Pretty Babies

Well, I watched Cuties so you don’t have to. I don’t like people condemning something without having seen or read it. So I saw it last night. It’s almost as bad as you think, and Netflix deserves all the grief it’s taking over the thing. But inside the grossness of Cuties is a reasonable point — but not one you can tell in film, or at least not in this film. Let me explain.

Back in 1978, Louis Malle made a film called Pretty Baby, starring 12-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in New Orleans. It was hugely controversial over the subject matter, and the fact that Shields did nude scenes. Cuties does not feature nudity (just a very quick glance at an adolescent girl’s breast), but it centers on the grotesque sexualization of minor girls — the title characters are a pack of 11-year-olds in Paris. Cuties is a deeply dishonest film that exploits its young cast nauseatingly, yet tries at the end to justify it with a too-pat moral. More on which in a moment.

Here, in this tweet, is why Netflix is in so much trouble:

Netflix is comfortable with this. Plenty of people will defend it. This is where our culture is at. pic.twitter.com/UlqEmXALmd

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) September 10, 2020

That tweet is essentially correct. There is no redeeming this. Cuties has lot of scenes like this. What the Avengers movies are to comic-book geeks, Cuties is to pedophiles — this, even though there is no sex in the movie. I want to make clear at the outset that I think this is a repulsive film, though the conflict it explores is dramatically worthy. There will be spoilers below, you are hereby warned.

The film centers around Amy, an 11-year-old girl living in immigrant housing in Paris. Her family is from Senegal, and are devout Muslims. When the film opens, her father has gone back to Senegal, and her mother is awaiting his return. We discover that he has gone to their homeland to take a second wife. Amy watches her mother grieve this, and try to be okay with it, because it is permitted in their traditional Islamic culture. An older Senegalese woman in the community, her “auntie,” is an enforcer of tradition.

A Muslim would no doubt see this film differently, but I sympathized strongly with Amy’s rebellion against this cruel culture. The problem is that Amy has nobody to talk to about it. She falls in with some bad girls at school — bratty, highly sexualized kids who have formed an amateur dance troupe (The Cuties), and are trying to win a competition. Amy eventually wins acceptance in the group, and steals her cousin’s smartphone so she can become part of their culture.

In what I think is the most important part of this movie — a theme that a better film could explore without descending into the filth it ostensibly criticizes — is the role that technology plays in corrupting these girls. There is no dirty old man who trains these kids to dress and act like sluts. They self-exploit through the smartphone and social media. Here’s a scene from when Amy is just beginning to hang out with the Cuties. They are in the girls’ bathroom at school. The Cuties are watching hardcore porn on a smartphone, and commenting on it in revolting detail:

We quickly learn that these rootless, restless girls are simply mimicking what they are seeing in pop culture, as experienced chiefly through social media. They are desperate for attention, and believe the way to get it is to sexualize themselves through scanty dressing and learning stripper-like dance routines, which they record and upload to the Internet.

At one point, Amy’s mother takes her to women’s prayer at the mosque. Amy slips a veil over her face, pretending to pray. But she’s really watching extremely provocative dancing, with nearly naked women doing lascivious lesbian routines. All of this is happening right under the noses of her mom, who has no idea what she’s up to with the smartphone (which she conceals, as she has stolen it).

The other Cuties all have smartphones too, but their less strict parents have allowed it. They are blind to how the technology facilitates the corruption of their daughters. I tell you, whatever else it is, Cuties is the best possible public service commercial exhorting parents never, ever to give their children smartphones.

At one point, Angelica, one of the Cuties, confesses to Amy that she never gets to see her parents, because they are always working in the restaurant. She believes that they don’t see her as someone of worth — at a dancer with talent. She cries. It’s clear that she is doing all this acting-out as a junior stripper-in-training because she is desperate for attention and validation.

The Cuties are Kardashianized, and have come to believe that their self-worth is based on affirmations of their social media presentation — that, and by acting sexually aggressive. The film shows on several occasions other people — older teenage boys, Amy’s cousin, an audience — reacting badly to the Cuties’ sexualization. The girls don’t actually know what they’re dealing with — they are playing with fire, and only imitating what they immerse themselves in on their smartphones. This is important: the Cuties aren’t actually rewarded with what they think they want. People just seem to think of them as weird and gross. Which they are.

In the most intense scene in the movie, Amy’s cousin, an adult man, discovers that she has his stolen smartphone. He demands it back. She refuses to hand it over, treating it like it’s more important than life itself. In a last ditch effort to save the phone, 11-year-old Amy begins to take her clothes off, and to look up at her cousin sexually, as if to offer herself in exchange for the phone. The man rebukes her (thank God), but the message is clear: Amy has already internalized the lesson that she can use her sexuality to get what she wants.

Toward the end, Amy has an epiphany that leads her to feel shame over what she is doing, and what she has become, and to turn back towards her innocence — but not in a way that affirms the patriarchal Islam against which she has been rebelling. Though one is happy that Amy is no longer going to be hanging out with the bad girls, it’s an unsatisfying ending. For one, it’s far too pat. For another — and far more significantly — it seems phony based on all that has come before. Imagine that you have just sat through a film that shows cake-and-cookie baking in the most lascivious, food-porn-ish way, but then has the obese chef protagonist deciding at the last minute to walk away from the kitchen, and to adopt a lifestyle of moderate eating. That’s what Cuties is like. Director Maïmouna Doucouré presents the Cuties’ many obscene dance routines as so alluring that the finale, in which Amy chooses another path, feels quite false.

There is a good movie somewhere in this material. The insanity into which our culture throws adolescent girls is an important topic. Pop culture bombards girls (and boys, but this is a movie about girls) with pornified messaging constantly, and really does tell them that their worth depends on self-presentation online, indeed sexual self-presentation. Where are the adults? In Cuties, the protagonist is part of a traditionalist Islamic community, but if this were true to contemporary American life, her disengaged parents might be worshippers at a suburban megachurch, and disengaged from their daughter’s life because they assume that she can be trusted with the smartphone, and besides, everybody has to have one to fit in.

We need a movie that illuminates this problem and tells the truth about it. I finished the movie feeling very, very sorry for adolescent girls today. The problem with Cuties — and it’s what destroys the movie — is aesthetic, and ultimately moral: it engages and demonstrates with great passion the very thing it purports to condemn. Again, think of a movie with an anti-gluttony message that spends half the movie filming eating pastries with lascivious abandon. It’s simply not credible. Netflix got in trouble at first for marketing this movie as eye candy for pedophiles, but it turns out that even though that is not strictly true, that tack was more true to the experience of Cuties than the revisionist marketing.

Whether the director (who is a woman) intends to or not, she has made a film that serves to accustom us to the sexualization of children. Cuties is dramatically quite bland; if it weren’t for the controversy, there would be nothing to recommend it. There’s no subtlety in it. If you wanted to make a movie or TV show that appealed to illicit prurience among the audience, you would have to make it with the pretense of condemning the thing you’re exploring in it. If you are the sort of person who finds long scenes of twerking pre-teens to be revolting, then Cuties is going to be hard to get through. If you find it exciting, well, perv, this is the movie for you.

I’m not saying that this is what the filmmaker set out to do here, but I am saying that this will be the effect. It will be the effect because the director’s aesthetic failure is a moral failure. And it’s a failure by the Netflix brass too, which tipped its hand with the botched initial marketing. It is plainly only interested in Cuties because it wanted a succès de scandale of a movie about twerking Lolitas. It has no interest at all in condemning a Kardashianized society that produces twerking Lolitas.

I have to bring to your attention the way some prominent critics have reacted to it. They cannot bear to give conservatives who have spoken out against this movie a victory. Thus, in the Telegraph — generally a conservative newspaper — we get this, as captured by the Catholic Londoner Niall Gooch: