There Are No Girls on the Internet - BONUS: Behind the Netflix Cuties Controversy

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

Here's a quick rundown of the controversy behind Netflix's new film Cuties.The Netflix Movie "Cuties" Has Become The Latest Target Of #SaveTheChildren Conspiracy Theorists:https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/netflix-cuties-qanon-targetDid you see the film? Let us know what you think at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Hey, y'all, Bridget here. I wanted to do a quick supplementary episode about the Netflix movie Cuties. First of all, I was a little bit nervous to even talk about this film. It's such a big controversy right now, but I kind of felt like I had to. So just to get this out of the way, Quties is a movie that is very much in line with my interests.

I love French cinema, specifically French Senegalese cinema. I live for a coming of age story, especially a story about a girl navigating her way through a rocky girlhood. Movies like Fish Tank or 13 Love them. Also, I grew up dancing. I grew up in doing competitive dance, being in dance troops that were sometimes a little bit questionable. So it does seem like a movie that is tailor-made for my interest. This is not meant to be a movie review. I'm just trying to give you the broad strokes of the controversy and the criticism and what's happening.

However, there will be some spoilt. And so if you don't want this movie spoiled for you, I definitely recommend you check it out before listening to this episode. I will try to warn you before the spoilers. So what is Quties? Cuties is a French film by first time director Mimono Du Serre. It tells the coming-of-age story of Amy, a Muslim synagullies 11-year-old living in France. It premiered at Sundance this winter to rave reviews before being acquired by Netflix. I was actually at Sundance and tried to see it, but unfortunately it was sold out.

So the broad strokes plot of the film Cuties is that Amy, this 11-year-old, she kind of balances these two worlds. The one world is her mother's world of sort of traditional Senegalese values. Her mom wants her to be this sort of chaste, girlish, traditional girl. But she's living in France. And so the second world that she's balancing is the world of these kind of cool, grown-up-seeming girls in her class who all do dance together. The film explores fairly common coming-of-age tropes around movies about girlhood, things like getting your first period, things like feeling alienated from your family, things like wanting to fit in and being grown up and cool and sexy, vying for likes on social media, and of course, sexuality. The filmmaker said that she saw young girls dancing on stage in Paris in the scantily clad outfits and that she was sort of fascinated by this. She was fascinated by the girls, fascinated by the adults who were watching and letting this happen, these girls' parents and their families.

families, she ended up spending a year researching dance troops in France, researching preteen girls, interviewing them, and talking to them about society, their bodies, how they felt at school, things like fitting in, and the result was this film, Cuties. So the film first generated controversy before it ever came out on Netflix because of the poster. So the poster for this film when it first debuted at Netflix was pretty run-of-the-mill. It had a picture of the girls in the film running down the street, doing like a shopping, But when the film was acquired by Netflix, the poster they went with was very different. It was the girls kind of scantily clad wearing their dance team outfits, which are sort of short shorts and shirts that show their bellies.

And they're in these like very adult poses. So think about dance movies like Step Up or they have dancers who are scantily clad posing on the poster. But those are usually grown women. The Netflix poster for cuties was like that, but with 11-year-olds. Now, I completely agree that this poster was not a good way to market this film, and it isn't even really representative of what the film was about. Netflix later apologized for the poster, but it was kind of too late. The director of the film responded to the poster controversy saying,

I discovered the poster at the same time the American public did. I didn't understand what was going on, and that's when I went and saw what the poster looked like. 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 the hypersexualization of children. I also received numerous death threats. So it's kind of fucked up that this first-time director was really attacked for Netflix's very real mistake in terms of marketing this film.

I think that poster really did a lot of damage in terms of how that film was going to be seen by people who hadn't even had a chance to see it. The vocal criticism of the film only continued after it was released on Netflix in early September. The director actually published a piece in The Washington Post about why she decided to make the film. She writes, the stories that the girls I spoke to shared with me were remarkably similar. They saw the sexier a woman is on Instagram or TikTok the more like she gets. They tried to imitate that sexuality in a belief that it would make them more popular.

Spend an hour on social media and you'll see preteens, often in makeup, pouting their lips and shredding their stuff as if they were grown women. The problem, of course, is that they are not grown women. And they don't realize what they're doing. They construct their self-esteem based on social media likes and the number of followers they have. Some people have found certain scenes in my film to be uncomfortable to watch, but if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable. Here's what she had to say on a Netflix short film on YouTube called Why I Made Cuties.

With hundreds of pretense who told me they are story, I needed to know how they felt about their own femininity in today's society and how they dealt with their self-image at a time when social media is so important. Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she is successful. And the children just imitate what they see, trying to achieve the same result without understand the meaning. So one thing to note is that this controversy has taken a political bend. Senator Ted Cruz is calling on the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the production and distribution of the film to determine whether it violates any child porn laws.

Tulsi Gabbard, who you might remember ran for president unsuccessfully, called it child porn. And somehow the Obamas are involved. Because the Obamas had a high-profile deal with Netflix to make documentaries through their production company, Fox News' Rachel Campo Stuffy published a piece in the Federalist called Michelle Obama is complicit in Netflix's child porn film Qudies. She writes, At a time when the left has declared that silence is violence, Michelle Obama's silence on Netflix controversial movie Qudies has not gone unnoticed. The hashtag cancel cuties was picking up steam and antenna, a data analytics company,

found that there was a meaningful spike in Netflix cancellations. Now, some of the big arguments I've seen about this film seem to be suggesting that the film, which is pretty clearly making an argument against the sexualization of children, attempts to do that by engaging the very thing it is meant to be critiquing. By that I mean, even though the film pretty clearly is meant to call out and condemn the sexualization of children and girls, critics argue that the actually sexualizes girls in trying to make that point. I think it's worth pointing out that many films have been accused of this very same thing. I'm thinking about movies like kids, which The Washington Post called Child Porn when it was first

debuted back in 1995. So I want to talk about what actually goes down in the film. Here's where you might find some spoilers. So if you don't want the movie spoiled for you, just know that going forward. So I have to say that I think a lot of the criticism of this film is being done by people who haven't actually seen it. I have seen it. I actually just got finished re-watching it. So let's talk about it. I saw a few viral warning posts floating around social media, and some of those seem to actually take some of this

film out of context. For instance, one viral, quote, parents guide said the film contains nudity of a minor. That is not true. The only nudity in the entire film is a very brief scene with a bare breast of an opposing dance team member. My sense in the film is that this opposing dance team is meant to be a little bit older, within the context of the film, and actually the actress whose bare breast you see for a second herself is an adult. She's over 18. So there is no minor nudity in this film. This post also warns that there's a scene where a minor girl in tight leather pants has her pants pulled down while the camera zooms in on her butt. Now, on its face, that sounds disgusting, but it actually doesn't really capture what happens in that scene. In that scene,

Amy, the 11-year-old in question, is kind of meant to be poorer than the rest of her friends. And this is the part in the film where she's trying to seem more grown up and cooler than she is, so she borrows her friend's leather pants and wears them to school. She ends up getting into a fight with an older girl on the schoolyard, and in the fight, her pants are kind of pulled partway down. And it exposes that she's wearing these really childish, kind of oversized, dirty, ratty, underpants. It is not a scene that is played for sexuality. This is an incredibly embarrassing scene for her.

She runs off crying and her friends won't talk to her because they're so embarrassed by what happens. And to say that this scene is like sexy or played for sexualization, it just is not. And so I've seen a lot of things floating around on social media that go viral that make very controversial claims about what kind of things are contained in this movie that are actually either A, not true or B, kind of taken out of context. This is clearly meant to be an embarrassing scene, not a sexy one. Now, I can confirm the film does contain scenes of young girls twerking in shorts. And I read a few critiques that say that those scenes feel gratuitous or overdone. And even if I don't personally agree with those criticisms, I think that's a fair point. Here's a pretty big spoiler.

At the end of the movie, the girls have their big dance contest that the film has been building to the entire time. It's full of inappropriate dances, twerking, grinding, all that stuff, done by 11-year-olds. But the whole point is that the audience finds this whole display horrifying. They're doing a thumbs down and booing, and some of them are getting up and walking out of the audience. And the point of the film is that the girls really don't have the maturity to understand why these dances are not appropriate. They thought they were going to get on stage and everyone was going to love these dances, but in fact, all the adults are horrified. It's kind of like the final dance scene in Little Miss Sunshine when she thinks her dance is going to be so great and it's actually not appropriate. it. Amy, the main character, is really sad. She cries on stage at this reaction. It's also really

important to point out that by the end of the film, it's clear Amy has made a choice that the whole world of twerking and dancing and grinding and trying to be sexy for social media is not for her. At the end of the film, she's clearly decided to sort of live a more youthful life. The final scene of the film is her going out and playing jumproping on the street and dressing like a little girl. So I think it's very to say this film is certainly not trying to valorize the sexualization of girls. Now, I also want to say that the director says that a trained counselor was present on the set, and the project was even improved by the French government's child protection authorities. So that's sort of the broad strokes of what's going on with this film and the controversy around it.

And in case you're curious, here's my opinion. I actually really liked the film. It certainly wasn't perfect. There's some scenes in it that I think ring really true to a specific kind of black girlhood. There's a scene where Amy tries to straighten her very curly hair by ironing it on an ironing board, which I definitely tried when I was young. There's a lot of scenes where Amy listens to her mother and her aunts have very grown woman conversations that I can really relate to. There's a scene where Amy's friends make fun of her for having a flat butt, and she goes back home and

starts noticing that all of these women in her family have these curvy bodies and wonder, and you can tell that she's wondering when she's going to get one or if she's going to get one. I certainly can identify with that. So yeah, I really enjoyed the film, and I'm glad I saw it. I think that the criticisms that people make that this film kind of traffics in the kind of sexualization of girls that it's trying to prevent or trying to call out, I think those are fair criticisms. I don't think those criticisms are completely missing the mark.

I don't happen to agree, but, you know, I think when you're talking about film and art, people are allowed to have their own opinions and make up their own minds. I also feel like I have to say that we've talked in other episodes. of Tangote around how bad actors online will use sensitive topics to push division and chaos online. And unfortunately, right now, one of those sensitive topics happens to be child abuse and child exploitation, which is really horrifying because child abuse is such a serious topic, that it's kind of horrifying to think of people turning it into a meme or spreading misleading or false information about it online. There's a link to a good BuzzFeed article in the show description that gives you more context about that particular part of the conversation.

but I just want to make very clear that I think it's really terrible that people are exploiting this very serious issue. And in doing so, they're kind of drowning out legitimate conversation, both critical and positive, around this film. And overall, I think it's really disappointing that the Senegalese first-time female filmmaker is having her debut drowned out by all of this controversy. I think Netflix was 100% in the wrong for putting out that poster, but that wasn't her decision and wasn't her fault. And I think they kind of set her up for a lot of attacks because we're in this time where everything is charged, everything is a political debate. And it seems like sometimes people can't have good faith conversations anymore, particularly online. So I find it disappointing that she's really gotten wrapped up in this. But most importantly, I think people should really see the film themselves.

I've seen so many viral things on social media trying to get people to not see this film, trying to get people to cancel Netflix because of this film. And I think people should really make up their own minds. You might disagree with me. That's totally fine. It would not be the first time that somebody disagreed with my film takes. Just ask anybody that I've made watch a film. But I don't love the idea that people are trying to dissuade others from even seeing this film. I've seen so many people posting like, oh, should I watch it?

Is it horrifying? And I think it's important to encourage people to make up their own minds. So here's where I want to know what y'all think. Did you see cuties? What did you think? You can hit us up at Hello. at tangoity.com and let us know. You can also find transcripts for today's episode

at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow,

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