Recently Netflix released an independent film from France on their platform called Cuties. It’s been very controversial on the internet and that’s what we’ll be discussing. Let’s start with an overview of the film. It’s about an eleven year old Muslim girl named Amy living in France with her strict religious family. Feeling quite repressed by her conservative mother eventually she meets a group of girls her own age who are part of a twerking dance team. Amy befriends them and they enter a twerking dance contest.

The film has been heavily criticized for it’s sexualization of children. Now when I read all the internet backlash against this movie I couldn’t help but think back to 2019 when everybody talked about the controversy surrounding Joker. While they thought Joker would normalize radical violence this movie would normalize the sexualization of children and pedophilia. There are several schools of thought about how society should relate to movies like these. One is that art is a reflection of society and can be used to reflect the values of the society. That it can teach us things and can have direct impacts on society. In this framework a movie like this would be condemned for its sexualization and it’s through this framework that most of the critics make their criticism. Another school of thought is that art exists outside of society and doesn’t have any impact on it what so ever. We do not get our values and our societal norms from art and instead we get them from the people around us. In this framework cuties is not controversial it’s just a movie that exists. There’s probably a synthesis between these two ideas that can work in real harmony. On a personal level I’m close to that second philosophy where not all art has to instill values or reflect societal norms. I believe art can be offensive and be filled with things that society would hate. I also hold a belief that if there is something that offends you you should look directly at it and understand it more that’s why I watched this movie. Yes I did I watched the whole thing so now I’m probably on an FBI watch list but I have to tell you I hate this movie. Earlier this year I saw the controversy just surrounding the movies poster and I admit that did paint this movie in a bad light for me. The worst part is that in the movie they make that poster move. Even if I hadn’t read all that backlash early on I still think I would have heated this thing. The sexualization is way too explicit and any theme it tries to convey gets drowned in this sexualization. While I think this movie is bad I don’t think it’s dumb. I actually like the end of it where Amy rejects both her twerking dance crew and her religion is probably the best possible ending for this film.

I also watched some interviews with the director and she says that this film is semi autobiographical. It’s definitely drawn from growing up as a Muslim woman in France and that’s a big part of the film. The other part comes from real life instances when she watched young girls doing twerking dance routines and I guess this is supposed to comment on how girls have to grow up in a hyper sexualized society. In the interview she talks about different roles of femininity in society and how they clash with each other. She does create a strict divide between her conservative religious role of femininity and a western sexual ideas of femininity. In the end both ideas are really systems of oppression and control so this movie does have something deep to say unfortunately. To criticize her there were ways to get this point across with a movie where every one of the main characters is over the age of eighteen. I would probably want to watch a movie about a repressed religious eighteen year old Muslim girl grappling with her own sexuality by dancing. That leads me to believe that the director made these characters eleven years old so the movie could be more offensive and that she could create internet backlash getting herself free advertising. So we all fell for it. We’ve been tricked and bamboozled. The only thing we can do now is donate money to organizations that combat human trafficking. That’ll show em all.

Now I don’t want to be all pessimistic here. As far as I can tell this film has two main messages. Society has a corrupting obsession with sex and women’s sexuality and the innocence of children is eroded as the adult world encroaches in on it. Now two good films that tackle these subjects individually they are Showgirls and the Florida Project.

In Showgirls a Las Vegas stripper named Naomi Malone gains fame and fortune but along the way she turns to violence and sleeping with her boss to get to the top. In the film there is gratuitous amounts of full frontal female nudity and all the actors are over the age of eighteen. The film rubs our faces in over the top sex. This satirizes America’s obsession with sex and pornography. It’s completely over the top and campy at times but everyone in the movie is an adult and not a child. In the Florida project a six year old girl named Moonee who lives in Orlando and is extremely poor. She gets into juvenile mischief with her friends culminating in her friends accidentally burning down an abandoned house. In the film Moonee is exposed to several adult activities. At one point she and her friends are solicited by an elderly pedophile. The creepy old man is stopped by Willem Dafoe’s character before anything bad happens. She’s also exposed to adult themes by her mother who takes her with her as she scams random people on the street. They constantly move from motel to motel and at one point her mother brings a random man to their home to prostitute herself while Moonee hides in the bathroom. The child’s innocence is fully destroyed when child protective services shows up and takes her away from her mother. As she’s exposed to more and more adult themes her childhood innocence is eroded and eroded away into nothing. I’d also like to point out that in this movie there are no little girl’s twerking anywhere. So these subjects can be addressed in more subtle and artistic ways. Stuff like this just makes me hate cuties even more.

Also when I think about it more I get kind of pissed that the director would exploit the young girls staring in this movie by sexualizing them. How hypocritical can you be when you try to say that society sexualizes young girls while you are the one really sexualizing young girls? In the end this whole thing is a fucking mess that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If Cuties is remembered for anything it will probably be all the times it made us cringe whether we saw the movie or not. Netflix might take a big hit for this one but I don’t think it’s the end for them. Goodbye everybody and remember, pedophilia is wrong.