Misanthrope's Corner.(the book 'Blue Lagoon,' and the two films it inspired)

NR's anti-porn issue breathed new life into an old idea I've been mulling over for a long time, so here it is: The Blue Lagoon Syndrome.

Everyone has seen the 1980 movie with Brooke Shields, but few remember the 1949 British version starring Jean Simmons, and hardly anyone has read the 1908 novel on which the movies were based. But taken together, along with the sniggering 1991 spin-off, Return to the Blue Lagoon, they offer a case study of our era's defining paradox: Sex isn't sexy.

The novel was written by Henry de Vere Stacpoole (1863-1931), an Anglo- Irishman who sailed the world as a ship's doctor before turning his hand to popular literature.

Essentially a hack, his only bestseller was The Blue Lagoon. Set in Victorian times, it's the story of two upper-middle-class cousins, Emmeline and Dick, both eight, who survive a shipwreck and are marooned on a South Sea island with an old salt named Paddy, the ship's carpenter. Knowing himself to be ill, and sensing that rescue will never come, Paddy teaches Dick all he knows about boats and the sea so the children can survive without him if necessary. This is exactly what happens; he dies a couple of years later and they are on their own.

The novel's premise is that two children of their time and class would be utterly ignorant of the facts of life. The advance publicity for the 1949 movie drove this point home, e.g., "They didn't know what passion was until they discovered it together!" The idea of two virgins knowing instinctively what to do hurled my junior high school into a tizzy and guaranteed our identification with the characters. Em and Dick (renamed Michael) were even dumber than we were, yet they managed to figure it all out for themselves without benefit of adults, convincing my best girlfriend and me that it was no longer necessary to ask our mothers questions about wedding nights and such because it was merely a matter of doing what comes naturally.

Our identification did not go beyond fantasies, however, because there was a safety valve at work. We didn't realize it, but our responses were shaped and contained by the unofficial censorship of the times. In 1949, a movie about teenagers coupling on a desert island could not cast teenage actors in the roles, so we were actually identifying with a certified grown-up, 21-year-old Jean Simmons, who had already played opposite Olivier in Hamlet. The casting tamped us down in another way: Simmons's beauty had such a grandmother-approved wholesomeness that she always looked as if she had just been scrubbed. It's hard to copy the sexual behavior of someone described as the picture of health.

The restraints on moviemakers forced them to omit one of the most powerful scenes in the book, when Em menstruates for the first time and thinks she is dying. Opponents of censorship cite the artistic power of "reality," but the safety valve of 1949 proved that art's ultimate power is imagination. We had just started menstruating ourselves so the ...