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

00:00:00.000 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:00:12.060 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:00:17.220 Hey y'all, Bridget here.

00:00:18.820 I wanted to do a quick supplementary episode about the Netflix movie Cuties.

00:00:23.180 First of all, I was a little bit nervous to even talk about this film.

00:00:26.400 It's such a big controversy right now.

00:00:28.240 but I kind of felt like I had to. So just to get this out of the way, Cuties is a movie that is

00:00:33.940 very much in line with my interests. I love French cinema, specifically French Senegalese cinema.

00:00:39.640 I live for a coming-of-age story, especially a story about a girl navigating her way through

00:00:43.960 a rocky girlhood. Movies like Fish Tank or 13 love them. Also, I grew up dancing. I grew up in

00:00:53.080 doing competitive dance, being in dance troupes that were sometimes a little bit questionable.

00:00:57.360 So it does seem like a movie that is tailor-made for my interests.

00:01:01.840 This is not meant to be a movie review.

00:01:03.580 I'm just trying to give you the broad strokes of the controversy and the criticism in what's happening.

00:01:07.480 However, there will be some spoilers.

00:01:09.240 And so if you don't want this movie spoiled for you, I definitely recommend you check it out before listening to this episode.

00:01:14.540 I will try to warn you before the spoilers.

00:01:17.480 So what is Cuties?

00:01:19.380 Cuties is a French film by first-time director Mimono Ducere.

00:01:23.720 It tells the coming-of-age story of Amy, a Muslim Senegalese 11-year-old living in France.

00:01:28.740 It premiered at Sundance this winter to rave reviews before being acquired by Netflix.

00:01:33.700 I was actually at Sundance and tried to see it, but unfortunately, it was sold out.

00:01:37.960 So the broad strokes plot of the film Cuties is that Amy, this 11-year-old, she kind of balances these two worlds.

00:01:44.900 The one world is her mother's world of sort of traditional Senegalese values.

00:01:49.400 Her mom wants her to be this sort of chaste, girlish, traditional girl. 0.89

00:01:53.560 But she's living in France.

00:01:55.160 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.

00:02:05.000 The film explores fairly common coming-of-age tropes around movies about girlhood.

00:02:09.940 Things like getting your first period.

00:02:12.160 Things like feeling alienated from your family.

00:02:14.480 Things like wanting to fit in and being grown up and cool and sexy.

00:02:17.980 vying for likes on social media, and of course, sexuality.

00:02:21.440 The filmmaker said that she saw young girls dancing on stage in Paris in these scantily clad outfits

00:02:26.480 and that she was sort of fascinated by this.

00:02:28.700 She was fascinated by the girls, fascinated by the adults who were watching and like letting this happen,

00:02:33.460 these girls' parents and their families.

00:02:35.260 She ended up spending a year researching dance troupes in France,

00:02:39.520 researching preteen girls, interviewing them,

00:02:41.440 and talking to them about society, their bodies, how they felt at school, things like fitting in.

00:02:46.980 And the result was this film, Cuties.

00:02:49.920 So the film first generated controversy before it ever came out on Netflix because of the poster.

00:02:55.640 So the poster for this film when it first debuted at Netflix was pretty run-of-the-mill.

00:02:59.400 It had the picture of the girls in the film running down the street doing like a shopping spree.

00:03:05.140 But when the film was acquired by Netflix, the poster they went with was very different.

00:03:09.840 And 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.

00:03:18.380 And they're in these like very adult poses.

00:03:20.760 So think about dance movies like Step Up where they have dancers who are scantily clad posing on the poster. 1.00

00:03:27.420 But those are usually grown women.

00:03:29.400 The Netflix poster for Cuties was like that, but with 11-year-olds. 0.59

00:03:33.760 Now, I completely agree that this poster was not a good way to market this film.

00:03:37.540 and it isn't even really representative of what the film was about.

00:03:41.380 Netflix later apologized for the poster, but it was kind of too late.

00:03:45.480 The director of the film responded to the poster controversy saying,

00:03:48.680 I discovered the poster at the same time the American public did.

00:03:51.660 I didn't understand what was going on.

00:03:53.540 And that's when I went and saw what the poster looked like.

00:03:55.800 I received numerous attacks on my character from people who had not seen the film,

00:03:59.340 who thought I was actually making a film that was apologetic about the hyper-sexualization of children.

00:04:04.060 I also received numerous death threats. 0.95

00:04:05.800 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. 0.89

00:04:15.260 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. 0.86

00:04:23.320 The vocal criticism of the film only continued after it was released on Netflix in early September.

00:04:28.860 The director actually published a piece in the Washington Post about why she decided to make the film.

00:04:32.780 She writes, the stories that the girls I spoke to shared with me were remarkably similar.

00:04:37.940 They saw the sexier a woman is on Instagram or TikTok, the more likes she gets.

00:04:42.240 They tried to imitate that sexuality in a belief that it would make them more popular.

00:04:46.460 Spend an hour on social media and you'll see preteens, often in makeup, pouting their lips and strutting their stuff as if they were grown women. 0.71

00:04:53.340 The problem, of course, is that they are not grown women and they don't realize what they're doing.

00:04:57.740 They construct their self-esteem based on social media likes and the number of followers they have. 0.50

00:05:02.780 Some people have found certain scenes in my film to be uncomfortable to watch,

00:05:05.820 but if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable.

00:05:10.680 Here's what she had to say in a Netflix short film on YouTube called Why I Made Cuties.

00:05:15.100 With hundreds of pretines who told me their story,

00:05:18.860 I needed to know how they felt about their own femininity in today's society 0.99

00:05:23.520 and how they dealt with their self-image at a time when social media is so important. 1.00

00:05:30.260 Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she is successful.

00:05:38.320 And the children just imitate what they see, trying to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning. 0.66

00:05:45.740 So one thing to note is that this controversy has taken a political bend.

00:05:49.880 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.

00:05:58.860 Tulsi Gabbard, who you might remember ran for president unsuccessfully, called it child porn.

00:06:03.340 And somehow the Obamas are involved.

00:06:06.400 Because the Obamas had a high-profile deal with Netflix to make documentaries through their production company,

00:06:11.820 Fox News' Rachel Campos Duffy published a piece in The Federalist called

00:06:15.600 Michelle Obama is Complicit in Netflix's Child Porn Film Cuties. 0.92

00:06:19.880 She writes,

00:06:20.860 At a time when the left has declared that silence is violence, Michelle Obama's silence on Netflix's controversial movie Cuties has not gone unnoticed.

00:06:29.680 The hashtag Cancel Cuties was picking up steam, and Antenna, a data analytics company, found that there was a meaningful spike in Netflix cancellations.

00:06:38.520 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.

00:06:49.940 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 film actually sexualizes girls in trying to make that point.

00:07:02.280 I think it's worth pointing out that many films have been accused of this very same thing.

00:07:06.280 I'm thinking about movies like Kids, which the Washington Post called child porn when it was first debuted back in 1995.

00:07:12.440 So I want to talk about what actually goes down in the film.

00:07:16.000 Here's where you might find some spoilers, so if you don't want the movie spoiled for you, just know that going forward.

00:07:20.980 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.

00:07:26.380 I have seen it. I actually just got finished re-watching it.

00:07:29.680 So let's talk about it.

00:07:30.860 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.

00:07:39.640 For instance, one viral, quote, parent's guide said the film contains nudity of a minor.

00:07:45.720 That is not true.

00:07:47.840 The only nudity in the entire film is a very brief scene with a bare breast of an opposing dance team member.

00:07:54.020 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.

00:07:59.880 And actually, the actress whose bare breast you see for a second herself is an adult.

00:08:04.500 She's over 18.

00:08:05.360 So there is no minor nudity in this film. 0.99

00:08:08.020 This post also warns that there's a scene where a minor girl in tight leather pants 0.97

00:08:12.540 has her pants pulled down while the camera zooms in on her butt. 0.99

00:08:16.460 Now, on its face, that sounds disgusting, 0.99

00:08:19.300 but it actually doesn't really capture what happens in that scene.

00:08:22.660 In that scene, Amy, the 11-year-old in question,

00:08:25.600 is kind of meant to be poorer than the rest of her friends.

00:08:28.140 And this is the part in the film where she's trying to seem more grown up 0.88

00:08:30.740 and cooler than she is, so she borrows her friend's leather pants

00:08:33.880 and wears them to school.

00:08:35.800 She ends up getting into a fight with an older girl in the schoolyard.

00:08:38.580 And in the fight, her pants are kind of pulled partway down. 0.94

00:08:41.600 And it exposes that she's wearing these really childish, kind of oversized, dirty, ratty underpants. 0.65

00:08:48.400 It is not a scene that is played for sexuality. 0.93

00:08:51.380 This is an incredibly embarrassing scene for her.

00:08:53.780 She runs off crying and her friends won't talk to her because they're so embarrassed by what happens.

00:08:58.860 And to say that the scene is like sexy or played for sexualization, it just is not.

00:09:06.180 And so I've seen a lot of things floating around on social media that go viral,

00:09:10.020 that make very controversial claims about what kind of things are contained in this movie

00:09:14.680 that are actually either A, not true, or B, kind of taken out of context.

00:09:19.960 This is clearly meant to be an embarrassing scene, not a sexy one.

00:09:24.780 Now, I can confirm the film does contain scenes of young girls twerking in shorts.

00:09:29.860 And I've read a few critiques that say that those scenes feel gratuitous or overdone. 0.91

00:09:33.820 And even if I don't personally agree with those criticisms, I think that's a fair point.

00:09:38.120 Here's a pretty big spoiler. 0.90

00:09:39.640 At the end of the movie, the girls have their big dance contest that the film has been building to the entire time. 0.98

00:09:44.520 It's full of inappropriate dances, twerking, grinding, all that stuff done by 11-year-olds. 0.68

00:09:49.920 But the whole point is that the audience finds this whole display horrifying.

00:09:54.520 They're doing a thumbs down and booing,

00:09:56.620 and some of them are getting up and walking out of the audience.

00:09:59.820 And the point of the film is that the girls really don't have the maturity

00:10:03.360 to understand why these dances are not appropriate.

00:10:06.720 They thought they were going to get on stage and everyone was going to love these dances,

00:10:09.660 but in fact, all the adults are horrified.

00:10:11.940 It's kind of like the final dance scene in Little Miss Sunshine

00:10:14.500 when she thinks her dance is going to be so great and it's actually not appropriate.

00:10:18.000 it. Amy, the main character, is really sad. She cries on stage at this reaction. It's also really

00:10:24.740 important to point out that by the end of the film, it's clear Amy has made a choice that the

00:10:29.200 whole world of twerking and dancing and grinding and trying to be sexy for social media is not for 0.83

00:10:34.500 her. At the end of the film, she's clearly decided to sort of live a more youthful life. The final

00:10:39.660 scene of the film is her going out and playing, jump roping on the street and dressing like a

00:10:43.440 little girl. So I think it's fair to say this film is certainly not trying to valorize the

00:10:49.160 sexualization of girls. Now, I also want to say that the director says that a trained counselor

00:10:53.580 was present on the set and the project was even approved by the French government's child

00:10:57.460 protection authorities. So that's sort of the broad strokes of what's going on with this film

00:11:01.720 and the controversy around it. And in case you're curious, here's my opinion. I actually really

00:11:07.660 liked the film. It certainly wasn't perfect. There's some scenes in it that I think ring

00:11:12.100 really true to a specific kind of black girlhood. There's a scene where Amy tries to straighten her

00:11:17.000 very curly hair by ironing it on an ironing board, which I definitely tried when I was young.

00:11:21.960 There's a lot of scenes where Amy listens to her mother and her aunts have very grown woman

00:11:26.780 conversations that I can really relate to. There's also a scene where Amy's friends make fun of her

00:11:31.620 for having a flat butt. And she goes back home and starts noticing that all of these women in 1.00

00:11:35.820 her family have these curvy bodies and wonder, and you can tell that she's wondering when she's 0.99

00:11:40.540 going to get one or if she's going to get one, I certainly can identify with that. So yeah, I really

00:11:45.280 enjoyed the film and I'm glad I saw it. I think that the criticisms that people make that this

00:11:50.920 film kind of traffics in the kind of sexualization of girls that it's trying to prevent or trying to 1.00

00:11:57.220 call out, I think those are fair criticisms. I don't think those criticisms are completely

00:12:01.160 missing the mark. I don't happen to agree, but you know, I think when you're talking about film

00:12:05.160 and art, people are allowed to have their own opinions and make up their own minds.

00:12:08.100 I also feel like I have to say that we've talked in other episodes of Tangodi around how bad actors online will use sensitive topics to push division and chaos online.

00:12:18.660 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.

00:12:36.340 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.

00:12:42.420 But I just want to make very clear that I think it's really terrible that people are exploiting this very serious issue.

00:12:47.920 And in doing so, they're kind of drowning out legitimate conversation, both critical and positive, around this film.

00:12:53.940 And overall, I think it's really disappointing that this Senegalese first-time female filmmaker is having her debut drowned out by all of this controversy.

00:13:03.680 I think Netflix was 100% in the wrong for putting out that poster, but that wasn't her decision and wasn't her fault.

00:13:09.360 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.

00:13:22.780 So I find it disappointing that she's really gotten wrapped up in this.

00:13:26.560 But most importantly, I think people should really see the film themselves.

00:13:30.780 I've seen so many viral things on social media trying to get people to not see this film,

00:13:35.920 trying to get people to cancel Netflix because of this film.

00:13:39.520 And I think people should really make up their own minds.

00:13:43.280 You might disagree with me. That's totally fine.

00:13:45.160 It would not be the first time that somebody disagreed with my film takes.

00:13:48.300 Just ask anybody that I've made watch a film.

00:13:50.700 But I don't love the idea that people are trying to dissuade others from even seeing this film.

00:13:55.420 I've seen so many people posting like, oh, should I watch it? Is it horrifying?

00:13:58.700 and I think it's important to encourage people

00:14:00.980 to make up their own minds.

00:14:02.660 So here's where I want to know what y'all think.

00:14:05.500 Did you see cuties?

00:14:06.780 What did you think?

00:14:07.960 You can hit us up at hello at tangody.com

00:14:10.400 and let us know.

00:14:11.740 You can also find transcripts for today's episode

00:14:13.580 at tangody.com.

00:14:15.180 There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me,

00:14:17.040 Bridget Todd.

00:14:17.940 It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:14:20.640 Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

00:14:22.700 Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

00:14:25.320 Michael Amato is our contributing producer.

00:14:27.320 I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

00:14:29.200 If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

00:14:32.780 For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There Are No Girls on the Internet - October 03, 2020

BONUS： Behind the Netflix Cuties Controversy

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