Bittersweet Infamy - #128 - Too Cute for Comfort

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Taylor tells Josie about Cuties (a.k.a. Mignonnes), the 2020 Netflix film by Senegalese-French writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré, and how it sparked a child exploitation panic that made its way to the U.S. Senate. Plus: illusionist Murray SawChuck breaks the magician's code, and gets disappeared from the Academy of Magical Arts.

Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Food. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in infamy. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter.

And the sweet. It's Canada Day. Oh my gosh! Happy Canada Day! I'm the worst. I'm so sorry. Thank you. It's one of those real bittersweet edge things where we're all very nationalistic right now, but also Canada was founded on a genocide, so it sort of tempers the whole thing. But you know, red and white, that's an attractive color palette. That doesn't stop the US, you know? Yeah. Nothing stops the US. That's what I admire about you folks. Not shame, not experience, nothing. Uh-uh, Yeah, yeah, real can-do attitude. That's

what happens up here. I love that. Are you all excited for your upcoming Fourth of July celebrations? I know that that's sort of a big one in your family. Yeah, it's a big one because everybody seems to be able to get the time off and all be together. We're kind of coming from... But you make the time off to... Different cities. That's true. That's true. It's just, it is really nice to be in San Diego in July too, gotta say. I remember very fondly all the time my recent trip to San Diego for your wedding and how nice the air is now laid back the dude bros are. It's a nice time. Yeah, 4th of July has an extra sweet treat for the Mitchell family because we tie-dye.

I think this is the fifth year running that we've done it. Is that like a running-dye joke? Yes, exactly. Okay. And I'm pretty stoked. I have a white jean jacket that I just simply do not wear enough. So I might as well tie-dye that motherfucker. Oh yeah, fuck it.

Fuck it. Fuck it. It's after Labor Day. Fuck it. It's not. It's not. You can still wear that. But fuck it.

I just don't, you know, it's a jean jacket without pockets. Without the, it has little pockets on the, on the top, but doesn't have the side pockets. And I feel like- Yeah, you're going gonna want those side pockets. That's the whole point of the jean jacket. It's a utilitarian pull to a degree. We're not being froufy with our jean jacket. No, and you can have like your angsty teenage vibe,

and it makes your waist look small. It's nice. I like that. You put thought into this. Good for you. Yes. So it's kind of a second tier jean jacket, but it's gonna be top tier after I'm done dying. You're hoping to take it to a My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, Eminem store, the works, just make it an explosion of color.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll be bringing it with me when I come to see you in beautiful British Columbia. In like two weeks. I know. I'm coming. Yes, it's happening. It's wild. I'm losing it. I'm losing it. Okay. So folks, what we're talking about is if you remember a couple years back, 2023, we did bittersweet 604. And that was sort of our exploration of all things beautiful BC. We did it in person. We did an episode at the 604 podcast Network Studios Which was a lot of fun and then we did a little road trip onto Vancouver Island before we finished the job in my uh in my that sounds dirty to We finished the job in my living room with a drag queen and it was great The established chandelier who's a great guest for that episode so fun. That was fun, right?

Well, we enjoyed it and we wanted to reunite, so here's what we're looking at this year. It's the bittersweet infamy Big Skookum BC Road Trip. It's happening. It's happening. Big Skookum BC Road Trip. Taylor, Josie, two friends of the podcast, Lucia Mish and Rui Gonzalez. Not just one, but two! You might know that Lucia told the main story of episode number 68, which really should have been 69, The Cult of the Clitoris. The Cult of the Clitoris, so good.

Unless you were Josie's minfamous in that episode, then you weren't so good. You know... Hey! Kidding. I'll never live it down. You have one bad day. And it defines you for the rest of your life.

That's the lesson of the show. Yeah, kinda. I'm kidding, you're great. You may remember Rui 1. Rui's the person that I'm dating. I went to visit Rui in Cuernavaca, Mexico back in episode number 119 in the Garden of the Emperor. That episode really grew on me. I like that episode. Yeah. I like that garden. Nice document of my time in Mexico. Yeah, good garden. Interesting garden. So what we're going to be doing, and more information is yet to come, but basically we're just going to be doing a road trip to the east of BC. We're going to try to get in some hot springs if we can, some national parks.

Dip our toes in some hot waters. Dip our toes. We're dropping Rui at Shambhala in Salmo if we can help it. A music festival. For those who don't know. A music festival in which like 20,000 people encroach upon a town that usually consists of 600. Cute.

An intense, remote, cool music festival. And then we're headed back home. Not only are we going to be recording footage of the road trip, but we're also going to be going to 604 Studios and we're going to be recording some of the bigger stories together in person. It's going to be great. And we get to meet our lovely and talented editor. Alex!

It's going to be good. Well, hopefully. I hope we get to meet Alex. No pressure, Alex! Hi Alex. How excited are you? And this is, by the way, we're taking a little bit of a risk announcing this early because wildfires season in BC very much a real thing.

So that could change any and all of these plans so please don't hold us to it and if you come back to this episode and find this part of the proceedings suddenly deleted you'll know why but otherwise I'm excited I'm so excited it's gonna be fun road trip Lucia Rui gonna be good times we're gonna be taping it all the way along the way and we've got some fun things planned Josie men or women Who's better at tennis? Women. That's true according to the film Battle of the Sexes.

A very interesting sports biopic chosen by our subscriber Lizzie D over at the Bittersweet Film Club. Lizzie D, thank you. That's ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. Join and you, like Lizzie D, can tell us which films to watch. And we watched Battle of the Sexes and we had a big interesting discussion over with perpetual special guest Mitchell Collins. It's a good movie. I had a good time.

You can't spoil that for them. They need to like know what if Josie hated it? Well I didn't. Hear Josie cuss out Emma Stone live over at the, no hear Josie cuss out Emma Stone live at the Bitter Sweet Film Club. If you've listened to this show at all, you know that a battle of the sexes, Billie Jean King, dramatization is right up my goddamn alley. It's fine. That's true. Josie's a pro woman woman. The big show at the very end

is at the fucking Astrodome in Houston. I love this shit. Yeah, that's true. We love when the Astrodome shows up and shows out. The angel on our shoulder is the Padres, but the devil on our shoulder is the Astros, you know? Oh yeah, or it's just the Astro Dome. Yeah, it's just the dome itself. Yeah. We send out the Astros as needed.

Yes, yes, exactly. I'm excited for your Minfamous, Josie. Your episode 128 Minfamous, the most milestone minfamous of them all. Can you do any close magic? Can you do like any magic tricks or anything like that? No to my great disappointment because I think magic is so much fun. Oh you do? Oh I adore it.

It's so much, ooo where did it go? Where did the coin go? You know it's fun. How did my name get on the card? You know I'm very easy. I think that there should be some things in life where you don't know how the magic trick is done. Okay.

And magic is probably the best example because that's the one. You know what I mean? But I admire magic. I just don't have very good like hand dexterity. Like my fine motor skills aren't very good. It took you a while to learn how to use scissors. I do. It did. And yeah, tie while to learn how to use scissors. I do. It did.

And yeah, tie my shoes. All those kind of fun milestone things. My dexterity, my command of my digits isn't amazing throughout the course of my life. And I feel like you need a lot of that, like, card needs to go up sleeve at right point or you know, things like that. Yeah, that makes sense. But you like it because some people dislike it. Who dislikes magic?

Do people dislike magic or do they dislike party magicians? Do they dislike just being captive to something? Or is it like we're like this? I think, okay. I mean a little, a little. I'm giving you a few options. A little column A, a little column B maybe, yeah. I think some people don't like magic because there's this sense of being tricked maybe

or someone's gotten the better of you or something like that. We need to burn the witch, that instinct. Yes, yeah. You tricked me, that means you're evil, you're dead. You're from Satan, I got you. Again, I bring it back to religion here. And I think there's also a little bit of like the person who is constantly like doing a magic trick

for you, wow, there's a coin from behind your ear, da da da, like it gets a little maybe old sometimes. It gets a little like, okay, we all know you have a hobby. We all know you do a thing. We get it. Can we move on? That's so, come on. That's harsh.

Let people, we only get so many years on this earth, dude. Let the dude do magic. Do they have to like do it like near me? So you're the one. So you're just, some people don't like, some people don't like magic. You don't like magic. I wouldn't say that outright. Until cornered.

Until cornered. Or, you know, yeah, if there's a magician on the street, I'll be like, okay, small salute, move right along. Wow. I think there is something like a little sleazy. I get this vibe of like, look at me, look at me, look at me. And I'm like, I don't want to look at you. I don't want to give you what you want. Is it that it's sleazy men? I ask you broadly sleazy men, not to say there aren't any women magicians, but I don't think you're talking about them.

No, I think you're talking about sleazy men. Yeah, you're right. I am talking about sleazy. Are they too close to pick up artists? Is that what it is? There does seem to be some type of element of that. Because you can't prejudge magicians like that. All types of people love magic, even women, even, you know, non-binary folks. This is true. Everyone loves magic. It's just a matter of what tickles your brain in the right way. What craft are you willing to take the time to learn? That's the thing for me, and whatever your craft is, it's fun to have a craft. It is, it is fun to have a craft.

And I love performance. I love performance of all kinds. Okay, okay, yeah. And that is certainly what magic is, right? It is a performance. There is something unique about magic in the fact that there is an agreement that that magician will not share their secrets

There is the iron clad Code of all magicians worldwide. I love codes. I love codes of honor as women and children first We decided that in order to be you know honest in whatever way or captain goes down with the ship, there's nothing really that's baked into the law about this, but we choose honor among thieves in whatever way we choose this. It's a little bit of like, this is a code since time immemorial, meaning like the early to mid 1800s. That's typically where our codes come from. And the code of magic is indeed that ancient, dating as far back as to the 1800s. As ancient as 150 years.

Yeah. Got it. And getting older. To be clear, I assume we're talking like stage magic here as opposed to like ceremonial slash ritual magic. We're talking rabbits out of a top hat. We're talking doves flying. The classics, wand, assistant that gets cut

into three pieces. Exactly, yes, yes. So this ironclad code, and Taylor does love a code, if it is broken, there are consequences to pay in the world of magic, which again, distinguishes it from other types of performance, right? If I am a bad tap dancer.

They don't take you out back and shoot you and use your tap shoes for glue. No, they don't. They really don't. So what happens when a stage magician violates this code? I'm going to tell you what happens, Taylor. The consequences in this case led to a trial Trial of the century really or you know the trial of late March 2024 that might be as recently as that

More concise. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Damn. I didn't know that we were still having these kinds of trials I thought we were brought to take me back to the mid 18001800s. Right? Yeah, no, this was just yesterday. Dang. The prosecution, the private club for magicians housed in the 1963 foreboding Victorian mansion tucked into the Hollywood Hills, the Magic Castle. Do you know the Magic Castle? Have you ever been? No, fuck no, but I mean, duh. No, it should be like a creaky place with like, uh, busts that you can pull and it flips open a bookcase. Done. Nailed it. Yep. I feel like

that's important to the aesthetic of the situation. The defense? Murray the Magician, also known as Murray Sockchuk, capital S-A-W, capital C-H-U-C-, K or Murray John Sawchuck. No special capitalization. That's, you know, the government has its way, but I have my way too. Our boy, Murray the magician, Murray Sawchuck of various capitalizations is a well-known illusionist and comedian.

He kind of does a little bit of both. He calls himself the Dennis, the Minnis of magic. Don't like that. So it's like, you know, a mixture of comical mishaps, little bad boys situation. No, I don't like it. No, I don't care for it. See, okay.

I ask if you like magic and. No, you can move on to the next. I don't want to dwell here next. So he has held a Las Vegas residency at the Tropicana, which RIP is no more. It was shuttered last year and later than demolished. The Tropicana got juiced. That's good. That's good. That's good. At the time of this trial in 2024, Satchuck was 50 years old. He has a very distinguishable look about him.

Not distinguished, I will point out. He kind of looks like if Carrot Top were blonde and not roided out. Okay, the woman has spoken. Put it in your mental image machine and do with it what you will. He has this like poofed up, kind of teased, bleached hairdo that kind of launches off of his head only upwards. You want him to be one of the subtle magicians. You want him to be one of these retiring magicians. You want him to be one of these retiring, introverted magicians. They sell tickets.

Yeah. And he's always kind of wearing like tinted sunglasses with like blue tint or orange tint. He always has like a pair of sunglasses on as part of his look. Right. He is to prepare us for our big Scugum BC road trip. He is a native of Burnaby, British Columbia. is to prepare us for our big Scugum BC road trip.

He is a native of Burnaby, British Columbia. Hey, he's from Burnaby-a-no. Look, they get less Canadian every time I do them. He's from Burnaby-a-no. There we go. Hey, let's refine that equilibrium there. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Woo-hoo. Yeah. There we go. Let's refine that equilibrium there. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. Love to hear that local boys are doing big things like getting magic tribunaled. Exactly. Sure.

On the world stage. It's great. He's done a lot of kind of big ticket things. He got on the reality TV circuit in a pretty savvy publicity wise way. He appeared on America's Got Talent. Yeah. So he's been on like Blind Date, which is a reality TV show that I've never heard of. Blind Date? Yeah. Okay. Blind Date. I don't know if it's the same Blind Date, but back in the day, there was a very early proto reality show called Blind Date where the gimmick was that you would get set up

on a blind date with someone and they would just tape what happened. But it was like a little ratchet. Like it was a little like you'd show up and like they'd give you like some sort of like horny thought bubble graphic, a la pop-up video next to your head being like, oh, I wanna see her boobs

and then make your eyes bug out of your head. Woo woo. You know, that's kind of the vibe. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of this guy's vibe. Let's be real. Yeah, okay. So he became the resident magic historian on Pond Stars.

Okay, so if we find something that someone comes in and says, this is an authentic Harold Houdini and they're like, wait a minute, his name wasn't Harold Houdini I got you. Yeah yeah exactly and especially with that America's Got Talent debut of his it was their fifth season and he was in the semi-finals and he did a pretty massive trick and America's Got Talent AGT for those in the know, he made a train engine disappear in front of a live studio audience. Okay. Which is an interesting thing to make disappear one because it's so goddamn big and he did it in studio but also because it was his father's train engine. What? What?

So as we were saying, magic is a performance, right? So part of this performance was the storytelling aspect, this biographical storytelling aspect. We love a storyteller on the Bitter Studio with you podcast, don't we? Where Murray explains the setup to the trick that my family has worked in the railroad business for generations, for almost 150 years. I'm the first one in a long, long line to break that chain of working in the railway. And go into magic.

And go into magic. But I still honor where I come from. I still love and adore my father. What's not to like about that? What a guy. So his father owns a train engine, interestingly enough. Sure. And he rigs this trick so that he pulls the sheet and that huge big ass thing is no longer

there. Where did it go? Like magic, it disappeared. Just like magic. Sharon Osborne gave him a standing ovation. Howie Mandel? Okay. Not so much. Howie's a tough act to impress.

He's met the banker of Deal or No Deal. This is true. He knows the real high rollers in the world. Yeah, exactly. He has this like reality TV schtick that he's very good at. Like to be able to kind of negotiate all these different appearances is pretty talented at show business. He also has parlayed some of his magic skills into a robust youtube viewership. He does a lot of tricks on there that get you know shared onto various social media platforms. He'll prank cops and security guards with

magic. Oh good! Yeah that's nice. A cab you know. No no no the opposite someone will die. That's what I mean. Okay. Don't eggs. Someone will die. Gotcha I get it now. Thank you. In one very popular video he gifted a homeless person a $1 bill that turned into a $100 bill. So that was cool. What happened to the $1 bill? What's the trick? According to Sogcheck, we did billions of views on that. I'm sure you did.

Hundreds of billions, I'm sure. It got him 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. That's not bad. That's money. That's money, baby. You can kind of get a sense of where he fits in the landscape of performing magicians, right? He knows how to do the showbiz.

He's up on all the YouTube stuff. So these YouTube videos is where things get a little sticky, though. OK. Oh, and this is where his offense occurs. In late January, 2024, he and his showgirl wife, he's one of these content creators that just kind of makes things constant every day, every day something new. Talent to it, I would imagine quite an exhausting pace to keep up even if you're like pre-banking stuff, really, really hard to keep up with that kind of churn.

And so him and Danny decided that they would put together a little sketch and they literally just kind of tossed it together. And it would be a takeoff of like a I love Lucy bit where Lucy and Desi Arnaz kind of do this back and forth thing in their version. He'd perform a series of tricks for the camera and like some very basic magic tricks. And then she playing this kind of unimpressed spectator, unimpressed wife would reveal

how those tricks are actually done Oh, you can't give away the tricks for content like that. It's not for the algorithm. You can't do it. You can't do it Sorry, I know that you got to make shorts, but we have codes to uphold. This is like hamarabi shit Yeah, so they literally just kind of come up with the idea film it really quick Super duper quick and throw it up. And they're like, okay, what's for dinner? Let's make dinner and then let's do a whole new one tomorrow.

You know, like it's just kind of in the routine. Tomorrow we'll do some dances. Yeah. And then it started to get a lot of interaction, a lot of views. So much so that in a few hours, it's up to a million views. So much so that in a few hours it's up to a million views and then in the next few hours it quadruples, it goes viral as the kids say, right? No publicity is bad publicity? Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeee eeeeee eeeeee eeeeee eeeeee eee eee eee eee eee e We may come to that, right? Do you want to see this offending video? Yeah. So we've got a David Byrne looking guy.

There we go. And he's doing tricks and he's got a hot wife and literally as he does them, there's no background music to this, I should add. Like you said, I love Lucy type of thing. I don't see that whatsoever. It's a kind of janky editorial situation, it seems to me. Very thrown together. Thrown together being the operative phrase here. Why is she revealing the tricks though?

They're going off of this idea of like, I mean, in his words at least, it's the I love Lucy kind of like, I don't know, we just kind of cooked it up and put it together. No, why are you giving away your tracks? I'm pro magician code in terms of like the papal conclave. I'm a hardcore conservative when it comes to the magician's code. I'm a traditionalist. Oh, yeah, I agree with you. The video is like it's not entertaining enough to be its own piece of work. I thought she was going to have a little Lucy dress and they were gonna have little Lucy da da da da da da.

Yeah. She was gonna be like pulling bonbons out of her bonnet and you know, which is a sits on her barnet. I think that that didn't happen. I think that I just saw some silent people in the basement of a home that's maybe too large for them. Where are they? They're in Vegas.

Yeah, that explains it. Yeah, so just two people living in Vegas. One of them is completely exposing the other's magic tricks. It's kind of it. The other part of it is because I watched the entire thing is it's a lot of tricks. It's like three fucking minutes long. I stopped. I stopped after a minute. There's like maybe a dozen and they all follow the same pattern. He does it and you can tell that he's kind of talented. He's got, you know, the really good... You don't want them to be saying that about you. Kind of delicate. But then his wife fucking mocks him and he makes him look like a fucking cuck. It's true. You're like, this guy's kind of talented. Shame about the pity I feel for him because his like,

I guess his wife hates him. I don't know. Like they don't present the image very well at all. It's not clear what they're going for. And she's always doing the same thing. She has this look on her face of just like, Oh my God, kill me now. And then she exposed it and then she walks away and she keeps walking away. It's like, bitch, why are you coming back? It's a round house. It's a circular pillar that she just keeps walking around in circles. Now that you mentioned it, it's a bizarre video. For being a content creator, it's kind of a janky ass video, I think.

Oh yeah, put a royalty free track on that bitch, Magic Marie. Yeah, maybe that's why he was kind of surprised that it took off the way it did, but he does stand by it when he gets a letter in the mail from the Academy of Magical Arts. Delivered by an owl. Exactly! Yeah, yeah, yeah! No, the letterhead has like an owl and a chouf of playing cards, like a top hat. Yeah, their little insignia. It's pretty cute. That's too funny. They're housed in the Magic Castle in Hollywood

and on their website, they explain, our organization promotes the art of magic, encourages fellowship and maintains the highest ethical standards. Our goals are to advance the art and promote a positive image of magic and magicians worldwide. So they are definitely intoning the code, right? In fact, they are upholding the code.

Someone's gaudy with these sick fucks emasculating wife just giving it all away. His sword's floppy, it doesn't even work. It's dire stuff. It's essentially like a cease and desist. Please stop what you are doing. It's essentially like a cease and desist. Please stop what you are doing. And then they summon him to the magic castle.

Now they actually give him a few options. He can come in person and chat or he can zoom in or he can write his own letter. So Sarchek decides, you know what? I'll go. I'm due for a trip to LA. And he shows up at the appointed time. And he is led to the Houdini room. That's where they put you in the water tank. Which by his own description, Sochek says, everything in there is Houdini artifacts. His metamorphosis trunk, his handcuffs, his straitjacket. It's a really cool room.

You have your dinner and then somebody comes in to conduct a seance. His metamorphosis trunk, his handcuffs, his straitjacket. It's a really cool room. You have your dinner and then somebody comes in to conduct a seance. And as it happens, the walls move, the paintings change, things appear, things disappear. It's a very cool experience. Let's be magicians. Let's be magicians, Josie. We can go there. We can record it for the podcast. Remember when I started the episode being like, I don't like magicians? It was tough shit. We all need to make sacrifices. Okay. It's not just about you. Think of the

collective. Think of the team. You're right. You're right. Think about the mission. Yeah, exactly. The mission statement, man. The mission statement. Okay. So that is their prosecution essentially is you've broken the time honored code and you got to come to Hollywood and talk about it in the Houdini room. Satchek arrives. He speaks at length Using a document that he had written as his guide that includes 11 bullet points all of which explain Why what he did was not incorrect and not against the code. How many of these are you going to give me, Josie? How many of the 11 do I get?

You're going to get three because three is the magic number, baby. We abide by the rule of threes. This is a writer's household. So in his first one, Sácek claims that if magic is being exposed to enhance a performance, making it more enjoyable and not vindictive or directed as mean or personal it really should be considered accepted as a performance piece. No. Okay. No no no. Because then everyone who's doing something like that fucking splitting up the Kit Kat trick that he does is now fucked because you just gave their shit away too, regardless of your intention. So no, next.

If you are teaching magic, you are exposing magic. And I should caveat this that the Academy of Magical Arts does allow the instruction and education about tricks. There's no, there's no issue with that, but only with exposing magic. So here Sasek is claiming, what is the difference between teaching and exposure? I appreciate it as a bit of sophistry, but no, no. That is neither here nor there in this case, I would say, because you're doing this for views. You're doing this as part of your like, we need certified practitioners. These rooms need to be sealed with oaths. There can be no recording. You know what I mean? Like we really need to take it back to the dark ages and the shit. I'm serious. We have gotten too flippant in the TikTok era about, oh, I'm instructing by posting my shit on TikTok. That is interesting because he does make a claim that like we are in the internet era. The day the internet was given to us common people to use,

we lost the code of secrecy. You disgusting rat story, Josie. Continue. Okay, so the last one here, third one. Yes. He brings up examples of how other magicians have done the same exact thing. And he's a snitch. And he's a fucking snitch on top of it all. What a guy. Houdini wrote a book on it, Unmasking of Robert Houdini, along with going to live shows in

disguise and debunking mind readers and spiritual healers, and he was the president of the Society of the American Magicians from 1917 to 1926. Are you really comparing yourself to Houdini? Different set of rules. Houdini can do whatever he wants, okay? Houdini can be a corrupt hypocrite as far as I'm concerned. You haven't earned it.

Fucking Magic Marie. So this hearing in the Houdini room lasted a total of 90 minutes. Yeah. And they dispersed. No verdict was delivered at that particular meeting. A few weeks later, it was determined. The council, the board, whatever they call themselves, committee, the magicians, the conclave. Yes. The Conclave. The Magicians. The Conclave. Yes.

The smoke came out of the chimney. They agree with you. Damn. These were not good reasons. This is not an acceptable way to be a Magician in this day and age. Magic is one of the last ones. Wrestling it's gone. Wrestling we know that these are actors now.

Wrestling we know that these are all regular human beings. Magic still kind of has its mystique about it. And while I'm sure that there are places where you could go and get some of this information readily easily or information like it, you may not learn how to do the trick exactly like the guy, but you might learn how to do the trick quite close. It's different given it of what just like, here ye, here ye, here's how the trick's done. No, no, no, no. Don't you have any sense of like the secretive coven you were sworn into? That's one of like the last fun things we have is like a relatively harmless, stupid secret society where we can

make shit disappear and you're ruining it. You're ruining it, man. So with that, the Magic Castle in Hollywood officially banned Murray the Magician, Murray Sacek, different capitalization, and Murray Sacek, same capitalization, from being a member of the Magic Castle, and neither is he allowed to perform there ever again. At the castle itself? At Magic Castle. Oh, who cares? Who cares? It's one place. ever again. At the castle itself? At Magic Castle. Oh, who cares? Who cares? It's one place.

Well, I mean, it is a pretty major, like, iconic venue in Hollywood. Well, then don't get yourself banned! That's true enough. True enough. And no one gets banned for life. He'll come back. All will be forgiven. This is all relatively minor shit. The secret behind my bluster and outrage is that this is all relatively minor shit honestly. this is true. i'm sure they'll make up as people do

worse trespasses and things like that and also he can do magic he's allowed to practice magic in the continental united states right it's just this one place. yes this is true. it's more symbolic than anything. this is true. and now he can go and reveal even more shit on TikTok because he's not bound by anything. Or YouTube or wherever. This is true. Yeah, he has no code. He's just out there. He's a renegade.

If anything, this makes him kind of cooler. He's like a renegade outlaw magician who breaks the rules. You should lean into this. And that is exactly the reaction from the wider community is, oh God, he just, he's, yeah, he's pretty good at the showbiz publicity game. He just played it again. Yeah, he just whipped up another one. Yeah, great publicity. Here we are talking about him.

Yeah. This was getting him on news organizations in Las Vegas and LA. All of the magic world was a flutter with the news. One of my main sources comes from the Hollywood Reporter. The dudes made it to bittersweet infamy. So you know that he's like top tier. The infamous even. Yeah. But where do we go for all our real world reactions? But Reddit.

Sure. Reddit user Andrew Flores wrote a year ago, obviously he's doing this for publicity and profit only that. But to the argument that anybody can buy these tricks on Amazon and learn them, the truth is they won't. That has always been the case. Sure it's easier now than ever to buy tricks online or seek methods on the internet, but that little bit of effort has always been the line in the sand that had kept the vast

majority of people from learning the secrets. Yeah. But when you post them rapid fire on TikTok for anybody's algorithm to feed them in two seconds, you remove that. Reddit got some smarties, you know? Some real dumb asses too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting point. It's an interesting point well taken, point well taken. Yeah, the part of magic is it's that very almost gossamer barrier between you and what is happening. And as the performer has all of the power in that situation, you kind of relinquish yourself as the viewer and it's that relationship that creates the magic. It creates the sleight of hand that is so entertaining. And if you break that down,

if you just feed it to them in two seconds, then that gossamer barrier is just kind of, you know, a dirty Kleenex that's not as fun. In tatters, in dirty Kleenex, a snot rag. Yes. Damn. No, it's so true. It's such a good point. And I also think that, like, I don't necessarily know how instructive I find what he's doing here in a nuts and bolts way.

It explains how a thing is done. But magic is more than how a thing is done. Magic is building connection with the audience. Like you say, magic is charisma. Magic is look over here. Magic is a bunch of things in addition to just like, oh, the Kit Kat bar that I break in half is actually two unfoldable Kit Kat bars. Like, you know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah. That's not actually that interesting. The performance, the razzle dazzle of it all. That's where magic lives, I think. ["The Magic of Magic"]

For today's main story, I'm gonna be doing a little visit to the movies, a little movie magic, movie story infamous movie movie movie. I'm just picturing like Nicole Kidman with like the shutter flash and she comes and she's like I've always loved the movies even in the others when there were ghosts haunting me yeah I think that's about right so before we head into our main though, I wanted to take another sort of quick detour and give a quick little RIP to someone who helped create a very memorable movie experience for me.

Aww. And it was the singer Rebecca Del Rio who is probably best known for being the singer in a really pivotal like climactic scene in Mulholland Drive. Have you ever seen it? I was just about to admit that I have never seen Mulholland Drive. Oh, watch Mulholland Drive. So everyone raves about it and it's as good as people say. Okay. Okay, good. Easy. And there's a scene in it where Rebecca del Rio sings Yorondo, which is like a Spanish

language cover of Roy Orbison's Crying. Ooh. And she sings it to Naomi Watson, Laura Herring, who are sort of the lead couple in this film. And it is this very arresting performance in a spotlight against a red curtain, and very Lynchian style. And she's delivering this belting tragic performance

that really affects these characters. And kind of everything in this movie changes after this scene. And at the Rio theater, they were showing Mulholland Drive with a performance of the song by Rebecca Del Rio before the show. Whoa! So I was like, obviously I have to go to that. And I invited friend of the podcast, fellow, Lira, who had seen Mulholland Drive before. So we went there together. And as we were sitting in the front row, they had done it to do with like the red curtain and the staging exactly as it is in the movie. Whoa.

Yeah, it was really cool. And me and fellow saw her kind of waiting in the wings to come out and she looked a little uneasy on her feet or something and we were like, Oh, is she okay? Is she okay? And she came out finally and she sang and it was the most arresting, chilling, haunting live performance of any kind I've ever seen. Whoa. She had that kind of voice that like pierces into you. So like really, really powerful, but a lot of control over it. And she told us Vancouver had been her son's like favorite city because that's where we live. We live in

Vancouver. She said that Vancouver had been her son's favorite city before he passed away of cancer. And so she wanted to do like a performance to him of his favorite song, which was Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Oh, gosh. Oh, I was a sobbing mess. Josie crying, just crying and crying and crying and crying and crying, she was so good. Perfect, perfect. An amazing performance and then obviously,

I think stuck around for a Q&A after the show and was really, really cool, really down to earth. She's from Texas, I believe, let me check. Oh shit. I think one of Texas's own. Oh, even better, she's from San Diego. Oh go Pods Yeah, go Pods She doesn't know Spanish, but she like learned it kind of phonetically for the song and it's a really beautiful performance

And she unfortunately was found dead in her home this past June at the age of 57 No cause of death is still under investigation. Oh no. But really sad. That is really sad. Yeah. Made me really sad if only in my like selfish selfish way that I was like, after that I was like, okay well Mulholland Drive is like top 10 all time now for me now, right? Like it has to be after that shit. And so just just to see like that caliber of like performer who like affected me so much on top of you know the sadness of any human dying in a very selfish way.

I'm like, oh, you were a fucking killer. Killer show, Rebecca. Killer show, Rebecca Del Rio, RIP. That's all. Yeah, certainly RIP. And watch Mulholland Drive. It's as good as people say. Mulholland Drive's a great movie. RIP David Lynch. Really love David Lynch, too. I'm a big Lynch guy. I have many millennials, I think, of my general demographic are. A small salute for David Lynch, really love David Lynch too. I'm a big Lynch guy, as many millennials I think of my general demographic are. A small salute for David Lynch. That's the coming attractions, you ready for the feature film? Yes, I've eaten all my popcorn.

Netflix. Whether we like it or not, it's here, and it's not going anywhere until it inevitably implodes after its unsustainable business model runs out of lives. The streaming service, which started in 1997, is a DVD rental website, has become a mega giant in the acquisition, production, and distribution of films, television, special events, and more. Josie, you Netflix subscriber?

We go on and off. That's the way of the world, isn't it? I do have a friend here in Houston, John Mayer, who up until pretty recently was a DVD Netflix subscriber. He kept the flame alive for Southeast Texas. Like how they kept that rural Japanese train station open so that one girl could finish high school.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I got you. It's like one of those things. They're like, oh, he'd be so sad if we shut it down. Yeah. I got you, I got you. What's like one of those things. Yeah. They're like, oh, he'd be so sad if we shut it down. Yeah. I got you. I got you. What year are we talking? How late is late in the game?

Maybe right before COVID, like 2018. Damn, they did it that long. That kind of been making them any more. That's the elderly doing that. And John Mayer. It was probably maybe a little pricey or just like there were no titles either that may have been it. You can only watch American version Godzilla so many times. Yeah.

1997 American Godzilla. But it is strange to think how that model of like putting a DVD in the mail and shipping it to someone's house and having them ship it back then graduated into what we are doing now which is you know you click on your TV and boop boop boop boop and watch something right away. And the monthly subscription model is alive and well. Yeah. It's just not DVDs in the mail. Yeah, this is true. Yeah. And we should say, and from there now they are producing a Korean television. Oh yeah, yeah. It's really exploded in every different, they made video games, they made interactive

black mirror bandersnatch shit, you know? Haven't they won, like as a production company, hasn't it won Academy Awards and stuff? It's never won Best Picture, but it's won Best Director and a few other things. But has it ever won a Melty? That's the real question. No. Let me run through real quick in my head. I don't think so.

I don't think it has. It is not uncommon for a successful independent film to acquire worldwide distribution via Netflix. And so it was with Mignon, better known by its English title, Cuties, the debut feature film of Senegalese French director Maimouna Ducrohet. Josie, you heard of this one?

I don't think so. Cuties is the story of Aminata, AKA Amy, an 11-year-old girl from a traditional Senegalese immigrant family attempting to bridge her cultures and become a woman in an eggsurb of Paris, France. Okay. Cuties wowed the crowd at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival where Ducoré won a directing award.

BEC Film snapped it up to distribute in France where it was released on August 19th, 2020, with the international rights going to, ta-dong, Netflix for release a month or so later on September 9th. Okay. Naturally, with the much-hyped film on its way, the big red publicity machine churned into motion, and within short order, social media was graced with the poster for what would doubtless be a film enjoyed by all, without controversy, without issue, without infamy.

Josie, do you want to see the poster? Of course! I see a group of young girls, maybe tweens? Like, tweens is old for these youngins. Would a number help? Eleven. Eleven, yeah. Yeah. They're eleven. Eleven is good. for these youngins. Would a number help? 11. 11, yeah, yeah. They're 11. 11 is good.

They are wearing like a dance team outfit that is like a little top with bare midriff and then little booty shorts. They have knee pads on and tennis shoes and they are posed kind of erotically, I'd say. One girl is like on her knees and her arm is like on her back. Another looks like she's mid-twerk.

The girl in the foreground, who I assume is maybe the protagonist. Look at your knowledge of visual language in cinema advertisements. So our protagonist is like, her legs are spread out as she's kneeling. One girl in the back who's maybe just more like a dance pose vibe, but in conjunction with the others, it's all a little provocative. She's not helping.

She's not helping. Yeah. Shiny stage, stage lights going, kind of pouty little looks, no big, you know, dance rehearsal smiles with, you know, the missing tooth or whatever. It's very like, mm, lower lip, pout. And then the title at the bottom, Cuties, Netflix, 9 September. Yeah, that was like your description of what's in the poster. What was your sort of emotional kind of response to this, right?

Because you, you know, you basically described a kind of a sexualized image of 11 year old children, right? Yeah. Um, is it Donnie Darko when the young Never seen it. Sister is in, oh, you haven't seen it? Okay. Never seen it.

You watch Mulholland Drive, I'll watch Donnie Darko and we'll report back. Okay, there we go. The main character has a younger sister who's part of this dance troupe. And it's integral to the plot because that's why his parents are away because they're with his sister on this dance competition trip. But she's in this like, I think they're called Sparkle Motion. And they do these like, kind of provocative dances that are weird and funny and And they do these like kind of provocative dances that are weird and funny and very emblematic of suburban conservatism while being also very sexualized children kind of way, you know, I'm getting a lot of that. But in that film, it's done as kind of ironic and weird and funny and like even the main characters like what the fuck is this? Was that your Jake Gyllenhaal? Yeah.

So I'm getting some of that. I also just came from a volleyball tournament at the Dallas Convention Center that was like the sea of 14 year old girls in short shorts, which 14 is older, but I definitely found myself having these moments of like, put on some longer shorts! Yeah, as you get older you feel that more I think. I definitely have felt it more as I've gotten older. I'm like, oh, I had no idea what the fuck I was saying and doing at your age.

Yes, yeah. Take my advice, take my wisdom. Why do you need so much mascara to play volleyball? Yeah, it'll get in your eyes, it'll get in your eyes. It'll get in your eyes. Yeah, some of those moments. But it was an interesting process of having to kind of stop myself

and saying like, I did the same thing and I never thought I would be 36, I guess. So, you know. Life throws us all kinds of curve balls, huh? Right, yeah, it keeps going. Yeah. So I guess I'm thinking of some of those emotions. But Eleven is that's pretty young. That's pretty. Yeah, it's pretty.

Yeah. And then to like, we'll put it in the context of like, it's a movie poster. It's not like your little sister in the basement practicing her dance with her friends. It's like, why are you guys twerking and twerking badly? Like, this is okay. This is a lot. But like to project it up on the big family TV that's, you know, half the size of the living room. It's a lot. That is a lot. It's a lot. And an adult took this photo.

An adult made the decision to put it up on there. Yeah. I think maybe sometimes that's the other thing. Yeah. Now, Josie, we've been doing this show a while. We're grizzled on there. I think maybe sometimes that's the other thing. Yeah. No, Josie, we've been doing this show a while. We're grizzled vets, I think, by this point. What comes next? Put on some long shorts vets.

Yeah. American. They're definitely American and they're most likely mothers that are upset, outraged, disgusted. You're doing so good, J.V. You're doing so good. You're doing so good, Davey. You're doing so good. You're doing so good. You ever seen this appropriate for American television sets? This is the terrorists have won. That's what's happening here. Yes. Oh, you got it. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun,

meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. And it was, to be fair, I will say it wasn't just America. There was a little bit of hubbub in Turkey and Latin America and all these other places. But I will also say I'm boycotting through till the end of season five, American stories. But this one blindsided me. It turned into an American story as I was researching because I was like, damn, all of this commotion

really did just mainly happen in America. Empire strikes again, baby. Wow. You guys are great. Old reliable. Old faithful. We're the worst. Nah. Keep things interesting. It's like the catfish put in the tank keeps us all nice and keeps our meat nice and springy keeps us from getting mushy. Good good. The cuties controversy spread like wildfire, it took hold first on the internet and within short order the usual gang of morality crusaders folks like American senators Josh Hawley and your boy Ted Cruz. Oh Teddy in his lifts.

Had amplified the backlash to a federal political level in the US. The fear was a great blow to filmmaker Maimouna Ducore who said, I really hope that once the film comes out they will watch it and they will understand that those who were criticizing me were actually walking the same path as me. In other words, according to its creator, the film was actually intended as a criticism of the hypersexualization of young girls in a modern society. Yeah. The film released on Netflix in September 2020, where it deeply polarized viewers and those who hadn't seen the film but wanted to make their two cents known regardless. And it's deep 2022.

We're all watching everything that comes up on, on Netflix too. You got it. Tiger King's over. What next? Yeah. Why are all the reunion shows filmed on cell phones in individual living rooms? This sucks. It did. it really did

Defenders said it was an aching and empathetic though uncomfortable Glimpse of the real struggles faced by the young girls of today and the difficulty of living between identities as a child in a religious and ethnic diaspora community Detractors said it was child pornography Ultimately the issue exploded into an American Culture Wars flashpoint, one of many. What the hell happened with cuties? I'm here to tell you. Oh, it's another like, Night Trap. To recap, what do you mean by Night Trap?

Episode 19, Night Trap. Melty award winner for best episode of the first 50 episodes. And it told the story of a video game that had all this kind of new technology. But the thing that ties it here is that American senators picked it up in this kind of cultural culture war vibe of video games are rotting our children's minds and making them into violent killers. It's a rape simulator. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And all these like silly things that they're saying, you know, on record, testifying in synod hearings. And it's like, wait, have you even played the game? Also, you sound like a dumbass idiot. Do you even know what like a computer keyboard is? No, like that kind of thing. So this that's the way that this sounds similar. Sugar warning. This episode of Beers to Infamy is about a film that depicts Critically, I would say the sexualization of children in society if that's not a discussion you feel comfortable with totally understandable You should go back and listen to episode number 49 the clottingly fairies that one is lots of fun. Oh, yeah

Just a random pull twin girls as well Yeah, in order to tell you about this movie minion aka cutie separate from minions by the way This is not minions. This is me young. Okay Keep that in your mind Josie. I love it. I'm actually That on the Senate floor. Oh, yeah, we're talking about minions here senator Yellow fellows are twerking now What's that? So in order to tell you more about this movie I should tell you about

the film's creator Maimouna Ducore, she's the writer-director. Ducore was born in 1985 in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Her family was polygamist, which is not an uncommon arrangement in Senegalese culture. Polygamy has a long history dating back to before Muslim influence on the area. Senegal, I should say, is a country in Western Africa. Back then a man could take as many wives as he wanted and yes we are talking about men with many wives not women with many husbands. Okay, okay. According to Kheba Mane, a language teacher in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the primary activity of our ancestors was agriculture. In order to cultivate the land you need a lot of hands, so the more numerous your family is, the easier it is to exploit the fields, to produce a lot, and to feed and support your family.

Later on, after the arrival of Islam, the amount of wives was limited to four. To bring it in line with the rules of polygamy is outlined in the Quran, and because the quality of living for the wives was evidently not very good. Okay, yep. If you can imagine that. Yeah. Our boy Manny, the language teacher, compares the new rules to quitting smoking. Quote, it is easier to tell a man

to switch from a box of cigarettes a day to five cigarettes a day than it is to suggest he immediately cut himself off from cigarettes completely. The man will struggle much more to complete the process of quitting if he tries to quit on the spot. Okay, okay, women as cigarettes. Interesting analogy.

Hey! We'll go with it. I left it in there because I thought you'd like it, Jo. Polygamy remains a reality for many Senegalese families, including that of sitting Senegalese president Basirud Diomai Faye, who has two First Ladies, Marie and Absa. In Senegal, you will find many contrasting opinions on polygamy, and I won't even attempt to distill this big and long discussion, except to say that it's a relevant story in the film Cuties, and it's a relevant story for a young Maimouna du Coré because it means two moms and nine siblings. Busy way to come up in the world.

Oh wow. Not something I dwell on in this telling of the story, but also probably worth noting that France has an infamously tense climate around Muslim immigration from Africa and the cultural clashes that brings, to which I suggest you shouldn't colonize people you don't want to hear back from down the line. Yep. Either way, that can make the push and pull of multiple cultures feel especially urgent for young people experiencing that phenomenon. Maimouna does well academically.

She studies biology at Pierre-Marie-Cure University while taking acting classes at the Laboratoire de lecture, so a woman for all seasons. She branches out into screenwriting. She wins a competition, gets an award, and uses it to make her first short film, Cache Cache, in 2013. In 2015, her short film Maman gets international attention and wins a lot of awards. It's also a child POV story about a young Senegalese girl in France, which is a very common theme across your body of work. Okay, yeah. It's a story about a girl whose father arrives back from Senegal with a new wife and young child. It's very much a story about a lonely person in an apartment, so I very much enjoyed it. Oh good! Taylor's

favorite genre. Oh, the best genre there is, right? I wonder why I feel that way. And I thought it really empathized with its young protagonist. Yeah. Says Ducre, I really want to show the suffering of women and particularly of children because, for me, we often forget to think about them and speak to them, which I think is true. It's very easy to just like... Yeah.

I think parents often delude themselves that children don't see or understand as much as they actually do, because it's easier that way to rationalize certain things or to forgive ourselves our indiscretions or whatever. Yeah, and sometimes it does just take a little patience too, you know, to kind of unlock those conversations, but it's totally worth it. Kids are rad. Yeah. Kids are dumb. Kids are smart. Kids are the best. It's only natural that after releasing such an acclaimed short, Ducoré would consider applying her gifts to a feature length film. Mignon, aka Cuties, not Minions, incorporates a lot of similar motif to Maman. Again, Maman, not Minion. They're both about a young girl coping with a father taking a second wife.

Josie, stop laughing. We're talking about serious stuff here, okay? You're a disgrace. I just tapped out. This is international film. This is international film. This is a French, Josie, this is a French independent film. And you're laughing. Not minions.

It's not minions. It's not minions. It's a French independent film. I'm sorry. I watched this with subtitles, Josie. Subtitles. I should not be laughing. It is not Minions. I apologize. Minion, aka Cuties, incorporates a lot of similar motif to Memo. They're both about a young girl coping with a father taking a second wife. Where the two films differ,

Memo and Cuties, is that Cuties specifically takes a lens of examining how its young protagonist, 11-year-old Amy, balances two radically different cultures while also taking her first naive and often unwittingly dangerous swipes at developing a burgeoning womanhood and sexuality based on the messages given to her by a sexualized Western society, a restrictive upbringing in a traditional religious family, the confused feedback from her peers who are going through similar versions of this struggle, and, of course, the internet. Oh Oh the big I we're taking on a lot of boogie men here, right? Yeah

Says do Correa of Amy the lead character I was trying to recreate the little girl who I was at that age giving her a voice and looking at what it means To become a woman and so one thing that informs I think my own view of like, okay So how is Maimuna Dukohai treating these child actors in these roles and whatever? Is it exploitative? Yeah. She so often seems to see her protagonists as like younger versions of herself. Yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean? And she doesn't seem like someone who is wracked with self-loathing. She seems like someone who like wants to ensconce her younger self, but also process maybe some things that she went through when she was younger. Yeah. The story of the film is inspired by an incident in Dukore's adult life where she saw a talent show at a park where in a group of young girl dancers performed a very sexualized dance routine in front of an audience that included traditional Muslim women in their head scarves. Oh yeah that is there's a lot going on that ain't Dominions that's for sure. women in their head scarves. It was a real culture shock says Ducoré.

I was stunned and I thought back to my own childhood because I've often asked myself questions about my own femininity, about evolving between two cultures, about my Senegalese culture which comes from my parents and my Western culture. This juxtaposition stayed with Maimouna and inspired the creation of Cuties, the story of an 11-year-old Senegalese French girl who joins a twerking dance group in defiance of her traditional Muslim upbringing. How does that logline feel to you just to start? I'm kind of into it. I like the log line. See where it goes. See where it goes for sure at least, right? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This could be a disaster, but also like seems like you're speaking from an informed perspective in whatever way. Right. And there's something, yeah, enticing about the juxtaposition and like I'm intrigued by it and not for the reason of like, oh, I'll see. Not for prurient reasons. But yeah, but knowing that it's her decision to do it. That's the more interesting scenario. Her agency is choosing to be in the twerking dance group is like, now that is interesting. And then I think about like my own girlhood and the girlhoods that I see developing around me.

And it becomes really interesting that way. It'd be different if she were forced to twerk. She's choosing to twerk. The opposing take, I think, to this would be that like, regardless of the intentions of the script and the agency of the character, it is always de facto wrong to show little girls doing sexualized things in a film, especially little girls who are played by little girls. And that out of context that can be harmful and that is so harmful that the context doesn't matter essentially.

That is an interesting take and I can see where that is coming from as well. And it does make me think, like it's an important consideration, it's an important story, but is film the best medium to do it in? Like, is a novel where it's not as like, visually in your face, visually resembling. And it won't get distribution on Netflix

and no one will read it. Yeah, yeah, I mean. I mean, that's not fair. I'm sure she could write this. This woman seems like an accomplished writer and has one prize. She could probably write a good novel. It gets read. But you know what I mean? Yeah. Film is a much more consumed medium and especially Netflix. Yes. It makes me think too of like when I read something for research in the podcast, I can read some like really gnarly stuff and be like, okay, yeah, okay, I understand. I understand the context, I get it. But then when I try and talk

about it, and listen back to it, I'm like, that shit is fucked. Yeah, what like I have a very different reaction. I've read that type of research. And I'll be like, okay, okay, wow, that's a lot. But I understand the historical context or I understand this or that. I come to it and I hold it in a different way than saying it and hearing it aloud. And I think film, there's a similar maybe scenario where seeing it is so much more impactful and intense than reading it or maybe even hearing it. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, that's what it is, is the particulars of how, because I don't disagree with you that it's a story worth being told.

I absolutely think it is. And a perspective worth exploring. And a persp- oh absolutely, both, both. So says Maimouna Ducouré, for a year and a half I stopped groups of young girls in the streets, sometimes in schools or when organizations opened their doors to me. I recorded them or filmed them when I had their parents' authorization, and I gathered their stories to find out where they situated themselves as children, as girls, as future women, how they placed themselves in society with their girlfriends, their families, at

school with social networks. All of these stories fed into the writing of Cuties. Wow. Ducoret's team saw almost 700 young girls in their casting search. All of those who were chosen are first-time actors. Oh. Which I love. I love when we do kids who are first-time actors. Unironically, I think it often comes out really well. Yeah. Yeah. I do love the first-time actor flick. Very Harmony Corrine, another guy who did very uncontroversial movies about children and

their sexuality. Yes, he is. DuCloé said that the film employed a staff child psychologist and that she created a climate of trust during filming. Quotes again, I explained to them everything I was doing and the research that I had done before I wrote this story. I was also lucky that these girls' parents were also activists, so we were all on the same side.

At their age, they've seen this kind of dance. Any child with a telephone can find these images on social media these days. And that's, I think, that's the very interesting context, right, is that this is happening whether or not we want to acknowledge it or have it on screen. But then the other flip side of that is if it's already happening, then why are we perpetuating it with more and with like well-funded and well-produced Netflix?

It's definitely an interesting question. I think that there's something to it, right? Like to our great horror as adults, there's only so much we can control of like, does your little girl who you know really likes Sabrina Carpenter see her new album cover where she looks like she's giving a due to Blowey and say, oh, what's this about? And then you're like, what are you going to do with that? Songs on the radio, whether you want it to be there or not. You know? So it's a scary thing. And I think for a lot of people it's probably a scary thing because we remember what it was like at that age. There really were these like crazy, murky... I'm sure it's a lot worse now with the internet and shit and like access to sex and

stuff like that. I remember weird instances of like blurred lines and all my little fucking weird 12 year old circles. Of course Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah that I look back on in cringe and that at the time were like meaningless to me, right? Yeah, oh totally cuz she spoke earlier the director do gray about How these young women are situating themselves in society and towards womanhood. And I think typically that's where like the confusion and scariness happens is you think that you're just trying to be adult or that this is the adult thing to do or this is how I can enter the adult world is kind of through these portals of power and especially for young girls it's typically sexualized and it gets murky and weird because you know you might even not look like a kid.

Like I hung out this weekend with my niece who's 14 she's as tall as Mitchell Like, she does not look like a kid, but she is very much a kid, you know? It's hard when the world doesn't see you at your age, but it's also hard when you don't want to be seen as your age. You want to be seen as older and as an adult and all of these things. So it's really murky and hard. There's a scene in this movie, Cutiesies where the 11 year old girls are all saying that they're 14 because they want some boys to like them. Yeah, it probably works, you know. Thank God it doesn't work.

Yeah, okay, good. I'll give you a little bit of a summary here now about the movie Cuties. I watched it for this. Did you eat Cuties while you watched Cuties? I did not eat Cuties while I watched Cuties. I watched it for this. Did you eat cuties while you watched cuties? I did not eat cuties while I watched cuties. However, I will say that this is also a belated elaboration on my candy heart that I drew that said cutie on it. Oh, very good. Very good. I considered this at the time, but it wasn't romantic enough. So I said, Oh, I'll save it for later. But that's how this kind of came onto my radar. Initially was it was one of my possibles for

the candy heart. Oh my gosh. Wow. Deep cut. Now we're putting it back into the rotation. Yeah Someone's taking notes and keeping them organized very nice. I have a spreadsheet. I have a spreadsheet. Okay so Spoiler alert. I won't tell you the whole movie but the summary will crucially include every important part including the ending So, okay. I'm not telling you the whole movie, but I'm telling you everything that matters. The reason that I'm including the ending specifically is because I think it's important to decoding Ducoré's ultimate intent with this piece. I think it's probably the part that like really hammers home kind of what she's getting at. Yeah, I know that makes sense. Also, a lot of the sort of intense stuff around like child sexuality, child no, that makes sense. Also, a lot of the sort of intense stuff

around like child sexuality, child abuse, that type of stuff will come in the description of this film with my apologies, I didn't write it. Amy Diop lives in a housing project with her traditional Muslim family, including mom Mariam and an unnamed auntie character. And again, we're in outside of Paris. Okay.

Amy is played by Fatiha Yusuf who is hand picked by Ducore after an extensive search. Oh. Mariam is played by Maïmouna Gay who also plays the mom in Ducore's short film Maman. So bringing her over. Those two share a lot of DNA they have like kind of some scenes in common. They're both not minions. They're both neither of them is minions that's correct. Auntie is played by Mbisone Therese Deyop, who is best known for being in the 1966 film Black Girl, often considered the first film by a Sub-Saharan African director to receive international attention.

Oh, very cool. So she's sort of like a Senegalese cinema legend in like her stately elder era playing like an auntie role. All three I should say of these actors are excellent, especially Fatiha's Amy, no fault to be found in the acting here. In any case, Amy is bound by the rules of her upbringing in which men are allowed to take second, often younger wives, who are to remain modest and worship their husbands. Auntie, who's the most hardline traditional of all the characters, mentions at one point that she wasn't much older than Amy when her own marriage was arranged.

Oh, okay, okay. As the story goes on, we see a scene where Amy's trying on skimpy clothing as her mom and aunt enter the room, so she quickly hides under the bed so she doesn't get caught. Oh, okay. And the aunt is like gently but firmly pressuring the mom that now it's time to call people and inform them in a calm tone that your husband is taking a second wife and you must be very like, oh, as long as they're in love and God wills it and I hope they have many children.

And the mom starts doing this and halfway through she just like breaks down crying and has to hang up the phone. Oh. And little Amy's under the bed listening to this and the mom starts like slapping herself to kind of like psych herself back up and she like calls the person who's like who the line that she just dropped to be like oh I'm sorry about that the line just dropped. It's devastating. It's very it's a great scene. It's heartbreaking stuff. Yeah. Oh, that's so sad. Oh, that's, yeah, that's rough. And I think a big part of what we get from this scene,

sort of from like a film analysis point of view, is that like, Amy sees the way that her mom is being treated in this arrangement, and she is frustrated that the mom is kind of having to take it. She wants to explode outwards in independence, perhaps, as she sees things like this happen.

One day in the laundry room of her housing project, Amy encounters another girl, Angie, who is dancing sexily to pop music while flattening her very long hair on an ironing board. Okay. So just giving it the old like the classic like drag the old hot iron across your hair and make it flat. Nice, nice. Really kill any nutrients that might exist in that.

This is modern day, right? Yes, yes, because we have smartphones. Because I always kind of envision that as like a 70s or 60s or you know. Maybe it's timeless. Isn't that a nice thought? Maybes or, you know. Maybe it's timeless. Isn't that a nice thought? Maybe. Yeah, that is. That's gorgeous. That's really gorgeous.

Amy is intrigued, especially when she starts school and finds that Angie is one of the cuties aka the Mignons, who Josie are not the minions. They are a group of delinquent girls her age who dress very provocatively, get into mischief at school and do choreographed dances together. Probably not hard to find girls like that who get into trouble and do TikTok dances together nowadays, right? Yeah, yeah. They are blood enemies with a rival dance group, the Sweetie Swags, who are bitches.

Period. Done. Moving on. At first there's tensions between Amy and the cuties, because honestly the cuties are kind of bitches too. But yeah well they let her join the group as their camera person using a phone that Amy has stolen from a neighbor. Oh. And she has done this in order to post on social media usually filtered photos of herself looking older and glamorous. Okay yeah glamour shot vib shot. Vibed. Put on some makeup, which I'm not wearing because I'm like an 11-year-old Muslim girl living in Paris, right?

Right, yeah. Yeah. She also uses the phone to access sexualized videos of strippers twerking, and we get the sense that she's really internalizing this vision of womanhood. Mm, yeah. And while we're on the subject of womanhood, in case you're wondering what this movie is about, Amy does get her first period during the course of the narrative. Yeah. And while we're on the subject of womanhood, in case you're wondering what this movie is about, Amy does get her first period during the course of the narrative. Nice.

Oh, not now. Like it's, this is a bad time. I can't tell you what a bad time this is. You know what, Taylor, it's never a good time to get your first period. I will tell you that. Do you feel like telling the group? Yeah. Yes. I was just about to start telling. Sure. I was sleeping over at my friend Nicole's house. Hi, Nicole.

I was sleeping over there because we were going to wake up early in the morning to go to this five cave run and like help set up. Of course we were doing some like volunteer thing. We weren't running the five. Some extracurriculars. And I remember I had these really cute like Hawaiian print PJ bottoms that I made my mom buy me from Delia's and they were really nice and I got I woke up on Nicole's bedroom floor at the foot of her bed and I went to the bathroom and it wasn't a lot of blood

but it was enough that I was like, I'm having my period. It's real. It's not made up. And I was like, Oh, what do I, what do I do? I don't have anything. So I didn't tell her, I didn't tell her mom. I like, I just like shoved some toilet paper in my classic, my underwear and went to the fivek and then when I got home I told my mom and She was like Yeah After one of the group members gets kicked out Amy gets brought on as a member of the dance team.

Not only that, but she's got all kinds of great moves that she's sourced from her stripper vids to add to the choreography so they can thwomp those skanks, the sweetie swags, at the upcoming competition. Nice. From here on out, we get a series of scenes of these girls practicing their new style, and honestly, it made me very uncomfortable.

Okay, okay, yeah. The gaze of the camera is unflinching on these girls' bodies and as much as I was often hoping it would glance away. And I think, genuinely, depending on your level of acceptance of such things, I can see how this would be too much for some viewers to handle. Yeah, okay, yeah. As to why she chose such an unflinching approach to the story. Ducoré says, "'We as adults have not given children the tools "'to grow up healthy in our society.

"'I wanted them to confront images of young girls made up, "'dressed up, and dancing suggestively "'to imitate their favorite pop icon. "'I wanted adults to spend 96 minutes "'seeing the world through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl "'as she lives 24 hours a day. "'These scenes can be hard to watch, "'but are no less true as a result.

I think that's a pretty convincing thing, is like, you find this difficult to watch, think about the 11 year old girl who lives this. All the 11 year old girls who have to live this and understand it without any of the tools that you have as well. Yeah, that's a fair point. And it's not just inherent to these dance scenes, it's literally what this movie's about. Children being handed the loaded gun of sexuality by the society around them and aiming it recklessly without really knowing the meaning of what they're saying and doing. And sexuality is not just a loaded gun, but for the sake of this metaphor, it's a loaded gun! Okay.

Hahaha! Thank you, Senator Basso! There you go. Hahaha! Can you point out the keyboard in the synod? Caring room. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. You want me to keep going?

So I won't name all the examples because again, this is a whole movie. The whole movie is this. But I'll give you an illustrative example. One, there's a scene where they're playing in a park and one of the characters, Kumba, who has previously presented as like probably one of the more confident of these girls could maybe convince you that she was like quite streetwise above her years but they're in a park and like she starts blowing up what she thinks is a balloon but it's a condom that she's found on the ground. Oh no! Yeah and the other characters see this and

they start like that means you've got AIDS! Like we see over and over again that these characters don't really understand sex. We see them kind of like not understand what sex is, not understand what rape is. It's a movie that has a lot to say about the role of technology and specifically smartphones in exposing children to sex. There's a really awful and uncomfortable scene where Amy uses her phone to take a picture of her genitals and post it online. Oh no. Yeah, and that's how you feel watching it. You're like, oh no, oh no. And she gets a lot of negative attention for this at school where she's shunned by the cuties and kicked out of the group and at home where she's supposed to be helping prepare for her father's second

wedding. Oh yeah, that's some deep, deep juxtapositions. I don't know if we ever see the father on screen though. The cast of this movie is overwhelmingly female. That's cool. Mom and Auntie are at Witt's end. They try talking, screaming, hitting, exorcisms, nothing works.

Finally, on the- she starts twerking during the exorcism, it's pretty nuts. That's kinda cool, I'm into that. Finally, on the day of the dad's wedding and the big dance-off, where the cuties will debut their raunchy new routine, Amy is able to slip away and convince the cuties to let her join moments before they go on stage. During the big dance, we see the audience's mixed reactions of pleasant support and confused horror as these sixth graders lavishly hump the ground. Halfway through the dance, and it must be said,

the young dancers in this film are quite good. Amy thinks of her mother and she freezes and then runs off stage. When she returns home, Auntie is ready to punish her for sneaking out, but mom intervenes and allows Amy to not come to her father's second wedding. Oh.

So sort of, I guess, like a bone from mother to daughter there, like a moment of reconciliation where like, it's hard for both of us right now, so I'm not going to make you come to this wedding. Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to make it harder for you. As the story ends, we see Amy happily jumping rope outside dressed neither in her traditional clothes nor the provocative outfits of the cuties, but in something simple and age-appropriate, cardigan and jeans. The end. 96 minutes in and out. Surely we can all agree on that. Whatever the content of the film. That's a nice tidy red tie.

That's nice. Yeah, I love googling 90 minute movies and seeing what comes up. Watching two of them. Yeah, true one. So yeah, movie that doesn't glance away from its subject matter whatsoever, but whose intent I think can be divined by that ending note. Amy isn't under the veil nor is she in a crop top. She's somewhere in between where she's happier. Feel how you want to feel about that message, but I think that's what Ducoré is saying. I really do not think this movie is, as the least charitable reviews suggest, intentional

exploitation of children. This is deliberately made by pedophiles for pedophiles. I don't think that's what's happening here. Yeah, that seems a little unfair. It must be said that that interpretation didn't really come up through the funding and filming and Sundance and awards and so on until August 2020. Five months into COVID lockdown. Remember how cheery we all were then? Yeah. When Netflix reveals its poster for its upcoming French indie darling featuring

all the cuties as they appear in their final performance at their most incongruously tarted up, out of context, posed with hips cocked and legs display. You bring up a good point about like, because I still have the image up on my screen, I've been looking at it this whole time. It's like, there was a decision to choose that as the image. You know what I mean? Like there are probably some other very cool shots from this, you know, indie darling French cinema. I mean? Like there are probably some other very cool shots from this, you know, indie darling French cinema. Oh, why don't I show you the poster that it had already been released under in France? You show me that. I would like to see that. Okay, this is cute. I like this one better.

It's addressing more of what the film is about, at least the way that you've presented it, with these young girls with shopping bags and they have big bras over their t-shirts, they have panties over their shorts. They're trying on the sexualized femininity to see what it feels like, but it's not the only thing that they have on. And that's the actual know, the actual literal and metaphorical situation going on here. And you will notice again at the bottom there is Mignon. Not Mingans.

Good job. Good job. Testing. You're passing. You're passing. Okay. I thought we were talking about Mingans this whole time. What? So it's unclear who made the more provocative poster, Netflix or a third party agency. But I would argue this is the true bedshitting moment in all of this story.

Yes, yes. To the point where on August 20th, 2020, the Netflix Twitter account posted, we're deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we use for Mignon slash 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 Okay, okay, so fault was admitted But by now the horse is certainly bolted and the horse is a partisan moral panic with the American right leading the way

That horse can run far and long and doesn't need to stop for a water break. It yeah, that's it's American made Yeah, can- do attitude a change dot org petition calling for people to cancel their Netflix subscriptions racks up 600,000 plus signatures and people did drop their Netflix quite a bit hashtags like hashtag cancel Netflix and hashtag Netflix pedophilia trend on Twitter but was it also like let's cancel Netflix because we watched all the shows we want to watch on there. Cancel Netflix!

There's no new seasons of The Circle. Exactly. It's like- Cancel Netflix! Love is Blind was boring last year. And then in like six months- Hey, what's on Netflix? What's on Netflix?

Let's put something on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cueing on the popular online right wing conspiracy theory of especially consider we're talking 220, right? Yeah, oh yeah. The heyday. Amplifies the claims of child endangerment. The film gets tanked and user reviews on websites

like Rotten Tomatoes or commenters say things like, I hope whoever made and helped make this movie suffers a long time in hell. And everybody who put a positive score for this should be put on a watch list. Okay, so all the people who made this movie, including the 11 year old girls who are in it who you're trying to defend. Piano strapped to their ass.

Yeah. First ones to go. Have fun twerking in hell. For Satan. That's what I think. That sounds like that American right horse. That is very true. Illogical, but going strong nonetheless. Senator Mike Lee of Utah writes a letter to

the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, demanding an explanation. US representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii calls the film a child porn that will wet the appetite of pedophiles and help fuel the child sex trafficking trade. Sure, yeah. Ted Cruz of Texas. I know him. Do I hear any cheers? Any cheers?

Anyone know Ted Cruz? Crickets. Oh damn. According to Ted Cruz, quote, every pedophile in America will watch this movie. Yeah, they will now, man. Good job. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your review got pinned to the top of the fucking message boards, I'm sure. Many senators demanded investigations from the Department of Justice to see whether Netflix was distributing child pornography. And lastly, Donald Trump Jr., an echo of a fart, says at an event, you know what the left is doing? They're justifying cuties.

They're justifying pedophilia. Yeah. On October 6th, 2020, a Texas grand jury indicts Netflix for five counts of promotion of lewd visual materials depicting a child. Whoa. What county is it? To be fair, a jury I was not called to.

I was not on that jury. Yeah, you didn't, jury number 13 wasn't present on the scene. Josie, if you had to guess what county in Texas, let's see. Let's see how your vibes are. What county in Texas does this grand jury thing happen in? What's Waco in? Waco is like Bell County or something. We were looking for Tyler County.

Tyler, Tyler, Texas. Oh, how did that get tried in Tyler, Texas? A DA who is trying to make a point, it seems like. Yeah, that seems right. Yeah, okay. That's not to say the film doesn't have its defenders, especially as the release date arrives, and we get a more complete and nuanced view of the film. For all of its flaws, people understand that this is a piece of art with intention behind it, right? Yeah.

It's well received by established film critics, as it has been since its debut, says Richard Brody of The New Yorker, the subject of Qtees isn't twerking its children, especially poor and non-white children who are deprived of the resources, the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion, to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective. Quoting Decider, Qtees is a purposefully uncomfortable watch, that's the point. It's a truth that girls who are too young to even understand what sex is are sexualizing themselves because they perceive sexuality as a way for women to achieve power and attention. Mm-hmm. Portals of power, baby. I'll literate it again.

Portals of power, P.O.P.! In addition to receiving critical support for the film, Maimouna du Coré receives personal and moral support from bodies like the French Directors Guild and Uni France. This comes at an important time as Maimouna becomes a target of the internet ire. I received numerous attacks on my character from people who had not seen the film who thought I was actually making a film that was apologetic about hypersexualization of children, she says. I also received numerous... Death threats? Death threats!

It's always the fucking death threats, isn't it? Mark that one off on your bittersweet infamy bingo card at home. We've got death threats. Yeah. Ugh. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos calls her to apologize personally for the botched rollout, which is very nice until we learn that Netflix allegedly suppressed QD's in its own search results in order to silently kill the film and dim the controversy. Whoops, Corpo's gonna corp. I'd love to give you some sort of climactic moment to tie this story up, some big final dance sequence, but the truth is that the dust dies down and the relevant players all

just move on to other things. The various senators and representatives and state attorneys general who animated the controversy move on to the next piece of political red meat with a side of hot potatoes. Cute, nice. Basking in that one. In 2025, Maimouna Ducourais is developing her latest film project, a Josephine Baker biopic potentially starring FKA twigs. Very interesting stuff.

Whoa, that sounds rad. Yeah, very interesting, very interesting. Netflix lost some subscribers, many of whom came back, then left, then came back. As we all do when we get pissed off at Netflix over some dumb fuck thing we don't like. Mine is that they stopped letting us password share. Oh yeah, that's a good one. That's a really good one. Yours might be child trafficking, mine is the password shit. Yeah. Remember those grand jury indictments in Texas? Tyler County? Yours might be child trafficking, mine is the password shit.

Remember those grand jury indictments in Texas, Tyler County? Tyler, yep. On December 18th, 2023, three years after the initial hubbub, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a lower court's decision, saying that Cuties did not represent pornography and that the claim was filed in bad faith by Tyler County DA Lucas Babin. Apparently, Babin only showed specific scenes from the film to the grand jury at the formal accusation they did not see the whole film. So again, Night Trap. We've cherry picked the moments that kind of make the point that we're trying to make. We've edited them together in a

salacious way. As you say, it's a 96 minute film. Just watch the whole fucking film. Like, 96 minute film. Just watch the whole fucking film. Like, ayayay. Yeah, oh, there's a decent chance they'll be just as pissed off as it's about a Muslim girl twerking and you're playing this in Tyler County, Texas. You'll be fine. Just play the movie. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Nonetheless, while the controversy has blown over, Cuties itself has not yet gotten its reappraisal on its own merits, independent of the firestorm. On Rotten Tomatoes, there's a yawning gap between the film's 88% critic rating and its 14% audience rating. Oh, whoa. Yeah.

It sits at 3.3 out of 10 on IMDb with its overwhelming amount of 1 score seeming to indicate review bombing. According to a study of the reaction to the film by Lisa D. Lenoir and Raquel S. Arias Labrador, at least 11.8% of sampled IMDB reviews of the film included, quote, director indirect criticism of progressives or conservatives as a rationale for explaining another reviewer's reasons for rejecting or approving the film. Reviews criticizing conservatives mentioned their puritanism and idiotic moralism and categorized them as a religious army. Conversely, some reviewers expressed disapproval of people who liked the film, either addressing them indirectly or explicitly for their lack of morality. Examples of shame and social disapproval appeared, e.g. if you like this movie you should feel disappointed in yourself. A fewer number of

reviews also included ad hominid attacks claiming the twisted or sick personality of the people liking the film. So just politicized reviews sexually. Yeah, politicized to the nth, used as a weapon to hurl against, I hate you people will know I hate you people. This ends up being a fundamental conclusion of their paper, which is interesting because they specifically came in to look at the reaction from the perspective of the sexualization of Black girlhood. And so it's kind of funny that where they ended up was like, man, this got really politicized really quick. What does that say about Black girlhood? Oh, there you go. No, there you go. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. No, there you go. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah quote when we embarked on this study We wanted to analyze the mediated space and child pornography claims against black bodies in the United States What emerged was an arm of the conservative news culture in motion where social actors of the movement Leveraged their positions to attract attention from mainstream news social media outlets and legal and legislative Branches to move forward with their agenda media outlets, and legal and legislative branches to move forward with their agenda. DuCouré's film, highlighting a young black girl's coming-of-age story, appeared to be primed for this social experiment. We contend that her intentions to raise awareness about hypersexualization of pre-adolescent girls became co-opted and embroiled in pornography-laced language and the United States First Amendment

law. Now that the fear has burned out, and all of its principles have moved on to other projects, we are left with the artifact itself. What is Cuties? Is it exploitative? Should it have been made? I think I'd be interested to hear from the young actors themselves once they've had time to process what was doubtless and extremely disorienting experience, and I'm happy to say that I couldn't find any of them being put on the spot to share their thoughts about any of this, which feels like a good thing. That's very good. Someone was doing a good job with that, yeah. Let's give these girls their privacy while everyone is being fucking weird about them. Yeah.

I will say that there are moments where I felt wildly uncomfortable and some lingering camera shots that occasionally felt a bit irresponsible for my own taste. But this weird murky time right before adolescence is where we're again waving around this loaded gun which is not all this is of sexuality without knowing it. And that's something that I remember experiencing myself in a really profound way in my own crummy little suburb surrounded by my own skid 12 year olds. It's something I've explored in my own art. I wrote an unpublished short story collection called The Pitty Dance, and the title story is basically about this exact thing.

Yeah, yeah. And as I was watching, I kept thinking back to early 2001 at the auditions for my sixth grade talent show. Oh, shit. Minions, was it Minions? That's where I got my own live show into minions. Truly. Because that is where Caitlyn and Tracey, who are 11 years old, did a pretty suggestive dance to what I would term a pretty inappropriate song. I'll give you one guess. It's 2001. It's early 2001.

I'm a genie in a bottle, baby. Oh, good pull. No, I wish. It was, it's actually the Moulin Rouge version of Lady Marmalade. You know, voulais-vous coucher avec moi? C'est soit.

Yeah. They were kind of singing and dancing along to that. Christina Aguilera, I will note, in both of those. Oh, Christina had a fine suite of suggestive songs in that era and beyond. Yes, yes. And even then I remember as a little kid being like, this feels a bit adult. Triple X adult. I don't know if they're gonna let him do this one. And sure enough, by the time the talent show came around, they were doing that jock jams, let's get ready to rumble, dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. They did like a more athletic routine to that rather than something so provocative.

Yeah, yeah. And I think if that can happen, and it did happen, and it does happen, and it happened to me, then it's fair game to be depicted thoughtfully in art. Yes. Yeah. I totally understand any adult who cares about children getting their hackles up around the specter of sexuality and especially sex abuse when it comes to kids. Because sexuality is just a thing that we all kind of seg into in whatever way eventually. As much as I've been talking about it like a loaded gun, it's a neutral and healthy thing, right? Yeah, yeah.

But, correctly, we take it very seriously how children are introduced to these concepts, and when we talk about things like children being introduced to sex in ways that they aren't prepared for, e.g. sexual abuse, that feeling of protectiveness is really natural. We want nothing but good things for the children we love. Put some longer shorts on, would you? Put some longer shorts on. And we want them to retain their innocence as long as possible because being an adult sucks.

Yeah, and once you lose it you don't really get it that, girly. And you don't even know that you had it until you lost it. Yeah. So cruel. Viewers may also have strong feelings about child abuse that are not about their children but themselves. I think these kinds of feelings are very understandable and very easily taken advantage of by moral panics and conspiracy theories like QAnon who are harnessing outrage for gain in sport.

Amen. Yeah, that mouth breathing far right horse that keeps a clomp in a clomp. To use the bittersweet film club scale Bitter-sweet or bittersweet. Oh, I give this one a bittersweet. Okay, that's I thought you were gonna say that yeah I thought it was really well made. I thought the story was great. I thought the acting was superb I found it roiled me in all kinds of emotions good and bad, which I appreciate Yeah, I was perhaps primed to feel this way by the controversy, but I was made very uncomfortable by some of the shots of the children dancing.

And I also felt the experience of empathizing with this poor, likeable child as she made these very naive and reckless decisions. I see a lot of myself, and as much as I'm not like a young Senegalese Muslim girl growing up in Paris, there's a relateability to the experience regardless. Yeah, yeah. Because of that to a degree I think I found the actual emotional experience of the film quite draining. Yeah. Because it's hard to watch someone that you really like who's a child make some of these decisions and you know do some of these things. Yeah that is painful. And again I know that's the point. I know that's the point. Perhaps file it away under a well-made movie I don't think I'll watch again.

With that said, I'll turn the ending over to filmmaker Maimouna Ducouré, who's a very intentionally crafted piece of art got eaten by the mob. Yeah. Cuties is a deeply feminist film with an activist message. We must all come together to figure out what's best for our children. I think altogether we have to fix what's gone wrong so we can give the most beautiful space for our girls and boys to grow up safely and become the best versions of themselves. That is the not-so-cute story of the American release of cuties, aka Nihon.

Not aka Vinyans. You got it. Thanks for listening. Not aka. Vignes. You got it. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com. Or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account.

At ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthemy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet.

The sources that I used for this Mimphemous included an article from The Hollywood Reporter, Magic Castle Trial. America's Got Talent Magician charged with revealing secrets. Written by Seth Abramovich, published April 19th, 2024. I looked at the website for the Academy of Magical Arts, specifically their About tab. I read an article from casino.org entitled Las Vegas's Murray the Magician Band from the Magic Castle written by Corey Levitin posted March 11th, 2024. I looked at the Wikipedia article for Murray Sochak. I looked at a Reddit discussion entitled, Magic Drama Actually Makes the News! Murray Sochuk has been expelled!

And the post that I mentioned was offered up by Andrew Flores one year ago. I watched the offending video on YouTube on Magic Murray's page. The video was entitled, She Revealed All My Tricks! page. The video was entitled, She Revealed All My Tricks! Best Magic 2024, and it was posted to YouTube January 28, 2024. To prepare for this episode of Bittersweet Infamy, I watched Maimouna Ducoré's 2020 debut Cuties, as well as her 2016 short film Maman. I read the study, On Othering Cuties, the politicization of contemporary black girlhood in the digital era, written by Lisa D. Lenoir and Raquel S. Arias Labrador, 2024 in the Journal of

Communication Inquiry, Volume 48, Issue 4. I read, Cuties director says she received death threats after Netflix poster backlash. Ted Sarandos called her to apologize. By Tom Grater for Deadline, September 3, 2020. Cutie's on Netflix, Maimouna Ducoury interview and backlash in time by Sue Yen Haines, September 4, 2020. Watch Cutie's on Netflix for yourself, then apologize to Maimouna Ducoury. Indecider published September 9, 2020. Cutie's director Maimouna Ducouré, Indecider, published September 9, 2020. Cuties director Maimouna Ducouré addresses controversy surrounding Netflix film by John

Blistein for Rolling Stone, September 16, 2020. Cuties, the French indie movie dragged into US election fray in France 24, September 17, 2020. Netflix scrambled internally to suppress a controversial movie from search results. By Zoe Schiffer for The Verge, October 26, 2021 FKA twigs and talks to star as Josephine Baker in Studio Canel's biopic from QD's director Maimouna Ducroet by Elsa Kesslassi, May 19, 2025 for Variety. Polygamist President-elect of Senegal presents two First Ladies to the public, in VOA by

the Agence France-Presse, April 1, 2024, and the Modern Opinions Regarding Polygamy of Married Men and Women in Dakar by Hannah Fried-Tanzer, Fall 2013, an independent study via the SIT Graduate Institute. If you want to support bittersweet infamy, we'd love if you would join us at our Ko-Fi account, k-o-fi.com, slash, Bitter Sweet Infamy. And if you become a monthly subscriber, you can become a member of the film club, like Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Jo, Soph, Dylan, and Satchel. You can tell us what movies to watch for the Bitter Sweet Film Club most recently.

We watched Battle of the Saxons at the behest of Lizzy D. Thank you also to our one-time supporter Alice. Woohoo! Bittersweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Alex McCarthy, Alexi Johnson. Our partner photos by Luke Bentley, our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins. And the song you are currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.