Scripturalization, the Production of the Biblical Israel, and the Gay Antichrist

Abstract

“Do you ever think about the term ‘Homeland Security’? I mean really think about it?” asks Larry of Brad in Todd Field’s 2006 film Little Children, based on Tom Perrotta’s 2004 novel of the same title (Perrotta co-authored the screenplay of the film). Larry is a former police officer, forced into retirement due to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after mistakenly shooting a teenager in a shopping mall. He is now spending his time persecuting a convicted sex offender, Ronnie McGorvey, who, having recently been released from prison, has moved in with his mother in the quiet suburb in which Larry and his family live. Larry justifies his attacks on Ronnie by appeal to a supposedly unimpeachable moral claim with an implicit grounding in a transcendent but unspecified authority which justifies an exception to the law: “Protect the children!” This particular appeal to an exception is fuelled by a fear of dangerous sexuality that Larry shares with a group of middle-class mothers who gather each day with their children at a local playground, their own fears managed and assuaged by a combination of their own highly regimented sexual lives, regulated within the framework of the patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family, their outspoken desire for the sexual predator in their midst to be violently emasculated, and their coy fascination with “the Prom king” Brad—named Todd in the novel—a mesmerisingly handsome young father who visits the playground each day with his son. Underlying their unspoken fears are the fissures and fractures within the emotional and sexual lives of each of these characters: the unhappy marriages of the three young mothers (Mary Ann’s in particular, in the novel) and of Sarah (the fourth and odd-one-out among the mothers at the playground who resists her companions’ vitriol against Ronnie), the gender instabilities of Brad’s marriage to Kathy, who is the family breadwinner, and Brad’s secret fear that Larry is sexually attracted to him. In the background, perhaps more clearly in the film than the novel, are tensions around private and public space driven by tacit assumptions