This Year’s It Kid
+ child stars of the once and future
Don’t miss this month’s analysis of the public villainy of Ben Affleck
For every year there is an It Kid. In 2020 it was Alan Kim from Minari. Before that it was the friend from Jojo Rabbit. 2016 was so bad that we got a bevy of It Kids from Stranger Things.
The It Kid is not an actor or a child: they are a symbol of childhood at its most ideal and innocent. They appear on red carpets as an oasis in the wealth-poisoned skulduggery of Hollywood and humanize the collective misery of the filmmaking machine. Unlike adult celebrities who migrate from notes app apology press tours to relatable front-facing camera content, these kids are too young to have the baggage of liking TERFy tweets. So they get to be a little prince of Hollywood for a few months before being dragged back into whatever hell child actors fight their way out of.
The modern prototype for the It Kid is Quvenzhané Wallis, who you will remember from 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, her puppy-shaped purses on red carpets, and the brutal misstep of a since-deleted Onion tweet where they called her a c***. I do not endorse calling children c***s but this tweet, and the backlash that ensued, is essential to understanding the role of the It Kid. The joke basically was: what if Wallis, a child who seemed more angel than human, was actually a vapid, horrifying, entitled diva–just like every other celebrity. Bitches, right?
This joke, done less crudely, would be fair game if Wallis were an adult with a bunch of films under her belt but Wallis was a little girl who wasn’t even on Twitter. The joke was not just inappropriate; it was an affront. Never mind Hollywood’s long history of rug-sweeping child abuse or the gross ways media routinely reports on barely post-pubescent girls. Kids, in the public eye, were sacred.
It's hard to say who the It Kid of 2021 was. Covid + the disintegration of the Golden Globes has shredded the pageant circuit for all film promotion, and the It Kid is hugely dependent on the public eye. The C’mon, C’mon kid and the Belfast kid would have been contenders (I did not see either movie) had the year been more normal. Frankly I would nominate Idlib, who is the friend from Old (I saw this movie twice in theaters), or Ada from Lamb (not a real person).
The early frontrunner for 2022 is Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, the kid in the almost absurdly tender After Yang, and I heartily endorse her reign. You only get one chance to be the king of the year, and after that you are relegated to the chum section of fake websites with the text YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE NOW scrawled across your angelic image.