What ‘Cuties’ Really Is

There has been a lot of talk about the perverse Netflix film Cuties since I posted my remarks about it a couple of nights ago, after watching it (see “Pretty Babies”). One thing I want to clarify for you readers who will not see the film — and I recommend strongly that you skip it — is that the claim that this movie is meant to  condemn the sexualization of adolescent girls ought not to be taken seriously.

I mean, the filmmaker may say that she intends it that way, but if she is being sincere, then she is lying to herself.

I apologize, but I have to be blunt here. I blacked out the offensive word in that screenshot above. It’s a screengrab from a scene in Cuties, in which the protagonist, Amy, is in the stall in the girls bathroom at school, listening to the Cuties — four other 11-year-old girls — describing in detail a porn clip they are watching and giggling at. Here they are when Amy emerges from the toilet:

 

 

Now, there is no reason at all to believe that these child actors were watching a porno. But they had to speak the lines. This charming discourse includes these lines:

Jessica: “Look at the girl’s face. I bet it’s rape.”

[Girl 3]: “Rape?”

Yasmine: “I heard if it’s rape, it goes right through your whole body. The guy puts it in and it [deleted].”

And so forth. That’s Cuties. These children had to memorize this dialogue and perform it on camera. They also had to learn how to stroke their crotches, twerk, put their fingers in their mouths suggestively, and move like strippers mimicking vigorous intercourse.

The actors are children. Simply to play their roles, they had to have their innocence taken from them by the filmmaker — no doubt with the consent of their parent or parents. It is hard to imagine fathers and mothers allowing their little girls to be exploited in this way, but people will do anything for fame.

My point is that the intention of the director, even if noble, does not obviate the fact that for these children to play these roles, they had to say filthy things (and to imagine visually the things the script had them saying), and do filthy things with their bodies for the camera.

I am not surprised to read reviews from film critics and writers who are appalled at all the philistine normies who find this disgusting. One of the most shocking moments in my life as a professional film critic came at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998, at a screening of the Todd Solondz black comedy Happiness. If you read the plot description on Wikipedia, you will understand why I call it one of the most perverse and disgusting films I’ve ever had to sit through. The most evil thing about it is how it manipulates the viewer into rooting for a suburban dad to succeed in raping a boy, a friend of his son’s who is sleeping over at his house. I wish I had gotten up and left, but I felt it my professional obligation to stay through the end, because I was writing about it for the New York Post, and this was one of the most highly anticipated screenings of the entire festival, which is one of the world’s most prestigious. Owen Gleiberman, then a film critic for Entertainment Weekly, later reflected on that screening; this was the consensus of critics present:

One of my fondest memories of Toronto is back in 1998, when I first saw Todd Solondz’s Happiness. It was one of the most exhilaratingly unnerving movies I’d ever watched — a scandalous comedy of desperation that seemed to draw back a curtain on the sexual and romantic lives of its characters, revealing the secret things they did, some of them kinky, a few of them criminal, a lot of them just…private. The movie forced you to confront the continuity between the lust and despair it showed you and what was going on off-screen, maybe even in your own life.

The New York Times reported on the bleakness in Toronto that year, and said:

Yet it was the darker American films — some successful, some not — that seized the attention of many filmgoers here. Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, whose films here included Roberto Benigni’s ”Life Is Beautiful,” a gentle and haunting drama set in a concentration camp, said he did not fully understand why there were so many ultraviolent and dysfunctional-family movies.

”Like a year ago, it seemed to be optimistic,” Mr. Weinstein said. ”What’s in the air? There’s this new freedom to explore dangerous subject matters. People are trying to top themselves. They’re asking: ‘What’s next? What’s new? How far can you widen the envelope? How far are we really going to go?’ ”

Yeah, well, how far indeed, Harvey Weinstein.

Happiness received an uproarious standing ovation, which continued for a while when director Solondz took the stage in the hall. I got the hell out as soon as I could. On the way out of the building, I ran into a critic for a major Midwestern newspaper. We traded can you believe what the hell we just saw? looks, and he said only, “I just had to call my wife to make sure we were still on planet Earth.”

By the end of my film critic years, I understood why this happens to critics. They love novelty. They love shocking the squares. They see so many movies that they quickly become dead to the moral force of what we see on screen. Look, a movie that tries to make its audience pull for the pedophile to succeed in drugging and raping a little boy. … How about that, a movie that features little girls giggling as they describe a rape they’re watching in a porno movie? What’ll they think of next? Four stars, folks, and damn the hicks for hating this!”

As I said in my previous comment, I think the eroticization of children — boys and girls — via our pornographic culture, the Internet, and the ubiquity of smartphones, all happening because we are too cowardly as a culture to ban this poison, is a massively important story, and certainly worthy of art. But it has to be approached with extreme caution, and may not be possible to do on film without crossing moral lines that nobody should ever cross. A novel describes something that has to be created in the imagination of the reader. A film ordinarily has to show the thing directly that a novel symbolizes in words. That’s the aesthetic difference, and in films like Cuties, it makes a moral difference.

How would you feel watching your 11-year-old daughter saying those lines in a film? Dancing like these erotically charged children dance in this movie? How do you get your little girl to unlearn how to mimic rough intercourse in a dance routine after filming is over? How do you unring that bell, mom and dad?

 

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