Let's Talk About Cuties

(A quick note. I am writing this from the perspective of a white American girl who grew up in a small town in Alaska and went through this stage of life 17 years ago. Very much not the heart of this story. For a wonderful own-voices review of the movie and its controversy I highly recommend this article by Jennifer Padjemi that I came across on Gal-dem. It’s articulate and explains why these types of movies are so important, and speaks eloquently on things I will never understand. I encourage you to read it as well.)

Way back in 2003, when I myself was an 11-year-old-girl, there was an alarming new coming-of-age movie released called Thirteen. To be honest, I don’t think it ever hit my mom’s radar and I never heard my friends’ parents discuss it. Outside of the secluded town of Valdez, Alaska though, it certainly made a stir. Here are these two barely teen girls engaging in lifestyle choices far beyond their years that could literally end in overdosing, jail time, and (barely) teenage pregnancy. It was so forceful a lot of people even wrote it off as outlandish. This movie came on the heels of an interesting time when metal musicians were being accused of inspiring the tragic Columbine High School shooting, video games were incorporating more violence and with that were faced with more scrutiny, and the indie film Kids had scared enough parents into participating Red Ribbon Week and arguing about sex-ed classes, and Eminem lyrics were somehow the greatest threat to world peace. Oh! And this also came just before Christina danced in assless chaps and Britney danced in a red latex suit, being the trendiest cultural icons to blame the tear of America’s moral fiber on. So when I sat down to watch Cuties after hearing stories and reading reviews about how it was anything from provocative to pornographic I was shocked by just how…normal it was.

Cuties is the feature debut of filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré and stars Fathia Youssouf as Amy, an 11-year-old immigrant from Senegal. Throughout the film, she is experiencing things that many other 11-year-olds go through: peer rejection, wishing to be liked, desperation for freedom, and an urge to reject the way she is being raised. With Amy, however, these desires are even starker than they are for normal tweens, as her identity as a lower-income immigrant makes her difference far more obvious. She’s being raised by women holding different traditions and expectations for her and this makes her feel isolated and alone in her new place. She sees her mother, one of two adult women in her life, become worn down and hurt by part of that culture: her father is now taking a second wife. Witnessing this (accidentally) as a child would be traumatizing and because that scene specifically is shot entirely from Amy’s POV it is clearly marked as the moment her character views the other girls as more than just the school’s in-crowd—they’re now an outlet to escape from her home’s stifling atmosphere. Amy spends the movie with two specific motivators: anger at her home-life and desire to be well-liked. These are honest views of what drives children this age across all generations, genders, and cultures, and it’s incredibly important to remember as the story moves forward.

Each action taken by the girls in the film was carefully written to be an escalation in behavior. These little “warning-signs” are very worrisome and very real. Within the group of five main girls, we watch them bully each other, bond, throw each other away, and then go back to being best friends like nothing happened. For Amy, this is a lesson in self-preservation within the pecking order and something she acts on much later in the film. These toxic behaviors do start young and are hurtful, and the filmmaker incorporates them skillfully into the narrative as a driving behavioral force. Concurrently, Amy begins viewing videos online of women dancing increasingly more provocatively (with thousands of the likes she craves) and her mother and aunt at home are giving her more responsibilities typically associated with transitioning into womanhood (cooking for her father’s wedding, being the primary caretaker to her little brothers). So as Amy strives to keep her friends, sees what earns women likes on social media, and begins to assume a more adult role at home, it makes sense why she would actively work towards actions and decisions she thinks will bring her acceptance. It is clear that she doesn’t understand that her actions have consequences or the context behind what those actions are saying and why they’re problematic. Amy never has a “sexual awakening” and neither do the other girls. She also doesn’t understand what happens to her when she has her first period. She is entirely unprepared for this stage in her life—like many real girls. Only at the end of the film, when she has lost touch with the importance of family and their values, cheated and hurt someone she once called a friend, to get back on stage to win the approval she seeks, does Amy realize what’s happened to her. As the faces from the audience, from who she craved applause, turn to disgust and they begin to boo, Amy reaches a point of clarity. In rejection of the lifestyle she once desired she runs to her mother for forgiveness. A shot of her dance outfit next to a traditional dress from Senegal transitions into a tracking shot of Amy dressed in an appropriate tee-shirt and jeans, walking out of her family’s home, to a group of other children skipping rope. She joins them, smiling, finding a place where she can just be a kid. Where she can just be herself.

As someone who watches a lot of films and strives to write a screenplay one day, this narrative contains nothing surprising to me. If anything it’s a very standard coming-of-age movie where a young person learns to unite two conflicting sides of themselves and emerges from the story with clarity and character growth (Almost Famous comes to mind). So, why did THIS movie get such a strong reaction and spark such a ridiculous hysteria from many who didn’t even bother to watch not only the film itself but the trailer as well? I honestly can’t answer this with any concrete data, but I do have some theories that come from my perspective as a cinephile, as a woman, and as someone who spends time on the internet. We’ll start there.

I think it’s pretty easy (and lazy) to blame the internet/social media entirely for mass hysteria of this nature. After all, in the 1980s and into the 90s the fear of daycare molestation was so fervent innocent people went to jail after being convicted of crimes based solely on their occupation and with no real evidence. There was no social media then. However, ironically in this case, you can’t deny the power the internet holds in spreading an idea. #savethechildren and conspiracy theories of child trafficking rings in online furniture sales have trended heavily in the last few months, colliding with Netflix’s bad decision to make the poster from the most intentionally inappropriate moment of the film, Frankly, this movie suffered, in part, from terrible release timing. It was mass-released after the WAP debate was fading and the aforementioned conspiracies were raging right at the end of an election where “culture-war” coverage is traditionally rampant. Any honest piece of media centered on the struggles of young girls would have been doomed. Our society has a bizarre and confused obsession with protecting the innocence of girls and women on the terms set by men. Through the lens of men. Usually, powerful men. It’s why dads with shotguns and purity balls and male politicians writing bills that regulate the freedom of women are considered normal. It’s why movies so frequently show single moms as the ones that are struggling to control and protect their daughters. It’s also why misbehavior on the part of boys in their coming-of-age movies are written as a right of passage and not a warning.

Which brings me to the last perspective from which I am hypothesizing: that of a cinephile. I have seen a lot of movies, starting at a very young age, and I am not a stranger to this film genre. So, while I watched it I was racking my brain coming up with all the “alarming” coming-of-age films I’ve seen and wondered why little to no one has mentioned them in this discussion. I mean in Stand by Me the boys are smoking in a treehouse and later point a loaded gun at someone. I thought about mid90s and it showed a 13-year-old boy have ACTUAL sexual contact and feelings (not the actors, but it was shot in such a way that the characters were), drink and do drugs, trespass, and swear up a storm. Gummo shows low-income rust belt kids killing cats, violently beating each other, and worse. Now it’s considered an indie-film classic and counted in a list of 1001 movies to see before you die. All of these movies show far more alarming behavior acted out by age-accurate actors, and no one boycotted them. Or even bothered to question whether or not it was worth considering behavior from past films like these. The female coming-of-age experience Thirteen, which I already mentioned, shows two age-accurate actresses playing girls who drink underage, wear skimpy clothes, get their tongues pierced, use drugs, bully each other, and have sex. It’s now lauded as an important film in its era and receives high viewer reviews because it’s “shocking” and “real.” Kids, which carries similar clout to Gummo in the indie world, centers around both boys and girls doing all of this same behavior but goes one step further and gives them AIDS. While many of these films inspired concern, none of them created the shit storm that we saw from Cuties. And then it hit me: these films are (with the exception of Stand By Me and mid90s) absurd. They’re written and shot through the perspective of adults panicking over that so-treasured moral fiber of the youth, but don’t actually take the time to hear about the pain that’s tearing it. And all of them (with another notable exception for mid90s, which benefits from its place as a period piece story of nostalgia) have a character who stands out as the clear antagonist with no moral nuance, that pushes the “good kid” to an extreme.

So in conjunction with bad timing and double standards held against female (especially foreign) stories, Maïmouna Doucouré made one big mistake: she dared to listen. The amount of research and interviews she did to get this right took 18 months. Her writing process was extensive. She had a child psychologist consulting on-set. All so she could share the stories of these girls, through the lens of her own experiences as a Muslim immigrant, in a grounded and empathetic way. There’s no character created to take the blame. Everyone is treated as human and doing their best to make it through each day. The movie is rated TV-Ma meaning it’s meant for adults, but it’s told from the perspective of a child to help breed a culture of understanding when addressing these issues. What this outrage and hysteria masked as concern tells me is that we are ready to lose ourselves and our minds to “protect our girls” but we’re not ready to listen to them in order to actually help them cope and heal.

We like having a scapegoat, a single clearly bad parent or friend. We like blaming Britney Spears or Cardi B when young girls aspire to be like them or mimic them, forgetting that they were also scared little girls who grew up in a toxic culture and then were primed to take the fall for “perpetuating” it. It’s a lot harder to reflect on how we may all be implicated in this reality. The reason Cuties doesn’t feature an easy scapegoat is because there isn’t one. I’m not here to say the actions of the characters in the movie are totally fine and not at all unsettling (they’re not), but the movie itself isn’t saying that either. This film depicts a harsh reality, but depiction in of itself is not promotion or glorification. Amy’s pain is shown as hard and it clearly, VISUALLY, levels her. We’re not supposed to support her actions but we are supposed to feel for her struggle. Honestly, if this movie teaches us anything it’s that it’s time we stopped putting the weight of misogynistic expectations and control on women and girls and instead start listening with open and empathetic minds, giving them the freedom to be themselves.