Cutie Pies?

Let’s make something clear: I have no interest in Cuties. I’m a childhood sexual assault survivor. I’ve also been the victim of unhealthy expectations, in my case a child savant because of my Autism. The former I’m still paying for, while the latter’s stunted my emotional maturity. For those two reasons, I wouldn’t be able to watch the film without having PTSD flashbacks. 

Anyway, Cuties. For those unaware, there was a controversy surrounding this film that dates back to its announcement. Focusing on a group of girls who are sexualized in order to “feed the machine”, it has one of the biggest critic-audience disconnects in recent memory. While it’s not unheard of for critics and audiences to clash, especially when both have different expectations, I don’t think there’s been a divide this drastic. The movie has an 89% Critic Score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3% User Score. This isn’t factoring in its 69 on Metacritic and 2.1/10 on IMDB.

I won’t focus too heavily on that aspect. People, be it critics or audiences, are entitled to their opinions. No piece of art, even film, is 100% good or bad, so tastes are always personal. And if I were to start pointing fingers, especially as someone who hasn’t seen Cuties, I’d look ignorant. So I’m avoiding that.

What I will discuss, however, is the reactionary opinions. I see them a lot, but it’s worth noting because people were quick to jump on the film from the moment Netflix announced it. So many Netflix users were furious, and #CancelNetflix was Trending on Twitter. It didn’t help that the media got wind of the movie’s existence and blew it up, which Netflix then exploited. But was it worth the vitriol? 

Well…no, for two reasons. The first is that, based on what Cuties’s own director had to say, the film wasn’t the boogeyman that reactionaries made it to be. According to Maïmouna Doucouré:

“Things happened fairly quickly because, after the delays, I was completely concentrating on the film’s release in France. I discovered the poster as the same time as the American public…[i]t was a strange experience. I hadn’t seen the poster until after I started getting all these reactions on social media, direct messages from people, attacks on me. I didn’t understand what was going on. That was when I went and saw what the poster looked like.”

I think this is pretty telling. Doucouré wasn’t trying to “groom prepubescent girls”. That impression was based in false advertising, a misleading description and a bad poster from Netflix. She also was using Cuties to expose prepubescent sexualization by society; after all, how often do we expect kids to “prep for parenthood”? It happens everywhere, and it was the subject of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.

Botched advertising’s one problem, but then there’s the outrage against critics who liked the movie. As evidenced on Twitter, there was an orchestrated backlash against those film critics who gave it a positive review. It didn’t matter what their reasoning was, they were the enemy. And many received death threats too. 

This isn’t okay. It isn’t healthy either. It’s one issue to disagree with a critic’s opinion, I do that constantly. But sending out death threats is disingenuous and wrong. It also makes you look immature.

The notion of “the critic as an inhuman adversary who needs humbling” is reductive. It might make for good fiction, but critics have lives too. The key difference between a critic and regular audiences is that they’re routinely subjected to more films than most for work, which makes it harder to impress them. They’re not immune to bad faith claims, they’re human, but their job deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Which is all the more reason why this hate train must stop. Ignoring how critics travel in unique circles, hence conspiratorial reviews are nigh-impossible to coordinate, attacking them for doing their job is the wrong approach. So they liked Cuties and you didn’t? Have you ever wondered why? Try putting yourself in their shoes, you’d be surprised! 

Above all else, this goes to show how irrational the internet can be. The “in group/out group” mentality, or Myside Bias, can be more harmful than helpful. It can even lead to false accusations of “supporting pedophilia”, which, as Doucouré has argued, isn’t the case. I’d also argue that the backlash borders on sexism and racism, but that’s for another day.

Netflix isn’t a saintly enterprise. They’ve been guilty of many bad practices, including underpaying employees and subcontracting cartoons to studios who’ve fired animators for speaking out about their working conditions. The mis-marketing of Cuties is yet another bad decision. They’re a business, and, like all businesses, ethics aren’t always at the top of their agenda.

The above is neither the fault of Cuties nor Doucouré. They’re shedding light on a serious issue, nothing more. By vilifying the movie and the reviewers that praised it, you misconstrue the message for a selfish agenda. And that’s wrong. 

         

Finally, and I can’t believe I have to say this, I don’t want to detract from the seriousness of pedophilia. Pedophilia’s immoral and destroys children’s lives. It’s also not worth celebrating in any form, even film. But that doesn’t mean you should send death threats based on your own understanding of what qualifies as pedophilia. Because that’s policing. And, as we all know by now, “ACAB”.

But I’ll get attacked for writing this anyway, so why bother?