Here’s another liberal take on the conservative take of Cuties:
slate.com/culture/2020/09/netfl … movie.html
[b]'Sparked by a promotional image featuring the movie’s tween stars in revealing clothing and suggestive poses, the controversy around Netflix’s Cuties has only grown as the film has finally arrived on the streaming service. Maïmouna Doucouré’s first feature is, according to an interview with the French Senegalese filmmaker posted by Netflix this week, a “deeply feminist film with an activist message.”* It debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the award for direction in the World Cinema section. But weeks after a petition charging it with being produced “for the viewing pleasure of pedophiles” garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, the movie finds itself at the toxic intersection of QAnon delusion and right-wing moral panic, with a smattering of leftist outrage on the side. Breitbart has posted about the movie a half-dozen times in the past two days, singling out critics who praised the film, several of whom have received death threats and been harassed off social media. And Thursday night, Tucker Carlson made it a centerpiece of his show, accusing a nonspecific “they” behind the movie of wanting to “destroy young girls.”
'Considering how few of Cuties’ attackers have actually seen the film, countering their criticisms with facts feels a little like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Those labeling it child pornography seem to have adopted a modified version of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s adage: They know it when they don’t see it. By definition, pornography requires intent, and whether or not Doucouré succeeded (and the reviews are divided on this point), her intent is clear. The movie’s protagonist, Amy, is an 11-year-old bouncing between the repressive culture of her conservative Islamic upbringing, where she is warned that “evil shows itself in the scantily clad women,” and the hypersexualized environment of Western culture, where images of adult women doing strip-club gyrations are emulated by tweens on social media for likes. The movie presents those images in order to critique them, in a way that could not possibly be more clear: When Amy and the titular dance troupe she’s formed with three schoolmates finally perform in front of an audience, Doucouré repeatedly cuts away to the disgusted adults watching them, some booing, some covering their children’s eyes.
'Instead of the Potter Stewart test, Breitbart’s John Nolte presents what might be called the Floyd Test. The initial marketing campaign, he writes, was “aimed directly at the naked-guys-in-a-raincoat-named Floyd crowd,” and as for the movie itself: “Naked Floyd’s gonna love it.” The point isn’t the filmmaker’s intent—although he later gets around to dismissing that as “bullshit,” too—it’s that Cuties might turn perverts on. That may be true, but it’s also true of countless more innocent images, and the diligence with which Nolte jotted down every purported crotch shot, at least until he “lost count after five,” speaks to its own kind of not-entirely-uncreepy obsession.
‘It’s hardly accidental that most if not all of the right-wing attacks on Cuties invoke Netflix’s connection to Barack Obama, although the Obamas, who do have a production deal with Netflix, had nothing to do with the film’s acquisition. It’s a way of winking at QAnon’s insistence that the Democratic Party is a haven for pedophiles, and it ties in neatly with the terror of Black and especially African sexuality that lurks just beneath the moral panic around Cuties. So much of the furor has centered on the sight of the girls in Amy’s mixed-race dance group twerking, emulating a style of dance linked to the African diaspora and then picked up by white artists like Miley Cyrus. In the Netflix poster that started all this, it’s the white girl in Amy’s troupe who seems most confident and defiant, while she looks at the camera with sideways, uncertain eyes.’[/b]
Clearly arguments can be made from both sides. There will be those who champion the film because the intention – the purpose – of the film maker is to expose the manner in which “society” does sexualize children. On the other hand, it is not irrational to suggest that in sexualizing the young girls in the film itself you are contributing to that very culture. How many will watch the film not to be outraged but to be aroused?
Now, for me, the tricky part revolves more around those who will tap me on the shoulder and say, “well, iambiguous, are you saying that this sort of behavior is rooted subjectively in dasein? That it is not objectively immoral?”
And, sure, a part of me rooted existentially in my own particular “I” rooted in my own particular life…the part that on a visceral level condemns the exploitation and abuse of children…reckons that maybe there is a philosophical argument that pins this down objectively once and for all. That maybe this is the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.
But another part has to reckon with the fact that I can never really demonstrate that this is true. And then the arguments and the behaviors of the sexual sociopaths who honestly believe that in the absence of God all things – including this – are permitted. They only have to be rationalized in terms of what existentially they have come to construe as gratifying their own selfish wants and desires.
And how can any of us know for certain that given new experiences we might ourselves come to do things that “here and now” might be thought of as impossible.
All “I” have to do in this regard is to remember that the boy I was before being drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam would scarcely recognize the man that I had become upon returning home. My whole frame of mind was radically reconfigured in the space of a few months.
Now, I haven’t seen the film myself. I don’t subscribe to Netflix so I may never see it. But here’s the trailer: youtu.be/M0O7lLe4SmA