The Night of the Hunter: Redefining "Childlike Innocence"

The veneration of children as a reservoir of evergreen purity is a thread that informs much of modern storytelling, both in the entertainment arena as well as the political one.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

    The media likes to cast children as vessels of uncompromised goodness that adults could only ever hope to emulate. This is interesting since most theories on children’s moral development actually posit that humans don’t internalize principles until they are in adulthood, if ever. Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development traced out childhood as a time where individuals judge morality largely on reward vs punishment. Still, their purity forms the bedrock of the conversation.

Because the future hinges upon their innocence, efforts to preserve their unblemished state can go to any length. You can justify any number of actions as long as you are doing it “for the children.” The incentive to ban the teaching of critical race theory and the history of slavery in the U.S. in public schools, for example, is often done under the guise of protecting children from the darkness of the world, whatever the actual agendas of the adults behind such movements. This is why some media scholars, like Henry Jenkins, adopt the stance that childhood innocence is mostly a construct invented for and weaponized by adults. 

None of us were really self-aware enough to measure at the time whether we had a greater reserve of virtue as kindergartners, and I don’t know if any of us as adults really know how to access the mindset of our childhood now. But I do think it is curious that the conversation has cast children as the height of society when they are its most vulnerable members. So perhaps it is less important to argue whether children come prepackaged with an abundant reserve of moral goodness that can weather any assault than it is to ask whether adults are doing their part to actually protect the children in their charge.

Which brings us to Charles Laughton’s 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter. 

Though this film was received with little fanfare in its time, it is widely recognized today as a masterpiece, and there are a number of reasons why. If there were only one film that made the case for black and white movies (there definitely isn’t), it would be this one. Here, the competing lights and darks amplify the overarching conflict between good and evil at work in this story. This also offers some telling shots of our antagonist, the malevolent Reverend Powell, wearing all black in settings where everyone else is wearing light colors that reveal Powell as this carrier or darkness in this world. Because at its heart, the film is a look at the nature of good and evil and where children fit into it.

The Night of the Hunter both indulges in this mindset of childhood innocence while also demystifying it. On the one hand, the film leans hard into the notion that children are these living temples of goodness. The film’s final scene has Lilian Gish's character remarking to herself, “When you're little, you have more endurance than God is ever able to grant you again. Children are man at his strongest. They abide.” That sentiment isn’t itself anything new. What makes this film’s thesis on childhood so remarkable is how it exposes the irony of the way childhood innocence emerges despite the involvement of adults, not because of it.

As vulnerable members of society, children need to be protected, yes, but in a world that treats children as a sort of status symbol, the most dangerous force threatening most children is adult indifference. At a glance, this might sound like soft artillery, but as a child, is there anything more frightening than the possibility that the people who are supposed to protect you might choose not to simply because it is inconvenient? 

    There’s a scene in the movie, for example, when the bad guy has our child protagonist alone in the house and is trying to pressure him and his little sister to give up a secret. This looming figure says these words to the eight-year-old: “Speak, or I'll cut your throat and leave you to drip like a hog hung up in butcherin' time.” This is probably the most terrifying thing a child can hear from the baritone chords of Robert Mitchum, even if your face isn’t stuffed on top of a barrel with the blade of a knife on your neck. But it’s even more frightening because the audience knows that if he were to tell a grown-up that a well-loved member of society said these words to him, they would not believe him. The child is entirely helpless in this situation.

            Here, childhood isn’t a tranquil garden. It’s a battlefield. If children are in fact helpless, it is because they are left to fend for themselves by systems that claim to defend them from malicious forces.

So today we’re going to use The Night of the Hunter as a springboard for our discussion on childhood innocence: where does it come from, and what actually threatens it? I also want to survey the way that some of the best “children’s stories” are themselves not thought to be appropriate for children. And to help assuage some of our adult guilt, we’ll parse through some thoughts about how adults can make the world a place that is genuinely safer for children. 

Intro to Night of the Hunter

  At the heart of this story are two children, John and Pearl, living on the riverbank during The Great Depression. Their world is changed when their father robs $10,000 from the bank, killing two men in the process. Their father hides the money in Pearl’s doll, forcing both of them to swear to never tell anyone where the money is hidden.

            The driving force in this film is that of a ruthlessly cold-hearted murderer, Harry Powell, who wanders along the Mississippi river under the guise of a noble preacher. He marries helpless widows and then kills them for their money, all the while under the belief that he is doing God’s will. When Powell catches scent of the money, he makes John and Pearl’s widowed mother his next target. 

    The community at large is instantly taken by Powell’s charisma and commanding presence, while John is immediately distrustful of his surface-level gentility. His suspicions are quickly proven right as Powell starts to pressure John into telling him where the money is hidden. John is resolute, but Powell only encroaches further, even convincing John and Pearl’s mother to marry him, only to kill her once she grows too close to the truth. Powell fabricates a story about her running off, and the town immediately hails him as a salvific figure for taking in her kids, and suddenly there is nothing standing between Powell and the children. 

Powell torments John and Pearl until Pearl confesses that the money is hidden in the doll, but John and Pearl make an escape and flee down the river in a small raft. They are eventually found by an elderly woman named Rachel Cooper whose home has become a refuge for orphaned children. Rachel takes both of them in and keeps them safe for a time, but Powell eventually closes in on John and Pearl. He attempts to invade Rachel’s safehouse in the middle of the night, but Rachel holds her ground. Powell is in time brought to justice, and John and Pearl are finally free to live their lives in peace.

           The film has been described as a fairy-tale set in the real world, and even in the film’s darkest moments, there is a sense of magic to the film. Arguably the film’s most iconic sequence has John and Pearl drifting down the river after escaping from Powell, and it’s here that you see the film’s blending of childlike innocence with the realities of a dark and unforgiving world. You’ll get these really haunting shots that have small creatures like frogs or dragonflies really close to the camera, magnifying their size relative to the raft far out in the river and creating this distorted landscape that feels caught halfway between a dream and a nightmare. (This becomes a theme within the film’s cinematography, which constantly likens both John and Pearl to rabbits or birds or some small helpless thing in a world that is large and full of predators.) And so the film creates this really fascinating meeting ground that displays the terror of this situation while still coloring it with a childlike sense of wonder.

The film’s tone and subject matter don’t type it as what we often think of as a “children’s film,” yet this film really captures a specific facet of what it means to be a small thing in a world that is frightening, both because of the monsters that live there and the adults who fail to protect them from the monsters.

Let’s start by asking the big question at hand.

Why Do Adults Suck?

Beasts of No Nation (2015)

Part of the media’s worship of the moral purity of children can be traced to an adult envy of the way children are free of the burden of having to earn their keep. In theory, children have all their needs met by their parents and do not have to brave the social, political, and economic battlefield to stay afloat the way their parents do. In stories that do feature children being forced into taking disturbing actions out of self-preservation, the shock factor is magnified by our context of children being incapable of such moral depravity by virtue of their innocence. By design, adults are more in a position to take an "ends justify the means" mindset that opens the doors to moral shortcuts or compromises.

For adults, staying a part of the economy entails a lot of things. Actually attaining work is only the first step. You have to continually renew your good-standing in society by proving to everyone else that you still belong in the game. In a perfect society, this would be as simple as just doing your job well, or just being a good person, but that’s not the world we live in. You have to say the right things and to the right people. Staying in touch with the “in” group can compel a person to comply with any number of absurdities or paradoxes if that’s how the whims of the ruling party sway. 

     The Emperor’s New Clothes folktale by Hans Christian Anderson models this dynamic clearly. In this story, the pressure to prove that one is special motivates not only an entire kingdom but also the king himself to believe that there are invisible clothes which can only be perceived by the most elite. It takes a child, unencumbered with the need to prove one’s status, to point out that the king is actually naked.

    You also often see this phenomenon parodied in sitcoms where the characters have to put on some embarrassing charade in order to advance or even just hold onto their career. Pick an episode of FRIENDS or New Girl, and if the conflict isn’t about a one-night stand, it’s about adults having to abase themselves to keep their paycheck. This scenario is often played for laughs, but there is a real darkness to this model as well.

    Adults will go along with almost anything if it keeps them on the lifeboat. Meanwhile, children remain subject to a state of helplessness by the simple fact that for the adults in their lives, it does not advance their station to believe them in their cries for help. If it comes down to protecting those most in need of their help or keeping staying with the in-group, children are almost always left wanting by adults. This is exactly what happens with John and Pearl when the big bad wolf comes knocking.

           Powell assimilates into society so well because he has learned how to play into society’s preconceptions of prosperity and elitism. His made-up gospel is the “new clothes” that only the most sophisticated are supposedly able to see. They don’t want to see this man as anything but upstanding because he has them convinced he will lead them to heaven. It is by this logic that the adults in Powell’s crowd convince themselves that this charismatic, eloquent stranger is a worthy tether. They fall for his con, hook, line, and sinker. John sees through Powell because he has no interest in status or his own elevation. 

But one thing that makes The Night of the Hunter stand apart from other media depictions of children is that it doesn’t draw a straight line between literal children and this kind of purity. The character of Pearl has fascinated me since my first viewing of the film for how she appears to derail the film’s entire thesis on children and innocence. As the younger of the two children, you’d think that Pearl would be even more in touch with this transcendent innocence that seems so intrinsic to childhood, but even though she can’t be older than five, Pearl seems to be already infected with a sort of worldliness. Pearl is constantly seeking after the approval of adults who gift her sweets or tell her what a sweet little doll she is, and she is also the child who is always one step away from telling Powell where the money is.

What we learn from Pearl is that innocence can be stamped out of a child if the adults in their environment condition them a certain way. Pearl has been trained to seek after the approval of adults who care little for her interior life and just see her as this little doll they can dress up. Yet even as Pearl’s world has fitted her to be a little adult, she is still naive to the predations of forces that would do her harm, which leaves her vulnerable to someone like Powell. None of this is really Pearl’s fault, she is doing exactly what her culture has conditioned her to do, and it only further reveals how adults disempower children through their pursuit of status.

    Pearl’s characterization makes further sense when you look at her mother, Willa. She has little sense of autonomy or even individuality, and, perversely, this is exactly why she thrives so well in her corner of society. Her community prizes passive wifehood as the ultimate aspiration for a woman, leaving little space for individual identity. Willa actually does voice some discontent about falling in with Powell so quickly, but the film shows how Willa’s social system actively discourages her from listening to her own internal warning systems. Why should she question why this handsome stranger wants to graft her to him so suddenly? So Willa does exactly what her community expects of her, which is tragically very little, and this ultimately plays into her downfall.

In media that looks honestly at the plight of children, a recurring theme is the way in which children become casualties in the wars waged by adults, often having to pay for the sins of their fathers themselves. John becomes the inheritor of his father’s cross when his father makes him promise to never tell where he hid the stolen money. John’s father may have stolen this money with the intent of protecting his kids, but the fact remains that if he had not stuffed Pearl’s doll with all that money, Powell would have never gone after John and Pearl. This comes back to the way that the pursuit of money, even when done in the name of children, creates a world that is perilous most to the children who are least prepared to defend themselves.

The Paradox of Children's Films

When you think about what children in this world are expected to endure, it is telling that some of the most striking film depictions of childhood are themselves not “appropriate” for children. That's not a slight against the Moanas of the film world, but movies like The Night of the Hunter reveal the paradox of childhood innocence and childhood resilience.

           This is a common thread that Guillermo del Toro likes to track in his movies, Pan’s Labyrinth being a prime example. This film sees a young girl, Ofelia, in 1940s Spain coming of age against the backdrop of civil war. Ofelia and her mother move into the home of her new stepfather, the heartless Captain Vidal, just as he’s on the precipice of crushing the rebellion, and it’s there that she discovers the gateway to a magical underworld. This world is enchanting, yes, but it’s also filled with frightening creatures. The hanging irony being is that the underworld of fairy-eating monsters is not nearly as frightening as the “real world” Ofelia lives in, one that allows monsters like Captain Vidal to come into positions of power. (Incidentally, Del Toro has also listed The Night of the Hunter specifically as one of the greatest influences on his work.) 

Pan’s Labyrinth and The Night of the Hunter also touch on another obstacle faced by children. They are vulnerable by virtue of their lack of experience with the real world, as well as their inability to grasp abstract topics, but they are also disadvantaged by existing in a world where they are expected to sit still and not raise their voice. They are chastened for speaking against the prevailing authority, even when the prevailing authority is wrong or even wicked. John is chastised both by his mother and the other adults in the community for being cold to Powell while Ofelia’s mother doesn’t understand why Ofelia is constantly reading those fairy-tale books.

Netflix' A Series of Unfortunate Events

    Popular media has created a whole subgenre of children’s stories wherein disobedience is a duty, almost a rite of passage. In these stories, the child characters come up against the bland conformity so readily embraced by adulthood and are put in positions where they can reject it or accept it at the expense of their soul, possibly their safety. At the start, these children may even make bids for help from the adults in their support system only to be left unattended, often because the adults do not wish to believe them. 

     And this is where there is some credence to the idea that children may in fact be morally superior to adults, but the kind of moral lifeblood embodied by characters like John or Ofelia doesn’t come from “innocence,” from having never experienced anything trying. They were good in spite of the machinations of the adults in their life. 

This makes sense in the context of learning to question power structures, but it isn’t an especially encouraging model when you consider that even the most honest child is going to grow up one day to become an adult. 

So, is there a way for a person to grow into the world of adults without losing their soul?

Childhood and Faith

    I want to talk about “faith” as a facet of childhood because that is a virtue often linked as innately childlike. Stephen King’s IT puts forth the idea that children are in many ways stronger than adults because as kids they are more willing to believe in things. They haven’t been hardened by the economic systems that may advance one’s social standing but deaden one’s idealistic impulses. Indeed, treading water in the unforgiving current of the adult economy is enough to make anyone cynical. And so it makes sense that “faith” would feature in a film about the endurance of children. But this film presents faith both in a strictly moral sense as well as a religious sense.

           If you’re like me, you’re maybe a little tired of seeing the religious figure always portrayed as a menace (or else an oaf) in mainstream media. And some Christian groups did protest the film upon its first release, but as a practicing believer, this movie has never struck me as being antagonistic toward religion. (Neither, I think, does the film look down on or exclude those who profess no faith.)  The film exposes how religious language can be twisted to serve wicked ends, but its treatise is also a lot more nuanced than certain groups were willing to give credit in its day.

For one thing, the film differentiates between faith and blind faith. John embodies faith, loyalty to a truth that is not readily discernible to the temporal eye but reveals itself through earnest searching. You see this in the way he chooses to oppose Powell and also take care of his sister through their trial despite receiving little support or validation from his environment. Meanwhile, the adults, specifically the ones who fall for Powell, demonstrate a blind faith in Powell simply because he makes them feel elect.

           But it’s the inclusion of Lillian Gish’s character that really makes all the difference. Rachel Cooper is not a person of religious authority, but she is a practicing believer and drops scripture almost conversationally, and not in the dainty parodic way you see almost uniformly in contemporary media. Unlike Powell who preaches the gospel of flattery, Rachel Cooper actually emulates Christ through her actions. She becomes a sort of haven for forgotten and abandoned children, including John and Pearl. She may not always be warm or gentle, but she does genuinely care for the children in her charge. Through her, you see what it looks like when religious living does what it sets out to do.

            That Rachel emerges as a vessel of genuine goodness makes sense in the context of how adults are painted in this film. Unlike the larger network of adults that John and Pearl are trapped in, Rachel gives very little concern to worldliness. As an unmarried woman of her age living in the 1930s, one who presumably manages her farm by herself, she is transgressing society’s space for her. She doesn’t appear to aspire to great wealth. She’s not out to elevate herself. She’s not trying to impress anyone. She’s here to protect those who can’t protect herself. This is also why she is so quick to recognize Powell for what he is. Unlike the adults who chided John for calling out Powell, Rachel believes John’s accusations and becomes their fiercest defender. One could say she has faith in John.

The secret about childlike purity is that it doesn’t have to disappear entirely once a person crosses the threshold of adulthood. Certainly, playing the game becomes a little harder once you have to navigate a system that rewards sycophancy over altruism. We can assume that Rachel has had some trial and error along the way (there is some subtext about Rachel being estranged from her adult children), but her emergence as a guardian to the children is encouraging to those of us looking how to not just be good but be champions of little things.

Conclusion

Society has a real hot-and-cold reaction toward childhood. On the one hand, most political battles are fought on the backs of children. At the same time “reclaiming childhood,” often reads as deliberately frustrating the maturation process in some way. The process has also accrued some consumerist undertones which tend to turn people off of the whole idea. (Golly, if only someone would write an essay about the healthy consumption of nostalgic properties in a capitalist-driven world …)

Stand By Me (1986)

    I think this is a mistake because even once you’re bogged into the swamp of adulthood, there is value in asking yourself why there ever was such moral envy of children to begin with and trying to find ways to bring that light into your life. Because I don’t think it’s as simple as kids being more naive or blissfully ignorant. Neither do I think that the solution is as simple as buying more plushy toys. It has more to do with returning to a mindset where being nice and honest just felt more natural.

  Anyone who lives long enough to make it to adulthood is inevitably forced into the battleground of moral compromise and monsters, but we can be mindful in how we play this game. We can choose to be good over socially desirable. We can avoid playing into the hands of the Harry Powells of the world. We can advocate for a world where children are not made to prove their goodness before their time--and not against monsters whom adults have a responsibility to fight against. 

At some point, the walls that protected us as children are inevitably going to fall down and we all have to confront the natural evils of the world. We can’t help that. We can’t even control when they fall or whether we are “ready” when it happens. What we can control is whether we carry that goodness with us and whether we leave the way better for the children who walk the path after us. And I think a part of that starts with recognizing their humanity.

            --The Professor