“小甜甜”布兰妮和我：被好莱坞毁掉的女童星
The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls
玛拉·威尔逊
2021年2月25日
I spent my 13th birthday locked in a hotel room in Toronto.
我的13岁生日是关在多伦多一家酒店房间里度过的。
It was July 2000, and I was on a press tour to promote the movie “Thomas and the Magic Railroad.” I had been promised a day off for my birthday, but when I arrived from Los Angeles the night before, I learned I would be talking to reporters all day. Working on my birthday wasn’t new to me — I had celebrated my eighth birthday on the set of “Matilda” and my ninth filming “A Simple Wish” — but this was still disappointing. Aside from a nanny, I was alone.
那是2000年7月，我在为电影《魔幻铁路历险记》(Thomas and the Magic Railroad)做巡回宣传。尽管我已得到许诺，生日那天不工作，但当我头天晚上从洛杉矶飞过来后，我得知，生日的一整天都排满了记者采访。虽然在生日那天工作对我来说并不新鲜——我的八岁生日是在《玛蒂尔达》(Matilda)拍摄现场庆祝的，九岁生日是在《脱线教父》(A Simple Wish)拍摄现场过的——但这次仍然令人扫兴。除了保姆，只有我一人。
The next morning I got up, groggy from jet lag, and put on my best Forever 21 attire. Two press coordinators checked in before I started my interview: Did I want the air off, or a soda? I said I was fine — I didn’t want to get a reputation as a complainer. But when the journalist asked how I was feeling, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I told her the truth.
第二天早上，虽然因为时差，我仍昏昏沉沉的，但我起了床，穿上了从Forever 21买来的最好的衣服。两名媒体协调员在采访开始之前到房间里看了一下：要不要关上空调，还是来杯苏打水？我说我什么都不需要——我不想给人留下爱抱怨的名声。但当记者问我感觉如何时，我犯了我一生中一个最大的错误。我对她说了实话。
I don’t know why I opened up to her. But I had never been good at hiding my feelings. (Acting, to me, is very different from lying.) And she seemed like she really cared.
我不知道我为什么对她敞开了心扉。但我从来都不善于隐瞒我的内心感觉。（对我来说，演戏与撒谎截然不同。）她看上去似乎真的关心我。
The next day, Canada’s newspaper of record put me on the front page of its entertainment section. The article began, “The interview hasn’t even begun with Mara Wilson, Child Star, and she’s complaining to her staff.”
第二天，加拿大最重要的报纸把我放在了娱乐版的头条。文章在开头写道：“对童星玛拉·威尔逊(Mara Wilson)的采访还没开始，她就已在对她的手下不停地抱怨了。”
The article went on to describe me as a “spoiled brat” who was now “at midlife.” It described the dark paths child stars like me often went down. It embraced what I now refer to as “The Narrative,” the idea that anyone who grew up in the public eye will meet some tragic end.
那篇文章接下来把我描述为一个现已“人到中年”的“被宠坏的少年得志者”。它描述了像我这样的童星常常走上的不愉快道路，采用了我现在称为“标准叙事”的说法，即任何在公众视线中长大的人都将以某种悲剧性的结局告终。
At 13, I already knew all about The Narrative. As an actor from the age of 5, who was carrying films by age 8, I’d been trained to seem, to be, as normal as possible — whatever it took to avoid my inevitable downfall. I shared a bedroom with my little sister. I went to public school. I was a Girl Scout. When someone called me a “star” I was to insist that I was an actor, that the only stars were in the sky. Nobody would touch the money I made until I turned 18. But I was now 13, and I was already ruined. Just like everyone expected.
13岁的我已经知道这个“标准叙事”的全部内容。我从五岁起开始当演员，八岁开始主演电影，我早已被训练得看上去或者说表现得尽可能正常，无论如何也要避免我必然的身败名裂下场。我和妹妹共用一间卧室。我上的是公立学校。我参加了女童子军。每当有人称我为“明星”时，我都坚持说我是演员，并说星星只是天上才有。在我18岁之前没人会碰我挣的钱。但我13岁了，已经被毁掉了。正如大家所料。
There’s one line from the article that jumps out at me now, amid the agents saying 12-year-olds needed to be “innocent-looking” and like an “Ivory Snow girl” to get cast and the lurid descriptions of child stars struggling with addiction. The writer had asked me what I thought of Britney Spears. Apparently, I replied that I “hated” her.
那篇文章里有句话现在尤其引起我的注意，文章引用经纪人的话说，12岁的孩子需要有“天真无邪的样子”，得是“象牙那样白的雪姑娘”，才能被选派上角色，文章里还有童星如何与毒瘾作斗争的耸人听闻描述。记者问我如何看布兰妮·斯皮尔斯(Britney Spears)。显然，我的回答是我“讨厌”她。
I didn’t actually hate Britney Spears. But I would never have admitted to liking her. There was a strong streak of “Not Like the Other Girls” in me at the time, which feels shameful now — although hadn’t I had to believe that, when I’d spent so much of my childhood auditioning against so many other girls? Some of it was pure jealousy, that she was beautiful and cool in a way I’d never be. I think mostly, I had already absorbed the version of The Narrative surrounding her.
其实我并不讨厌布兰妮·斯皮尔斯。但说我喜欢她绝对不会是实话。当时的我有一种强烈的“不喜欢其他女孩”的性格，让现在的我感到惭愧，虽然说把童年的那么多时间花在试镜、与那么多女孩争角色上的我，没有那种想法才怪呢。其中有些纯粹是嫉妒，比如我永远不会像她那样漂亮和酷。但我觉得更多的是，我已经接受了围绕着她的“标准叙事”。
The way people talked about Britney Spears was terrifying to me then, and it still is now. Her story is a striking example of a phenomenon I’ve witnessed for years: Our culture builds these girls up just to destroy them. Fortunately people are becoming aware of what we did to Ms. Spears and starting to apologize to her. But we’re still living with the scars.
人们谈论布兰妮·斯皮尔斯的方式当时曾让我害怕，现在也是这样。她的故事是我多年目睹的一种现象的突出例子：我们的文化打造出这些女孩，只是为了毁掉她们。幸运的是，人们开始意识到我们对斯皮尔斯干下的事情，并开始向她道歉。但我们仍生活在创伤之中。
By 2000, Ms. Spears had been labeled a “Bad Girl.” Bad Girls, I observed, were mostly girls who showed any sign of sexuality. I followed the uproar over her Rolling Stone magazine cover story, where the first line described her “honeyed thigh,” and the furor on AOL message boards when her nipples showed through her shirt. I saw many teenage actresses and singers embracing sexuality as a rite of passage, appearing on the covers of lad mags or in provocative music videos. That was never going to be me, I decided.
2000年时，斯皮尔斯已被贴上了“坏女孩”的标签。我注意到，坏女孩大多是那些展现出性感迹象的女孩。我关注了《滚石》(Rolling Stone)杂志上她的封面故事引发的轩然大波，文章的第一句话中就有对她“蜜色大腿”的描述，以及美国在线(AOL)留言板上对她的乳头透过衬衫可见的群情激愤。我看到许多十几岁的女演员和女歌手把拥抱性感作为人生重要阶段的标志，她们出现在男青年杂志的封面上，或出现在撩人的音乐视频中。我决定，我永远不会那样做。
I had already been sexualized anyway, and I hated it. I mostly acted in family movies — the remake of “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Matilda,” “Mrs. Doubtfire.” I never appeared in anything more revealing than a knee-length sundress. This was all intentional: My parents thought I would be safer that way. But it didn’t work. People had been asking me, “Do you have a boyfriend?” in interviews since I was 6. Reporters asked me who I thought the sexiest actor was and about Hugh Grant’s arrest for soliciting a prostitute. It was cute when 10-year-olds sent me letters saying they were in love with me. It was not when 50-year-old men did. Before I even turned 12, there were images of me on foot fetish websites and photoshopped into child pornography. Every time, I felt ashamed.
尽管我已经被性化了，而我非常讨厌那点。我出演的主要是家庭电影中的角色：新版《34街奇迹》、《玛蒂尔达》、《窈窕奶爸》（Mrs. Doubtfire)。我从没穿过比及膝连衣裙更暴露的服装。这都是有意的做法：我父母认为那样会更安全。但那并不管用。自从我六岁起，就一直有人在采访时问我，“你有男朋友吗？”记者问我，我认为谁是最性感的演员，还问我有关休·格兰特(Hugh Grant)因召妓被捕的事情。10岁的男孩子们给我写信说他们爱上了我，这是可爱。但50岁的男人们这样做就完全不同了。我还不到12岁的时候，我的照片就已经上了恋足癖网站，被PS到儿童色情图片上。每次看到这些东西，我都感到无地自容。
Hollywood has resolved to tackle harassment in the industry, but I was never sexually harassed on a film set. My sexual harassment always came at the hands of the media and the public.
虽然好莱坞已下决心解决这个行业的性骚扰问题，但我从来没有在电影拍摄现场受到过性骚扰。对我的性骚扰总是来自媒体和公众。
A big part of The Narrative is the assumption that famous kids deserve it. They asked for this by becoming famous and entitled, so it’s fine to attack them. In fact, The Narrative often has far less to do with the child than with the people around them. MGM was giving Judy Garland pills to stay awake and lose weight when she was in her early teens. The former child actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed stalker. Drew Barrymore, who went to rehab as a young teenager, had an alcoholic father and a mother who took her to Studio 54 instead of school. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of abuse nonwhite actors, particularly Black actors, get from the public. Amandla Stenberg was harassed after being cast in “The Hunger Games” as a character that had been written as Black, but whom some readers of the book series had imagined as white.
“标准叙事”的一个重要部分是，出了名的孩子被这样对待是应得的。这是他们通过出名和享受特权自己找来的麻烦，所以攻击他们是可以接受的。事实上，“标准叙事”讲述的东西与孩子的关系不大，而与孩子周围的人关系更大。米高梅公司(MGM)给十几岁的朱迪·加兰(Judy Garland)药吃，让她别睡着，还让她减肥。曾经当过童星的丽贝卡·希弗(Rebecca Schaeffer)被一个痴迷她的跟踪者谋杀。十几岁时就去过戒毒所的德鲁·巴里摩尔(Drew Barrymore)的父亲酗酒，母亲带她去Studio 54，而不是去上学。这还一点都不包括非白人演员，尤其是黑人演员受到的来自公众的辱骂。阿曼德拉·斯坦伯格(Amandla Stenberg)被选派了《饥饿游戏》(The Hunger Games)中的一个角色后受到骚扰，因为尽管这个角色本来就是黑人，但这部系列小说的一些读者把其想象成了白人。
The saddest thing about Ms. Spears’s “breakdown” is that it never needed to happen. When she split with her husband, shaved her head and furiously attacked a paparazzi car with an umbrella, the Narrative was forced upon her, but the reality was she was a new mother dealing with major life changes. People need space, time and care to deal with those things. She had none of that.
有关斯皮尔斯的“崩溃”最可悲的事情是，这完全没有必要发生。当她与丈夫离异、把头发剃光、用雨伞猛击狗仔队的车时，人们把“标准叙事”强加于她，但现实是，她刚当了妈妈，要应对重大的生活变化。人们需要处理这些事情的空间、时间和关怀。没有人给她这些。
Many moments of Ms. Spears’s life were familiar to me. We both had dolls made of us, had close friends and boyfriends sharing our secrets and had grown men commenting on our bodies. But my life was easier not only because I was never tabloid-level famous, but because unlike Ms. Spears, I always had my family’s support. I knew that I had money put away for me, and it was mine. If I needed to escape the public eye, I vanished — safe at home or school.
斯皮尔斯人生中的许多时刻对我来说一点也不陌生。我们都看到过用我们的样子做的娃娃，都有过亲密朋友和男友把我们的秘密告诉世界的事情，也都听到过成年男人对我们的身体品头论足。但我的生活更容易，不仅因为我从来没出过那种小报上的名，也因为和斯皮尔斯不同，我一直有家人的支持。我知道有为我积蓄的钱，那是我的钱。如果我需要从公众视线中逃脱出来，我会消失——安全地呆在家里或学校里。
When the article that referred to me as a brat was published, my father was sympathetic. He reminded me to be more positive and gracious in interviews, but I could tell he also didn’t think it was fair. He knew I was more than what that journalist wrote about me. That helped me to know it too.
那篇把我称作没有规矩的人的文章登出来后，父亲很同情我。他提醒我在接受采访时要更正面、更有礼貌地回答问题，但我看得出来，他也觉得那篇文章不公平。他知道我不是那个记者写的那种人。这也帮我知道了这一点。
Sometimes people ask me, “How did you end up OK?” Once, someone I’d considered a friend asked, with a big smile, “How does it feel to know you’ve peaked?” I didn’t know how to answer, but now I would say that’s the wrong question. I haven’t peaked, because for me, The Narrative isn’t a story someone else is writing anymore. I can write it myself.
有时人们问我，“你是怎么做到没出事儿的？”有一次，一个我曾认为是朋友的人笑容满面地问我：“知道自己已经达到了顶峰是种什么感觉？”我当时不知道如何回答，但我现在会说，这是一个错误的问题。我还没有达到顶峰，因为对我来说，我的叙事不再由别人来写。我自己也能写。
