Enes Akdağ

Disclaimer! : This blog post is derived from the conference presentation entitled “You Wouldn’t Be Here If I Didn’t Pay You: Intersectional Look to Employee/Employer Child Actor in Honey Boy (2019)”, at The Many Faces and Spaces of Precarity in the Moving Image Online Conference.

From Jackie Coogan to Shia LaBeouf, the labor conditions of child actors and the parental management of their earnings have long been contentious topics. Honey Boy (Dir. Alma Har’el, 2019), a semi-autobiographical portrayal of former child actor Shia LaBeouf’s experiences, examines the precarious subjectivities of child actors in the studio system. The narrative follows two different time periods. A huge portion of the screen time is allocated to 12-year-old Otis Lort (Noah Jupe) and his father James (Shia LaBeouf), a former rodeo clown and convicted sex offender, who live together in a seedy Los Angeles motel. The second time period in the narrative focuses on 20-year-old Otis Lort (Lucas Hedges), who becomes entangled in criminal activities, ultimately being sent to juvie.

Otis Lort, the protagonist of Honey Boy, appears to function as a “screen sibling” to Louis Stevens (Shia LaBeouf), LaBeouf’s character from Disney’s Even Stevens. Honey Boy also exhibits notable parallelism with former child star Shia La Beouf’s personal milestones, such as a traumatic car crash and the years of rehabilitation following. This blog post aims to critically analyze the promising child star Otis Lort as embodying a precarious subjectivity.

Otis Lort as a promising child star has multifaceted dimension of precarity.  Guy Standing characterizes the precarious subjectivities as being caught in a paradox of employment. Otis has a dual role as both employee and employer. Otis is breadwinner but he needs parental permission to spend his earnings. On the other side; he is super talented kid and is being subjected to the adult working standards of the studio system. 

Standing highlights how members of the precariat often struggle with fractured identities, shaped by unstable work environments and exploitative dynamics. At that point, Honey Boy draws parallelism between different experiences of precarious subjectivities, through the school aged child star Otis Lort and teen sex worker Shy Girl (FKA twigs). Both Otis and Shy Girl face an identity crisis: as children, they have been thrust into an adult role. They both have dysfunctional families within which they seem to be cast as a mediator between parents. The only friends they have are each other.

The Lort family becomes an exemplar of conflicting ideals and performances. While paternal figure James Lort believes that the only way to achieve success in Hollywood is to become hyper masculine, fragile masculine Otis Lort cries on Shy Girl’s shoulders. In his quest for control, James undermines Otis’s mother’s efforts to secure financial stability, framing it as a betrayal of their “team”, meanwhile Otis is seen to resist emulating his parents’ relationship in his interactions with Shy Girl.

I would argue that Standing’s first faction of precariat, atavists, seems a perfect fit for James Lort. He comes from old-working class family and he is obsessed with their own hidden success stories in the past. He has a long history of working as underpaid in temporary jobs. 

On the other side of the coin, Otis Lort seems to be a progressive who has been deprived of his own future. To put it plainly, Otis is sick of his father’s obsession on career plans for his son. Otis has no alternative version of his future available to him. Ironically, Otis seems to be positioned at the transitory point between the underpaid and the underemployed. While he mostly falls into precarious temporary jobs, he dreams of jobs he can exert some control and autonomy within. However, this high degree of autonomy always comes with a price; always being ready for work, in a socially isolated lifespan. Not surprisingly, Honey Boy ends with the emergence of an alternative source of income for Otis, cannabis dealing, as a preferable occupation.

Honey Boy is not just a personal story; it is a cultural critique of how industries commodify childhood and creativity. By interrogating the precarious subjectivities of child labor, as in the case of Otis Lort, we gain a deeper understanding of the systemic inequities that persist within creative fields.

p.s. Kindly re-read the blog-post, while listening Bob Dylan’s song “All I Really Want to Do”.

Enes Akdağ is an Istanbul-based filmmaker and a Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies at Kadir Has University. He holds a M.A. in Media and Communication Studies and a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations. His up-to-date research interests lie in the fields of film industries, new cinema history and queer cinema. He recently joined the New Media and Communication Department of Üsküdar University as a research associate.