No, Hollywood. It's Not OK If It's A Sex Doll

There are days when you really have to ask yourself whether there are people in a studio lot's in-house dive bar somewhere, or an art gallery opening, champing at the bit to see how far we can go down the rabbit hole of sexual depravity before an armed invasion of vigilantes storms the walls. "The Trouble With Being Born" (from "female director" Sandra Wollner) has had walk-outs in (Weimar) Berlin, and rightly so. It's about a child sex doll.

Down the cliff we go, with the "minor-attracted persons" language of the humanities' departments. It's not scenes cut from "Leon" this time, it's worse.

Variety and the Reporter are now reviewing child pornography as art. The slippery slope is not a fallacy; it is the universal default.

"But still, it is impossible to trick our brains into not seeing the final images — which are mostly graphic only in inference — for what they appear to imply: the violation of a child."

https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/the-trouble-with-being-born-review-1203516473/

This isn't OK, and we're in serious moral trouble.

Pretentious Waffle From The Weimar Class

The screenplay isn't publicly available, but this monstrosity was put together by Sandra Wollner (b. 1983), an "Austrian film director and screenwriter" who directed and co-wrote it "in co-production with The Barricades, ZDF / Das kleine Fernsehspiel and Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg". The other writer typing away furiously about kid-fucking was Roderick Warich.

Details: https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt9220966/

Production was done by Panama Film, "founded in 2018 by the two producers Lixi Frank and David Bohun. The creative co-founders are the directors Stefan Bohun and Sebastian Brameshuber."

The director's synopsis:

Elli is an android and lives with a man she calls her father. Together they drift through the summer. During the day they swim in the pool and at night he takes her to bed. She shares his memories and anything else he programs her to recall. Memories that mean everything to him but nothing to her. Yet, one night she sets off into the woods following a fading echo. The story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us.

This sorry drivel continues with the same kind of social science obscurantism you'd find in a gender studies class:

Memory as the identity-defining narrative that keeps us from drowning in the chaos of meaninglessness. Memory as programming, human narration as the very foundation of our existence....

To get lost, as if entering a strange reverie, in which causal principles cease to function, which remains inexplicable, slowly pulling you into its chaotic depths....

Shut up.

The press kit is available: https://potentialfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/TTWBB-PRESSKIT-1.pdf

The Leftipedia article on this successor to the Human Centipede saga - an "antithesis to Pinocchio" - describes the plot thus:

The film explores the topos of the artificial human, presented here in an unusual way with a focus on the emotional level. Elli is an android, a machine, in the shape of a girl, as well as a sex robot. Elli lives with Georg, whom she calls "Papa". They drift through a summer, swimming in the pool during the day and in the evening he takes her to bed with him. Georg created Elli from a personal memory, to make himself happy. A memory that means nothing to her and everything to him. For Elli, it is merely the programming she follows. When she later meets her real-life role model, an odyssey develops that increasingly brings the audience to Elli's perspective. The dystopian film portrays "the story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Being_Born_(film)

The topos ("common place') of the artificial human? Huh?

Pinocchio is the story of a puppet brought to life by a blue fairy, who tells him that he can become a real human if he proves himself to be "brave, truthful, and unselfish".

"Georg" is a pedophile. This is the story of a pedophile, and a film industry too corrupt and stupid to recognise it.

In an interview with the director, she makes it explicit the story is about pedophilia.

"In my film a man has already brought the object of his desire back to reality and can shape it entirely according to his own wishes. On the one hand this desire is reasonable, because it‘s dictated by loss and grief concerning a real person, while on the other hand it is unreasonable – far more dynamic than desire alone, because he wants to live out his sexual fantasies. I found it interesting that both exist at the same time and can also be lived out simultaneously in this virtual being."

The Origin Of A Very Stupid Leftist Idea

This all has precedent in the social sciences. Of course it does. It's somewhat of a meme. Leftists have a theory. A bad one. It goes something like this:

If you satiate someone's appetite for something, they will stop doing it.

The unbelievably stupid premise of this film can be found in multiple faculty department journal papers describing the idea we should provide pedophiles with rehabilitative sex dolls. There is nothing "intellectual" about this garbage.

This combines their many loves: sexuality without emotion or consequence, conditioning and programming, AI, and kid-fucking.

If you can stomach it:

• https://www.slideshare.net/scarlettsalome4/sex-doll-a-possible-cure-for-pedophiles-76052934
• https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/agispt.20190501009719
• https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lauren-Shapiro-7/publication/321137227_Child_Sex_Dolls_and_Robots_More_Than_Just_an_Uncanny_Valley/links/5a3062850f7e9b0d50f8e28e/Child-Sex-Dolls-and-Robots-More-Than-Just-an-Uncanny-Valley.pdf
• https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0.pdf#page=373
• https://psyarxiv.com/zsufr

New York Post (right-leaning):

A charity in the UK has sparked outrage by calling for so-called ‘child sex dolls’ to be made available for pedophiles on prescription. StopSo, which aims to prevent sex offending through therapy, say the dolls could stop perverts harming real children.

https://nypost.com/2017/08/03/outrage-over-push-to-give-pedophiles-child-sex-dolls/

Independent (left-leaning):

Paedophiles who use child sex dolls in a “managed environment” may be detered from carrying out attacks in real life, according to the chair of Specialist Treatment Organization for the Prevention of Sexual Offending (StopSO) - a charity which prevents sexual offending through therapy.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/paedophiles-child-sex-dolls-prescription-stop-attacks-child-protection-stopso-therapists-a7872911.html

NBC News (left-leaning):

At the University of Montreal, researchers led by psychologist Dr. Patrice Renaud are exploring the behavior of men with pedophilia by watching them navigate a virtual park filled with computer-simulated pre-adolescents.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/would-child-sex-robots-stop-pedophilia-or-promote-it-ncna834576

The Atlantic (left-leaning):

Struggling to reconcile his attraction to children with a conviction that they should be protected, Takagi founded Trottla, a company that produces life-like child sex dolls. For more than a decade, Trottla has shipped anatomically-correct imitations of girls as young as five to clients around the world.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/can-child-dolls-keep-pedophiles-from-offending/423324/

Only academics could be this stupid. And only left-wing ideologues could be stupid enough to fall for this sophistry: if we satiate pedophiles' appetite for raping children, they'll stop wanting to rape children.

No.

What you feed, grows. What you starve, dies.

We have known this folklore for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Feeding someone or something stimulates the appetite for more of it.

You'll also note this "doctrine" of theirs - which asserts people are fundamentally good and if you just educate and love them enough they stop doing bad things - does not extend to things they don't like, such as guns.

By the aforementioned logic, we should give people more and more firearms, plus paper targets of children, to stop them shooting up schools. It's idiotic.

Variety: Striking Intellectualism

Its headline describes this disgusting "example of techno-pedophilia" as a "fraught sci-fi provocation" of "Striking intellectualism and icy formalism vie with a viscerally upsetting premise."

From writer Jessica Kiang, who describes the director as possessing a "lacerating intelligence":

In terms of daring, Wollner may even outstrip her countrymen: Her film’s eerie, glassy surface conceals deep cuts into ontology, memory, identity and our increasingly boundary-obliterating relationship to tech.

It’s inevitable that the more depraved elements of the story end up obscuring some of Wollner’s subtler ideas and it will be a hard task to get people to mull over ancillary issues in a film destined to be shorthanded to “the child sex-robot movie.”

https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/the-trouble-with-being-born-review-1203516473/

Again, it's a movie about a pedophile raping an AI child.

Child rape isn't a "premise". It's a crime even the worst predators in our prisons despise. They write about it as if it's a dish at a French restaurant. What is it with these people? Academics and bourgeoisie media liberals?

"The Melbourne International Film Festival decided to not screen the film at its 2020 festival, citing concerns raised by two forensic psychologists that it might "[normalise] sexual interest in children" and be "used as a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material". The decision to remove the film from the festival line-up was denounced by film critics Peter Krausz, Tom Ryan and David Stratton."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Being_Born_(film)

You think?

It's not that these films are in bad taste. It's that they provoke disgust.

Hollywood Reporter: A Hidden Gem

The Reporter thinks it's... daring. Its headline describes the film as a "Underage Robotic Provocation".

From British critic Alex Ritman:

Making such a film didn’t come without its difficulties, not least around the central role, played by the 10-year-old Lena Watson (a stage name inspired by her idol Emma Watson). Wollner admits she was initially “scared” about choosing a child for the part (she had originally planned to cast a 20-year-old but then changed her mind, rewriting the script and removing several more explicit elements).

Looking for Elli was — perhaps obviously — slightly removed from your average casting call, the filmmakers not merely wanting someone who suited the part but also a child, Wollner says, that “came from a healthy environment,” with the sort of open-minded family who would understand the story they wanted to tell and also allow them to do it.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/berlin-hidden-gem-underage-robotic-provocation-trouble-being-born-1280962/

Why be scared if you're doing nothing wrong? What was toned down from this script, exactly?

Again, it's a film about a pedophile.

Screen Daily: A Powerful and Revelatory Achievement

SD itself achieves the award for pretentious word salad in an extended review almost salivating at the perversion of this film, labelling it a "complex, artfully crafted, sometimes wilfully perplexing film delving boldly into questions of memory, gender, identity and indeed film language."

Huh?

From critic Jonathan Romney:

The narrative turns and changes of identity are combined with a complex and ever-shifting time scheme, so that we’re often unsure exactly what is happening, or from whose perspective events are seen. At one point, a considerably older Elli enters the frame (played by Jana McKinnon, from the director’s first film The Impossible Picture). Wollner’s tendency to build her narrative on quicksand rather than terra firma begins in the opening sequence, with a roaming camera apparently representing Elli’s point of view and she ultimately suggests that perhaps Elli has more than one self floating around this story. Eerie night scenes, with a forest and other locales pitched into barely penetrable darkness add to the cultivated indeterminacy.

https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-trouble-with-being-born-berlin-review/5148160.article

Yes, it's a film about a child being raped by a pedophile.

With this inability to write basic English, it's assuredly authored by another sociology "graduate".

The Fine Line Being Deliberately Crossed

Art is a mirror we hold up to ourselves. It indirectly provokes questions, and often confronts us with them. It holds a message and asks us to consider what the artist was thinking, demanding we respond to it.

Pedophilia is not off-limits as a subject of discussion. Nothing is. Depicting evil is crucial in recognising it as we do our best to learn from it and resist it. The actions of the evil, evil itself, and the results of evil are critical subjects of art.

But here we are, once again, forced to explain when art crosses the line into obscenity. "Destigmatising" child rape has been a coordinated theme from the social sciences for decades.

The English Common Law definition is ever-helpful:

For the purposes of this Act an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.

Obscene Publications Act 1959 (which goes right back to the Customs Consolidation Act 1876, Amendment Act 1887 (Importation of Indecent and Obscene Material)
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/7-8/66/section/1

In other words, would a pedophile be likely to jerk off to this, and/or would it stimulate sexual desire towards minors in its audience?

In the US, a specific test is applied to determine whether the 1st Amendment applies:

The U.S. Supreme Court established the test that judges and juries use to determine whether matter is obscene in three major cases: Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 24-25 (1973); Smith v. United States, 431 U.S. 291, 300-02, 309 (1977); and Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497, 500-01 (1987).  The three-pronged Miller test is as follows:

Whether the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, finds that the matter, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion);

Whether the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, finds that the matter depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse); and

Whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Any material that satisfies this three-pronged test may be found obscene.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-obscenity

In other words: does it appeal to pedophiles, and depict/imply kid-fucking?

The trades make it clear: watching this stirs uncomfortable feelings in the audience they need to "examine". Oh, really?

Obscenity is not art, no matter how cleverly it is packaged. Someone should re-clarify that to Takashi Miike, whose disgusting "films" include women urinating and defecating everywhere.

Is obscenity subjective? Yes; different cultures have differing moral standards of the day.

But we can get down with simple notion we do not need an "artistic exploration" of why raping children is wrong, and/or portraying pedophiles in a sympathetic light is offensive to the Man on the Clapham Omnibus.

There's nothing to learn here, apart from the fact Germany has been a moral cesspit for over a hundred years and the tradition continues apace.

Raping a child, whether it is an AI or not, is wrong. Script, done. Production complete. The audience is dumber and sicker for it. The ability to outrage people does not transform garbage into art, because it was nicely filmed on an Arri Alexa.