Sexualized Innocence: Revisiting The Blue Lagoon | Chaz's Journal
Unfortunately, all this sex and subversion of virtue doesn’t add up to a secret feminist masterpiece. "The Blue Lagoon" is lovely to look at (it was shot by Nestor Almendros, who worked with such legendary directors as François Truffaut and Terrence Malick) but suffers from its eye-rolling dialogue and strange softcore-meets-survival-drama tone. And the sexualization of Shields would continue throughout 1980. Just a few months after the release of "The Blue Lagoon," she appeared in a series of ads for Calvin Klein Jeans, asking in the most notorious of the bunch, "You know what gets between me and my Calvins? Nothing." Citing concerns that the commercial verged on child pornography, CBS refused to air it, and ABC followed suit.
As a teen star, Shields was presented as a “good girl” whose famously strong brows offset her delicate features. Her public image, even when she was generating controversy, still projected a borderline ridiculous level of naïveté. In a 1982 interview published in Scavullo Women, a book of beauty tips, she was quoted as saying, “I’m totally against all kinds of drugs. Even cigarettes. I get my quote-unquote highs from other things: babies, guitar music, animals”—and this was two years after she starred in this horny teen opus. Was there a wink in this statement, a trace of irony in its saccharine quality? It’s hard to say, and when considering that Shields was paid to be beautiful from her birth (her first brush with stardom came via an Ivory Soap ad as a baby), one can’t help but wonder about her level of self-awareness.
Hollywood is littered with stories of child stardom’s dangers, but even with the questionable sexualizing of her pure loveliness, Shields seemed remarkably well-adjusted. “There’s never been a time when I’ve said I just wanted to be a kid, because all along I have been just a kid,” she said in the same interview. This presentation of real-life innocence makes the onscreen presentation of "The Blue Lagoon"’s innocent/horny mélange feel unsavory. As Emmeline, Shields’ innocence turns into an overripe sexual fantasy. The fact that she doesn’t know exactly what sex is is supposed to make you feel better about watching her have it. Such logic was flimsy enough nearly 40 years ago, and feels even worse today. In her heyday, which just happened to coincide with the tail end of second-wave feminism, Shields seemed both younger and older than she was. "The Blue Lagoon" is nothing if not a cinematic version of Britney Spears’ “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” twenty-some years before the fact.
