Netflix’s Cuties: a social commentary gone awry
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By now you’ve probably heard of Netflix’s Cuties (originally titled Mignonnes), a French film released at the beginning of September in North America, that has garnered considerable attention and scrutiny. The criticism comes due to the film’s controversial over-sexual portrayal of the child actors. The original description of the movie read:
The film, which drew attention from politicians and news agencies alike prompted the trending hashtag, #cancelnetflix. The movement was more than just a threat as thousands of subscribers dumped their accounts and Netflix’s stock put up a loss of $9 billion. As the heat cranked up the backlash sparked Netflix itself to make a statement, declaring on their official Twitter account that :
(For the record that “updated” description simply replaced the word “twerking” with “free-spirited.”)
For full transparency I did not watch the whole film. I started out of curiosity but very quickly turned it off. However, due to my desire to want to understand the film (and with the intention of writing this article) I did connect with three individuals who I knew had watched it in its entirety — two who saw its message and outcome as a net positive and one who very strongly denounced the film.
What Cuties gets right
There have been many scathing reviews of the film thus far, many of which I think are warranted in their outrage but might be missing some important points the movie makes. The director of Cuties, Maïmouna Doucouré, in a recent interview explained that her intention with the film was to draw attention to the horrors and dangers of hyper-sexualisation on adolescent women, particularly in the Western world. Many of the articles I read before attempting to watch it myself (and talking to those who had watched it) reduced Cuties to merely a piece of child pornography-light. That I think was not entirely accurate.
There is some genuinely good social commentary within Cuties, touching on the emptiness of modern secular materialism, its over-sexualization of women, as well as the harm and oppression of traditional Islam. Turning the mirror on our own cultures and seeing their ugly blemishes for what they are is always a good thing. Worldview introspectivity is a good practice to exercise.
It seems clear that what Doucouré, as a director from a rampantly secular culture like France, is trying to draw attention to is the oppression that takes place in our cultures both foreign and domestic. As Doucouré notes in her interview,
“Our girls see that the more a woman’s overly sexualized on social media, the more she’s successful. And the children just imitate what they see... It’s dangerous.”
That the over-secularized, hyper-sexualized culture of things like social media can be just as cruel as the fundamentalist Islamic practice of Muslim immigrants. To the extent that this film does that very thing we can see Doucouré’s goal and intention as a noble one.
Source: evanscartoons.com
What Cuties gets terribly terribly wrong
However, please do not misread me — I in no way wish to be an apologist for Cuties and I do not think this movie should have been made. The film ends up doing exactly what it sets out to expose, and while the motives may have been correct the method by which it goes about this task is beyond terrible and results in philosophically sawing off the branch it is sitting on.
The reason for all of the outrage so far is simple: in attempting to point out the over-sexualization and exploitation of children Cuties very clearly over-sexualized and exploited children.
As one of the individual’s who I discussed this film with noted to me, “the gaze of the camera becomes the gaze of the audience,” and the gaze of the camera continually focused on the backsides and crotches of children as they twerked and gyrated. That is not OK. What many of the harsher reviews of this feature get exactly right is that the camera in multiple scenes does indeed focuse and lingers on what the pedophile would go out of their way to look at.
The catch twenty-two of Cuties is that it ends up doing exactly what its author says she is trying to warn against. There is much about the social media saturated, vacuously secularized, and overly-sexualized culture we find ourselves in that needs to be exposed for what it is. But when the cure becomes the disease there is a serious problem. It is a really strange way to stand against the sexualization of eleven year-olds by then making eleven year-olds sexualized.
There are ways to accomplish what Doucouré vocalized as what she was trying to do that would not have taken advantage of and placed the adolescent actors in compromising scenes. In fact, there is a snippet of that very thing within Cuties itself. In one particular scene when Amy, one of the characters in the film, is discovered with the stolen camera of her cousin, she implors for it to be given back to her by offering a seductive dance as payment. The reaction Amy’s cousin gives is horror and confusion. His response is to express how ridiculous and inappropriate Amy is being before he simply walks away. This one scene reveals what the film could have been in its attempt to make an acute social commentary. There are ways that can communicate and suggest that our society has hyper-sexualized eleven year-olds that doesn’t require us to over-sexual eleven year-old actresses in the process.
Where does this leave us?
In decades and centuries past it was common place to teach people, starting with children, catechisms. Traditionally Christian communities would instruct the youngest within the culture with lasting eternal truths. This practice is of course still practiced. I myself when I hear certain phrases can still fill in the answers:
“What is the chief end of man? — to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
”What rule has God given to direct us in how we may glorify and enjoy him? — The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.
Catechesis is the simple and clear instruction of a teaching that reveals a truth. Christian Catechisms teach profound theological truths in bite-sized snippets. These work not to replace the role of Scripture or Christian education but work as a primer and basis to lead to fuller explanation of the ultimate questions that explain reality around us.
But what is the catechism of our modern secular age? What are the influences we implore on our children that help them to grow into men and women who mature into law abiding, responsible, and acceptable adults? Whether we like it or not our culture is communicating the answers to the existential questions through media. The catechisms of the 21st century western world are the mantras communicated to us by pop music, social media, and political ideology. This is actually an aspect that Cuties diagnoses well in its over-arching commentary on society (both east and west).
But Cuties becomes a victim of its own making. In a culture that pays little attention to consistency and true critical thinking Cuties acts as an example of a secular catechism that attempts to point to a problem. But Cuties plants its feet firmly in mid-air and tries to take a leap, making a true cultural statement by doing the very thing it decries.
In many ways I do not think we should be as shocked by Cuties as we are. Does it objectify and take advantage of children in an appealing and reprehensible way in order to point out the horror of objectification of children? Yes. But in a culture where moral ambiguity is becoming more and more the norm, where ethical decay has taken leaps and bounds within my own life time, Cuties is in many ways the logical outcome of our cultural climate.