yeah, I just want to bear witness to Brooke Shields as she's reclaiming different aspects of her identity and to tell the story from her perspective that we've received this image of who Brooke Shields is and a certain illusionary component of that image that's been projected. And there's quite a different story about who she is that I think is being revealed within this film.
[00:27:16.084] Wonder Bright: Yeah, definitely. And not just of her. I think what I want to bear witness to is the fact that she is a lightning rod for it at that period of time. But as Sarah Mars, a film critic who writes on LaineyGossip.com pointed out in her review, her main critique of the film is that they don't contextualize all the other child actresses who also ended up being really sexualized and abused through that framing. And that, you know, it's perhaps unfair, Mars says in her critique, to expect this film, which is really a biography of S.H.I.E.L.D.' 's life, to do that work. And yet it does end up being a missing because it is such a vital part of the discourse around these things, you know. Obviously, as I'm watching the film, I've been detailing my own personal experience and resonance with the themes that emerge. So it is a context that is really, truly shared. And pedantically, I'm just going to note that traditionally, the moon is not necessarily related to the mother in astrology. However, it is related to the body. And so this eclipsing effect of the moon, I mean, I personally do give the moon to mothering, frankly, but I just want to note that it is also traditionally not the mother and is about the body. And so that eclipsing aspect is something that does speak to the body being eclipsed, which is also true in her experiences as we've been detailing them, both through the experience of being a child and then becoming a mother. So, yeah, it's a rich tale, well told. And I also just really want to acknowledge and bear witness to Brooke Shields herself and witness her story as she's telling it.
[00:29:12.335] Kent Bye: Yeah, so that was Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields by Ilana Wilson. It's part of the doc premieres at Sundance 2023, and it actually does have distribution. It's going to be distributed through ABC News on Hulu, so it should be made available, I'm sure, at some point in 2023. Thanks again for joining us here on the Story All the Way Down podcast. If you'd like to get more information, you can go check it out on storyallthewaydown.com and find ways that you can support the podcast and get more information on what we're up to. Thanks for joining us.
