Condemning "Cuties" requires consistency
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This newsletter has a 7 to 8 minute read time:
(1) A little while back I watched the infamous Netflix film Cuties. I wrote a blog post about it, in which I argued that the debate surrounding the controversial French film raises some legitimately thorny questions, but that arguments for its cancellation suffer from inconsistency and ignorance … and I also turned to thinking about horror films as a way to analyze its meaning. I was about to hit the send button when I received a text from a friend telling me that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, so I decided to tuck it away for a while. I know the fuss about Cuties is about 472 controversies old now, but I’m sharing my thoughts for those interested.
If you’re in the mood for more movie talk: To round this out as a full-fledged film version of What’s Left, you can check out my appearance on The Only Podcast About Movies in August to discuss another film controversy from earlier this year — The Hunt. You can find it anywhere you find podcasts, but here are links to the episode on SoundCloud and Spotify. I really love the free-flowing style of conversations they host, and this conversation was a lot of fun. If you want to skip the introductory banter and discussion of listener emails, the conversation about the film starts somewhere around 15:30. My one-liner on The Hunt is that’s a politically vacuous, subtly right-wing film whose only charm is Betty Gilpin’s oddball performance.
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Should Cuties be canceled?
Screenshot from Cuties.
My gut instinct is to avoid watching a film that millions are condemning as a paean to pedophilia, but the intensity of the controversy surrounding the new French Netflix film Cuties eventually compelled me to watch it. If powerful senators are calling for an intervention into Netflix’s film roster and a Justice Department investigation of child exploitation over its scenes, I needed to know what the hell was actually happening in this movie.
Cuties is a film that seeks to provoke, and the debate around it raises some legitimately thorny questions. But the argument for the film to be removed from circulation — often advanced by people who haven’t even seen it — is not persuasive given its clear object of critique and the way that the movie was made. Ultimately the film has more useful things to say about the hyper-sexualization of Western youth than a conservative movement increasingly consumed by fantasies of pedophiles lurking around every corner and pulling the strings of society from deep state bunkers.
Cuties, originally titled Mignonnes, is written and directed by Senegalese-French writer-director Maïmouna Doucouré. It’s a coming-of-age film set in a Parisian housing project, and portrays the struggles of Amy, the 11-year old daughter of a Senegalese immigrant family, to choose between sharply differing models of womanhood presented to her by her traditionalist Muslim family and a set of new friends at school, a clique of girls whose bravado, age-inappropriate attire and dancing prowess instantly dazzle her.
The film, which won a directing award at Sundance this year, has many beautiful shots. In one scene, Amy is hiding under her mother’s bed when she learns by eavesdropping that her father will be returning from a trip to Senegal with a second wife. The camera takes Amy’s point of view, and the viewer bears witness to her mother’s simultaneous distress and her social obligation to share the news in good spirits with family members over the phone by watching her mother’s feet nervously tap and shake, by listening to her mother alternate between secretly weeping and theatrically laughing. It’s a brilliant story-telling technique that captures the repressive nature of the arrangement, and documents the sly and solitary modes of news-gathering that children in strict Muslim families often deploy to investigate questions of love and sex. The development helps set in motion Amy’s skepticism of her family’s model of femininity as a promising one.
Increasingly she looks to forge her identity through her new circle of friends, with whom she forms the titular dance troupe and hopes to win a dance competition. The scenes of their sexualized, hip-hop influenced dancing are at the heart of the controversy surrounding the film. In particular there are two extended dance sequences in which the group of girls dance in revealing outfits, and during those scenes there are several close-ups of the girls’ body parts. Netflix’s marketing materials showcased that imagery, and that seems to be what caught the attention of the American public. Consider the difference between the French and American publicity posters here:
Netflix’s promotional material, which showcases scenes that make up perhaps 10 minutes of the film, appears to be what really fueled the controversy. After all, Sen. Ted Cruz — who condemned the film as “disgusting and wrong” and says he’s requested the Justice Department look into whether Netflix or the filmmakers “violated any federal laws against the production and distribution of child pornography” — has admitted he never actually saw the film. A brief scan of online debate reveals that many of the film’s most ardent critics have not seen the movie but refuse to based on the Netflix poster, video clips, or text descriptions of a handful of scenes of the movie. (Those descriptions describe other scenes that involve showing Amy’s body up close, like when she gets in a fight and someone pulls down her pants to reveal her underwear.)
The pushback has come from many quarters, and it has been intense. Several GOP lawmakers have condemned the film as unfit for public consumption, #CancelNetflix trended on social media last week, and petitions calling for the film to be taken off Netflix garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Fox News talking heads like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson deemed it a symptom of a “pornified culture” and a exploitative way for “pedophiles and creeps” to make a quick buck. QAnon conspiracy theorists argued that the movie proved that elites “support” pedophilia and are angling to mainstream it.
Disapproval hasn’t been confined to the right. Recent Democratic presidential contender Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said the film would “whet the appetite of pedophiles and help fuel the child sex trafficking trade.” Left-wing New York Times columnist Elizabeth Bruenig and other progressive commentators also criticized the film.
So how much, if any of the criticism, is legitimate?
First it must be stated that this film is clearly seeking to critique, not endorse or normalize, the way that girls are exposed to and encouraged to participate in a public culture that sexually objectifies women. Broadly speaking, the conservatives and Doucouré are actually allies in the culture war.
In fact, one of my own critiques of the film is that the director’s political message is so clear that it can be cheesy and heavy-handed. Doucouré’s portrayal of Amy choosing between the binary of the West vs. Islam and finding both options to be ill-fitting is well-trodden territory. In particular I found the conclusion of the film to be astonishingly simplistic, and a betrayal of the film’s more powerful moments (spoilers, obviously): Amy experiences a breakdown; lays her skimpy dance outfit and traditional Senegalese dress next to each other on her bed; goes out wearing a more modest, age-appropriate Western outfit that strikes a middle ground between the two; and celebrates by skipping jumprope between a woman wearing a traditional Senegalese outfit and a girl in what appears to be a Western-style dress. The director just about slaps you in the face with her normative vision for girls needing to find a middle ground free from the pressures of stifling tradition and libertine modernity.
That should be clear to anyone who watches the film, and any critiques from people who haven’t should be disregarded. Netflix has rightly apologized for using crude marketing material that does a disservice to the entire purpose of the film.
Another problem with the commonly articulated right-wing view is that it implies that images of girls in revealing outfits will activate some kind of latent pedophilic impulse in the public. Not only is that … not how pedophilia works, but it would also entail arguing that long-running reality TV shows featuring pre-adolescent girls in risque outfits (Dance Moms, Toddlers and Tiaras — shows that actually normalize or promote ideas that Cuties objects to); child beauty pageants; public swimming pools; and preteen cheerleading are also contributing to the great American Pedophilia Problem. But they haven’t argued those things, most likely because they know it’s not true.
And finally, a lot of the criticism seems to dodge how these films are true to the experience of adolescence today. Film scholar Eileen Jones argues at Jacobin that the film faithfully captures the seesawing between childhood and adulthood that generally goes on at this age, and has been depicted in film before without eliciting a sex panic.
For me, the more interesting questions surround whether or not Cuties inadvertently reproduces the problems it sets out to critique.
Cuties is not nearly as sexual as some of the public hysteria might lead you to imagine. There were no depictions of sex or sexual abuse or pedophilia or any real sexual contact in the film, with the exception of a boy slapping Amy’s butt in class and being sent to the principal. There is not much talk of sex either, but to the extent that it exists, it happens at the level of 11 year-old girls curiously and confusedly exploring what means to desire people (and somewhat accurately explaining to each other what condoms are are for, in what I thought was the funniest scene of the film). The footage of the dancing scenes doesn’t take up much screen time.
The key question though is whether the dance scenes went too far. I think it could be argued that the lingering close ups on the girls were not always tasteful and a bit over the top. They almost hinted at fascination.
I asked Shahir Daud, a New York-based film director and cohost of The Only Podcast About Movies, to weigh in, and he argued that they were a deliberate provocation.
“I think the challenging part of the film from an aesthetic point of view is how the filmmaker deployed close ups during the dance scenes,” he said. “They feel gratuitous, but they also purposefully make you feel uneasy about the lead character’s choices.”
“Those scenes made me uncomfortable, but I feel like the movie is acting in good faith with its audience,” he added.
Cultural critic Kat Rosenfield articulated some similar sentiments in her analysis of the film at Arc Digital:
[The dance scenes are] gross and inappropriate, particularly clipped out of context. But in the actual film, the dancing is intercut with reaction shots from revolted audience members that affirm the wrongness of what you’re seeing — and at the end, with Amy’s own tear-stained face as she freezes and finally flees the stage. If this scene makes you squirm, then good. It’s supposed to.
A defense of the close-ups would parallel the defense of horror films as introspective: the depiction of the grotesque and taboo force a blunt reckoning with the dark sides of society and humanity; discomfort is educational. Given that the director’s intentions of critique are clear, I think Daud’s good faith point is correct and would support this kind of reading.
A less charitable reading might point out that some horror films seem to relish depicting forbidden images in a manner that feels exploitative and nurtures reactionary fantasies (a rape scene in what I think was a Rob Zombie film that I can’t remember the name of comes to mind). Again, a lot of this comes down to trying to understand intentions. I don’t think the context of this film supports that reading, but I do think it’s worth bearing in mind when contemplating how hard it is to pin down the meaning of transgressive images.
There is also another, more difficult question to reckon with embedded in these debates as well: is it simply innately inappropriate to present certain images regardless of context? That is, are certain modes of satire or criticism simply impossible to articulate through visual story-telling if the images are simply off-limits?
It’s not controversial to say certain images or ideas are widely considered entirely out of bounds of acceptable mainstream art. There are, for example, strict legal restrictions and social taboos surrounding the documentation of child nudity. I’m not sure I have a counterargument to the point that when dealing with minors, certain kinds of representation of them in art should be off-limits regardless of directorial intention because as a society we’ve decided there are limitations to minors’ capacity for consent.
But ultimately any argument against the circulation of Doucouré’s work must reckon with three things:
First, it requires rejecting Reject Doucouré’s filmmaking process, which reportedly took care to operate within child protection norms and the actors’ real-world milieu.
Doucouré operated much like a documentarian in her approach. She came up with the idea for Cuties after witnessing a dance show in Paris that resembled the one in the film’s climax. After being shocked by the show, Doucouré then spent over a year interviewing over a hundred 10- and 11-year-old girls.
“I came to understand that an existence on social networks was extremely important for these youngsters and that often they were trying to imitate the images they saw around them, in adverts or on the social networks,” she told Screen International. “The most important thing for them was to achieve as many ‘likes’ as possible.”
Her cast was comprised of amateurs who were already independently familiar with the types of dancing they were doing. There was a trained counselor on set, and the production process was approved by the French government's child protection authorities. The psychologist who was on the film reportedly continues to work with the cast in light of the film’s popularity. Films of this kind involve negotiation with parents of actors, and Doucouré said production went smooth precisely because the parents saw themselves as activists.
Second, any argument against the circulation of this film demands consistency. As mentioned earlier, there are shows that have dealt with similar imagery with far more exploitative intentions (reality TV shows chronicling families that literally profit off their daughters’ pageants and competitions) which have not received mass condemnation. It should not escape our notice that those shows have featured almost entirely white casts.
Third, the right has decided in recent months that the left’s so-called “cancel culture” is destroying America. I’m not exactly clear on how to square that with the idea of calling for the cancellation of a film one hasn’t even seen!
It’s also particularly ironic that the problem that Cuties identifies as a key accelerant for the hypersexualization of the youth — the Internet serving as a conduit for context-divorced imagery — also helped ruin Cuties’ reputation.
Ultimately arguing for the cancellation of Cuties really requires taking aim at the culture that spawned Doucouré’s ambitions to critique it.
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