Netflix film Cuties tells the story of a Senegalese child struggling to reconcile her traditional religious upbringing with the oversexualized culture of modern life in France.The Canadian Press
Whatever message the film Cuties was trying to convey, it was lost by the scene where four preteen girls grabbed their crotches and strained their necks. In fact, it was probably lost before then, when one barely pubescent girl thrust her body around in leather-look pants and another humped the floor, as the camera filmed close-ups of the girls' butts, chests and groins.
Cuties tells the story of a Senegalese child named Amy struggling to reconcile her traditional religious upbringing with the oversexualized culture of modern life in France. She befriends a dance troupe that tries to win a competition with a provocative dance routine, but in the end, Amy realizes she’s happier fully clothed and skipping rope.
The film’s intention, clearly, is to castigate society’s pressure on young girls to act like grown-up, sexual women – but in doing so, it employs young girls to act like grown-up, sexual women. It’s sort of like if a filmmaker wanted to make a movie about the horrors of animal abuse, and to prove her point she directed someone to strangle a cat for the camera. Cuties probably could have made its same point without the gratuitous shots of children’s crotches. And it’s impossible, watching a child in a wet tank top and panties gyrate on the ground, to ignore that this scene of a real-life child will surely be clipped, saved and filed away on some predator’s computer.
Yet however inappropriate Cuties' casting and direction might be – and perhaps that is a matter of perspective – the outrage it has garnered has been explosive on a scale atypical for even similarly exploitative media. For example, TLC aired a show for years about five-year-olds in full-face makeup who would prance around in cutoff shorts while shaking their butts and blowing kisses at pageant judges. The show, Toddlers & Tiaras, did garner its share of controversy at the time, but it nevertheless managed to stay on the air for nine seasons without provoking state senators to demand investigations.
In response to Cuties, however, Texas Senator Ted Cruz wrote a letter to the Justice Department to investigate whether the film “violated any federal laws against the production and distribution of child pornography.” Hundreds of thousands of people signed online petitions demanding Netflix drop the film from its offerings, and some have claimed to have actually cancelled their Netflix accounts in protest. Even Conservative Party of Canada Leader Erin O’Toole weighed in on the Cuties controversy, tweeting: “Childhood is a time of innocence. We must do more to protect children. This show is exploitative and wrong.”
It is not happenstance that the response to Cuties has been particularly robust and widespread in this moment. For one, it fits nicely into our conspiratorial times. In 2016, some people became convinced that Hillary Clinton was involved in a sex-trafficking ring operating out of a D.C. pizza parlour. That preceded the rise of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that a coalition of Democrats, celebrities and other elites are running an underground sex-trafficking wing of Satan-worshippers and pedophiles; this past summer, QAnon believers claimed furniture company Wayfair was smuggling children through online furniture orders. That rumour managed to jam up the National Human Trafficking Hotline in the United States, and it forced Wayfair to clarify that no, it does not hide children in its armoires.
QAnon, once a fringe movement, is becoming more pervasive. A few of its supporters have earned the Republican nomination for Congressional and state legislative races, and easy targets such as Cuties provide fodder for the notion that our society has devolved into a state of total immorality and exploitation. That’s not to say only QAnon believers would have issues with the film’s portrayal of children – just that QAnon’s sprawling online network, which has masterfully infiltrated online message boards, Facebook groups and activist organizations, could very well be why a French film that might have otherwise gotten lost in Netflix’s expansive catalogue has catalyzed such an enormous global response.
For politicians such as Mr. Cruz and Mr. O’Toole, the film provides a convenient distraction – an easy and uncontroversial target against which they can rally the troops (to borrow the words of a former public safety minister: You’re either “with us or with the child pornographers”). And at a time when so much of life is uncertain, ambiguous and poorly defined – When will this pandemic end? Am I still supposed to wipe down my groceries? – there’s an odd comfort in declaring something definitively bad.
Cuties might have been a poorly conceived, kind-of-gross film with a warmed-over message in the best of times, but promoted within the current zeitgeist, it’s a symbol of everything wrong with humanity. Combine the growing influence of QAnon and the need to somehow release our collective anger and frustration, and Cuties makes for a pretty decent target.
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Robyn Urback