Cuties

​Well, time to discuss the year’s most controversial movie. I’ll try just focusing on it as a movie first.

As someone born and raised in America with parents from India, I could relate very well to this main character, someone born and raised in France with parents from Senegal. She has her feet in two cultures. Her conservative family has expectations of her – what her responsibilities are, how she should dress, what she’s allowed to say, think, etc. Meanwhile, her peers around her are wearing crop tops and skintight shorts and dancing. She decides she wants to dance with them and join their team for such a competition. She does gain the confidence to stand up to her family as a result, but trying to be one of the cool kids often means muting what makes you unique and happy and she has to learn that, as so many of us do at some point.

Well that was that. I knew I was in for an interesting experience, though, before I watched the movie and saw that it had an 88% approval rating on the Tomatometer but only an average 1.6 rating at IMDB. Sure enough, the rating had plummeted due to huge numbers of IMDB users voting 1 as a matter of principle.

In fact, as soon as my business manager recommended this assignment, I saw the hashtag #CancelNetflix was exploding. It seems to have died down, perhaps because of the memes saying, “If you’re canceling your Netflix subscription over Cuties but still voting for the guy who owns the Miss Teen USA pageant, you don’t really care about the sexual exploitation of young girls.” Of course, Trump took it further than that, walking in on the underage girls changing and bragging about it on The Howard Stern Show, but good luck convincing Republicans they aren’t the party of “morals” and “family values”.

What surprised me about the #CancelNetflix hashtag, however, was that it was even circulating in progressive groups I follow, not just among the same conservatives who got mad at Starbucks for something or other multiple holiday seasons, got mad at Keurig for NOT wanting to advertise during a show promoting a pedophile’s political campaign, and got mad at Gillette for…saying not to be a jerk?

Is Cuties that tasteless? Or tasteless at all? The issue is that the dancing the girls do is twerking. When I first heard about that, I was wondering what the big deal is. Don’t adolescent girls want to dress and dance the way they see female singers do in music videos? Heck, I remember when I was in the MTV demographic Madonna famously kissed Britney Spears (and less famously kissed Christina Aguilera LOL) on the mouth during the MTV Video Music Awards and I read a hilarious story about a pair of 12-year-old girls who were going to kiss each other like that after school for any boys who paid them to watch.

Still, the issue remains over whether the movie is exploitative. I was cringing/looking away sometimes when we saw the girls gyrating their hips and spanking each other.  Although we see that in hip-hop videos all the time, it’s with females who are years older, and thus it’s not creepy. What really stands out in this movie are the close-up shots of the girls’ butts while they’re dancing. There is also a video watched on a cell phone of a rival dance group performing, and one of those girls flashes a breast at the camera. From what I’ve read that actress is not a minor though, so let’s focus on the main characters themselves.

I feel the movie is showing what girls that age want to do as they are discovering their own sexuality, want to rebel against authority, and admire the cool singers they see on the screen. I’m certainly not going to look, but I imagine there are videos of tween girls on YouTube (or less mainstream, less censored sites) dancing the way we see the young ladies do in this film. It’s also naïve to believe that all the women on OnlyFans (or whatever erotic websites have existed, going back to the dawn of the internet) are legal adults.

While laws are in place against kiddie porn, it of course still exists and one way to help prevent it is to make girls less vulnerable to exploitation by not repressing them. The more you force them to hide their sexuality, the more likely they will be to act out by doing thing like making risqué videos. Although nothing that bad happens in this movie, such videos can certainly get unwanted attention from the wrong creeps. Perhaps, if the protagonist’s family had let her dress more liberally and have more freedom to hang out with whom she wanted, she wouldn’t have needed to rebel this way in the first place.

The director, Maïmouna Doucouré, is a French-born child of Senegalese immigrants, just like her main character, and thus knows what she is talking about. So do I, as I discussed earlier. Although sexual exploitation is less of an issue for boys, boys and girls are both vulnerable to things like drug abuse if they seek to give a middle finger to repressive authority. That’s why I support the legalization of all drugs, as studies show kids are less likely to try them and get hooked if the mystique of them being illegal pleasures is gone.

So basically Cuties is an authentic, raw look at the importance of being yourself – not letting authority stifle you but also not letting peer pressure push you too far in the other direction. It’s a well-written, well-acted, well-directed film and, although you will feel squeamish during certain scenes, it’s worth it for a great message.

Bottom Line: Thumbs up. Please don’t “cancel” me.

Up Next: You ain’t seen nothing yet!