A short while back I saw a movie titled First Love from beginning to end. It was a Blackpills movie. It had me to believe that I would be watching a gushy film about two preteens having their first love à la Melody or Moonrise Kingdom. However, this movie also explores the controversial nature of a relationship between two adolescents in which there is an age gap of five years between them.
In a nutshell, a 17-year-old boy named Zach becomes friends with a boy the same age as him; and after Zach meets his friend's 12-year-old sister named Mercedes, he and Mercedes find themselves falling in love with each other. It's not exactly a storyline you would have seen in a rerun of Full House, but it's not a Romeo-and-Juliet-style remake of Lolita either. Upon seeing the movie, you do sense that Zach and Mercedes have genuine non-Platonic feelings for each other.
Below is a clip from First Love. There was absolutely nothing inappropriate about this movie. The only villain in this same film was American society itself rather than Zach, although the criminal justice system and the court system in that movie would have you to believe that it was Zach.
Zach Shares A Sentimental Moment With Mercedes While They're On The Run
Nothing in the movie ever indicates that there is anything exploitative or wrong going on between Zach and Mercedes. Their feelings for each other are no less than real, and nobody is grooming anyone. However, Mercedes' family and the authorities simply won't think otherwise.
Zach has a less-than-perfect past that throws a monkey wrench in his and Mercedes' ability to be together without outside interference from her family and the authorities. Before he ever met Mercedes, he got into hot water for fondling a little girl that he was supposed to be babysitting. However, you begin to wonder whether it would have made him any less trustworthy with Mercedes than he would have been if he had only been 13 or 14 years old and had an identical past upon first meeting Mercedes.
External forces are completely clueless about the realities of what Zach and Mercedes share together. Others only wish to demonize their relationship with each other. Zach's mother fears that his past will resurface if he lets his involvement with Mercedes go too far.
Although this movie is well crafted in every sense of creativity and realism, its only real major flaw is the fact that its setting is in Southern California. Yes, California has a law against what they refer to as "Lewd and Lascivious Conduct With A Child Under 14." Yes, a 17-year-old minor can be prosecuted there for having sexual intercourse with a 12-year-old minor. Yes, California has a sex-offender registry as old as the dinosaurs.
Nevertheless, when I was living in California, I found that the authorities there appear to be much less aggressive about prosecuting minors for violating their statutory-rape laws than they are about prosecuting adults for committing the same offense. Unlike other state jurisdictions here in the so-called land of milk and honey, California has had a statutory age of consent of 18 years old for over a century.
What the public often overlooks is the fact that California has a number of loopholes in its statutory-rape laws that make it highly unlikely that one adolescent minor is going to be prosecuted for having an intimate relationship with another adolescent minor. For example, California statutory-rape laws have what is called an intimacy discount, which means that if a statutory-rape perpetrator and his or her alleged victim are in love with each other, the courts have to take it into consideration as a mitigating factor.
First Love would not even constitute a movie about pedophilia, because the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ("DSM-5") specifies that a boy in his late teens cannot be diagnosed with pedophilia for being attracted to a 12- or 13-year-old girl. The feelings that Zach and Mercedes have for each other are perfectly normal and healthy, even though Mercedes' family members strongly disapprove of their relationship.
I would have to say that the end purposes of First Love would have been better served if the setting for it had been placed in some ultraconservative church town in New England à la Peyton Place for a lack of a better description rather than in non-conformist Southern California. When I was living in Los Angeles, I noticed how common it was for a 12- or 13-year-old middle-school girl to have a boyfriend as old as even 19 years of age.
Also, let's not act as though it's unheard of for a middle-school girl to have a forbidden love with an older boyfriend. Back when daytime talk shows were popular insofar as they were flooding the television airwaves, it was common to see a middle-school girl on a daytime talk show's guest panel, defending her relationship with a 20-something or even 30-something-year-old man.
Of course, if that older boyfriend of hers and her mother also appeared on the guest panel, that young girl's mother would be chewing the older boyfriend out left and right and threatening to have him arrested. Audiences ate these controversial true stories up like hotcakes back then.
While I may agree that the sex laws in California have come a long way since the time that the authorities arrested a group of teenage boys known as the "Spur Posse" in Lakewood, California, for engaging in a scorekeeping system that involved having sexual relations with underage girls as young as middle school back in the 1990s, I still hold onto the perspective that the courts in California are nowhere nearly as harsh about prosecuting statutory-rape cases as they are in other state jurisdictions.
The police, prosecutors, and the likes out in California all seem to believe that prosecuting one adolescent minor for having sex with another adolescent minor is the uncool thing to do despite that there may be an age difference of five or more years between both sex partners. They're afraid that throwing teenage high-school boys in jail for having sex with middle-school girls could mean that they would start having to throw their own teenage sons in jail for the same thing.
Believe me. Teenage sons of police officers, prosecutors, and the likes are always getting into trouble with the law, and their violation of sex laws is no exception. A statutory-rape prosecutor may be brutal in their practices of bringing the wrath of the law against a sexual offender; but when their own teenage son is confronting statutory-rape charges, you'd be surprised about what great lengths these same people will go to in order to keep their own offspring out of prison.
Although I will not give you any spoilers for this same movie, I will admit to you that the ending of this movie was very sad. Throughout the movie, you're able to see that the prosecutor couldn't care less about Mercedes or about anyone else involved in this matter at hand. He only wants to throw the book at Zach as hard as he can. Below is this movie in its entirety.
The Entire Blackpills Film Titled "First Love" From 2022
In a perfect world, Zach and Mercedes would have grown together in their relationship and would have eventually gotten married to each other and started a family after Mercedes came of age. However, as Americans, we all know that our nation is far from being a perfect world, to say the least about it.
The upside of this same film is that if an elected official should see it, perhaps he or she will look at it as a wakeup call to reform our nation's statutory-rape laws and stop feeding our Prison-Industrial Complex with young men that don't belong there. After the incident with Kaitlyn Hunt over a decade ago, Florida lawmakers did begin to seek to enact provisions in their state's statutory-rape laws that would prevent the wrong people from going to jail or prison for a confrontation with such laws.
At the same time, I can clearly see that the United States has a long way to go before its statutory-rape laws can catch up with those of European nations in terms of their fairness and integrity. Unfortunately, our society continues to live in a puritanical black hole.
Has Pedophile-Panic Derangement Syndrome found its way into American cinema? If it has, First Love should not be used as proof of it. Instead of portraying an inappropriate relationship between two adolescents with a five-year age gap between them, this movie demonstrates how broken the American criminal justice system is; although it should have had a different setting from Southern California if that was its exact goal.
First Love is not a film about child molestation or pedophilia. Also, nobody can hardly say that what Zach and Mercedes develop with each other in the movie is a cross-generational relationship inasmuch as they are only five years apart in age difference.
What First Love is, is a movie about forbidden love between an adolescent boy and an adolescent girl in which there is a five-year age difference between the two. As you watch through the movie, you will feel compassion for the characters in it; but you will never feel anger or hostility against Zach.
This article is copyright-protected.