I’m watching Season Two of The Last of Us (there will be no spoilers in this piece!) over the summer with some friends, and we get to a part including an on-screen ritual disembowelment. A child character watches the ritual disembowelment, then stares another character down and makes a slicing motion across his stomach as if drawing one of the curved ritual sickles across it. I remember being completely jolted out of the show as I realized that even if somehow they shielded that child actor from actually seeing the SFX organs spilling out of a strung-up SFX human being, they still had to direct that child to make that motion across his stomach as if cutting into himself, right next to an actor holding a weapon, probably telling him to “look like he was threatening to kill someone” or some similar stage direction. I remember thinking that there’s no way this 8-ish year old child could have understood the impact of this role even if he did personally consent (as opposed to a caretaker making the decision) to act in The Last of Us, and, much like the victims of family vlogging on social media, I wondered whether he would grow up to watch this show back and wonder why in the world his caretakers let that happen to him.
And even if this child does not sustain long-lasting mental trauma, why is he working? We don’t think about this phenomenon enough. We have child labor laws for a reason; children are easily exploited and should therefore not be working at all, instead focusing on school and brain development. The money is also an issue; generally, parents are in charge of almost the entirety of any payment, and are also in control of signing the child up for events and acting roles. This situation, as I’m sure is obvious, could very easily turn abusive; children cannot stand up for themselves, but are tasked with working a job and making money which the parents then mostly keep. The child does not have a genuine capability to consent to any of this because of their young age and inability to understand the full consequences of what they are agreeing to.
So what am I saying? Should we only have adult actors – no movies with children in them in any capacity? Yes, that is pretty much my point. I think our only ethical options in the acting world are either for adults to act the roles of children or for CGI and motion capturing to be used for any child roles necessary. We could also do animated productions with adult voice actors.
Wouldn’t this make the productions cheesy and obviously fake? Maybe. I don’t really care. Personal entertainment isn’t everything, and we certainly shouldn’t be sacrificing ethical treatment of children for a limited believability increase in a production we already all know is fictional. I’ll take a slightly uncanny valley CGI Renesmee (don’t search that name up unless you’ve already watched Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1) over a real little boy making a disembowelment gesture over his own stomach in exchange for money that will be kept by his caretakers any day, and really, so should we all.