As you can see from the meme collage at the head of this post, the streaming service Netflix absolutely loves it some dirty, sexy kids. In the last couple of days, this fact has become apparent not just to the few edgelords talking about it on /pol/, but to everybody, as Netflix has advertised its acquisition of a French movie called Cuties, which made it big at Sundance.
What’s remarkable is that, although Cuties has a handful of defenders, this is one case where almost everyone seems to be pissed off. The left-right divide, over this one film, has evaporated: Everyone is angry. For a brief moment, our fractured nation is united in mutual offendedness and outrage. Maybe now we can begin to heal.
What sparked the controversy is the poster Netflix chose to advertise the film—a poster notably different from the original French version, which Netflix apparently created on the unwise assumption that it would appeal more to American audiences. The poster has so outraged some that I have even seen an individual I admire and respect begging people not to share it, even to criticize. Because I don’t think we can talk about this without depicting, in some fashion, what we are talking about, I’ve decided to share the poster, but only after the break. Consider yourself warned.
This movie, Cuties in English and Mignonnes in French, is about a group of eleven-year-old girls who dance. That brief description sounds inoccuous, even charming, but wait until I tell you that the film achieved an NC-17 rating and will be rated TV-MA when it appears on Netflix next month. As you likely know, NC-17 is the rating that replaced X; this is an X-rated film about eleven-year-olds.
After the break comes the poster, and then I will discuss how Netflix chose to describe the movie, what people are mad about, and so forth.
This poster is just so damn ugly. The image definitely contrasts with the title: Two of the girls look terrified, one looks like a dude, and the fourth is trying and failing to look sultry. None look cute. Their outfits are crude, immodest, unappealing, and utterly inappropriate for dance; they may be inappropriate for anything, but if they belong anywhere, it would be at a track meet or something.
They have cool sneakers, though. That’s the one nice thing I can say.
To illustrate how injudicious Netflix was here, this is the original poster from the French version:
They’re still dressed like skanks, but this poster is at least less deliberatively provocative—if equally unimaginative in its layout.
Then we get to Netflix’s equally injudicious description of the movie:
Amy, 11, becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew. Hoping to join them, she starts to explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions.
After the outrage started gearing up, Netflix went back and changed the description, in the process taking a passive-aggressive swipe at “conservative” critics:
Eleven-year-old Amy starts to rebel against her conservative family’s traditions when she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited dance crew.
By “conservative,” by the way, they actually mean Muslim. Amy’s family in the movie is Muslim. Netflix is strangely careful to hide that fact. And by “strangely,” I mean unsurprisingly.
After it became clear that it wasn’t just conservatives that they’d pissed off, Netflix offered a mea culpa on Twitter, which once again contained a passive-aggressive dig:
We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description.
— Netflix (@netflix) August 20, 2020
“But it won an award at Sundance, guys!” … As if that’s actually a recommendation. Sundance is the epicenter of arthouse shit; they love pedophilia over there. Critics do, too: This film has an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing.
The descriptions of what happens in the film, gleaned from critical reviews, only make things worse: A little girl shows off her dancing abilities by “humping the floor” in order to impress the Cuties to let her in; a teenager takes her top off on stage; a young girl posts an uncensored image of her vagina to Instagram. The director has defended all this by claiming that, ackshually, she’s criticizing hyper-sexual internet culture rather than approving it. But from all the descriptions, it sounds as if she’s gone full Taxi Driver, wallowing in the very things she’s allegedly condemning.
Never go full Taxi Driver.
Not having seen the movie myself (and I have no plans ever to see it), what most irritates me is Netflix’s Orwellian use of the word femininity in its original description. There is nothing feminine about “twerking,” the basest and ugliest form of what can barely be called dance. There is nothing feminine about the girls’ outfits.
If the filmmakers wanted to depict young girls going Western and dancing in defiance of Islam, I assume that, I dunno, ballroom or tap-dancing or ballet were out of the question—you know, dancing that can actually be feminine, and that actually requires some talent, skill, and training. Twerking doesn’t require skill; anyone can do it. I, you, or anyone with no sense of shame can do it.
John Nolte, in his sharp criticism of Netflix’s rolling-out of this movie, callis this Netflix’s “third strike for sexualizing children,” but this is actually Netflix’s ninth or tenth strike, at least. You can see that from the meme at the head of this post, and there are a few other examples the meme doesn’t contain. Netflix absolutely loves to court the viewership of what Nolte colorfully calls the “naked under the raincoat crowd.”
As already mentioned, this movie appears to have angered most everybody, though it has its defenders: Most or all of them, as you might expect, are on the left side of the political spectrum; and of course it’s won praise from movie critics, who are not known for their conservative values. I find it interesting to contrast this with the typical critics of anime, who are more often on the left. Critics on the right attack things like Cuties or Big Mouth while critics on the left attack things like Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out.
I have a half-formed theory about why this is. For a few decades now, rightists have warned that, sooner or later, the left would work in earnest to normalize pedophilia. At first blush, it may seem that this prediction has never materialized or has at least been a long time in coming, but that is only because the Overton window has shifted enough that we didn’t recognize when it happened: Pedophilia has been normalized; we just call it “trans kids” or “drag queen story hour” or sex ed. Its normalization is evident in many Netflix projects, of which the licensing of this film is only the latest. Netflix is also the creator of the abomination Big Mouth—featured first in the meme up top—which is an aggresively ugly cartoon about children masturbating while learning about sodomy and other perverse activities.
Although it is dangerous to lump large swaths of people into simple categories, it is hard not to notice that anime mostly gets criticism from the left and that defenders of Big Mouth also come from the left. The precious few defenders of Cuties are also on the left. My question is, why? Why the apparent inconsistency of hating both the real and merely alleged pedophilia in Japanese productions while defending the obvious and especially grotesque pedophilia in Western productions?
The answer, I muse, may be beauty: There is much fault to find in Japanese pop culture, including pedophilia, but Japanese pop culture at least, if nothing else, tries to look pretty. Western pop culture, by contrast, is purposely ugly, like the outfits of the girls in Cuties or the vomit-inducing character designs of Big Mouth. Both the East and West are guilty of sexualizing children, but only the West has this cannabilistic aspect, this desire to devour, corrupt, and destroy every last shred or semblance of sweetness and innocence.
It’s merely an idle guess on my part, but I suspect the left hates anime because it isn’t pedophilic enough.
I keep seeing this meme, which sums it up:
