Killing the messenger

Dakota Fanning gets raped in her next movie.\nDid that get your attention?\nThe film is called "Hounddog," and it will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next week. The movie features Fanning as Lewellen, a young girl who lives in a world dominated by a cycle of violence and abuse. \n"Hounddog" has received a large amount of attention since production began near Wilmington, N.C., last year, but little has come from its cinematic merits. Rather the film has been under attack by various socially conservative critics -- namely, Fox News and A Minor Consideration, a Web site run by child-actor advocate and veteran of the profession Paul Petersen.\nClaims have been made that the scene violates child-pornography laws, and petitions have been circulated calling for prosecution of the filmmakers.\nAlthough child pornography is an absolute abomination, that should not be the focus in this case. For one thing, "Hounddog" is not pornographic. A cut of the film was shown to a Wilmington district attorney, who gave the producers a clean bill of health. The writer and director of the film, Deborah Kampmeier, says that Fanning was treated appropriately, and Fanning corroborates that, as does her mother. Basically, Fanning's take has been that she is growing up and she can't just do movies like "Charlotte's Web" in perpetuity. \nOne could make the case that, at just under 13 years of age, Dakota Fanning is not yet ready to make this kind of decision. She's being exploited by the adults around her; she's being used to make money.\nBut Fanning said something that I agree with -- something that shows her maturity: "There are so many children that this (rape and abuse) happens to, every second. That's the sad part. If anyone's talking about anything, that's what they should be talking about."\nIt seems like too often in our society, the focus is on the media instead of reality. When a producer makes a movie in which a child is raped, people call for the head of the filmmakers and ignore the real-life rapists and abusers who are being prosecuted by the very law-enforcement officers who would arrest the producers. When Eminem produces a song about killing his ex-wife, he is the center of the uproar instead of the real men who beat their wives and children. When schools like my high school ban books such as Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," they concentrate on the obscenities used by characters in the book, not the horrors of war that cause young men to use those words.\nThis nation would be a lot better off if there were fewer entities like Fox News and the Federal Communications Commission condemning artists who use "objectionable content" to make a point, and more citizens ready to hear those artists and effect change in their world.\nFilmmakers, musicians and writers are not the problem, nor are they the source. They may not be the whole solution, either. The problem and the solution both lie within us -- in the real world.