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This is a thread to discuss one of the most controversial films in recent years: quote:A 2020 French coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by French-Senegalese Maïmouna Doucouré in her feature directorial debut.[2] The film stars Fathia Youssouf, Médina El Aidi-Azouni, Esther Gohourou, Ilanah Cami-Goursolas and Maïmouna Gueye. The plot revolves around a French-Senegalese girl with a traditional Muslim upbringing who is caught between traditional values and Internet culture. According to the filmmakers, the film is intended to criticize the hypersexualisation of pre-adolescent girls. quote:For her feature debut, writer/director Maimouna Doucoure (the Sundance-winning short Maman(s)) sets the sexual awakening and desperate need for acceptance of an 11 year-old girl against a clash of cultures in the internet age. The sight of twerking pre-teen bodies is explicitly designed to shock mature audiences into a contemplation of today’s destruction of innocence, but some missteps hold Cuties at a distance for that demographic: a film to respect for its audacity, admire for its lead female performance perhaps, but also view as a dramatically contrived. In preparation for it's release on the behemoth streaming platform, Netflix created an ad campaign that was met with accusations of pedophilia, in which, similar to GLOW (which promoted an all-woman drama show about wrestling with sexy pictures of the cast in their costumes), the dancing troupe is posed in promiscuity. With that idiotic blunder, which has probably cost a few marketing employees their jobs, a new politicized discussion has erupted about the movie. It it exploitation? Is it pedophilia? Is it dangerous? Conservative political leaders in the USA, including Ted "Bitch Face" Cruz, are trying to rally against the film. Qanon, a fringe group in US politics that believe that there are system(s) of underground pedophilia rings and who believe Tonald Drump is on a mission to destroy the pedophiles, despite evidence linking him to Jeffrey Epstein's island of pedophilia and debauchery, has taken on a mission of disinformation to destroy Cuties, it's filmmakers, and anyone defending the film. However, many brave viewers who have seen the film, are willing to defend it, saying it handles it's heavy controversial topics with care, and that most of the talking points about the film are being manipulated by media or internet users who would rather stir the controversy with accusations rather than watch or ignore the film.  READ BEFORE POSTING:  Do not accuse posters or filmmakers in this thread of being a pedophile. To do so will result in automatic banning, unless actual proof can be provided, in which case law enforcement will be involved. Do not accuse posters, or the filmmakers, of being pedophilia apologists. Do not post Qanon talking points or misinformation as fact. If a Qanon post is posted, quote the source as Qanon. Lack of research is not an excuse for posting misinformation, and can lead to a probation. Ultimately no one will ever force you to watch the movie. You can mark it Thumbs Down on Netflix, request it to Do Not Show Me, and it will be out of your life. However, it is pretty ridiculous to constantly argue against a film you haven't seen, as context, tone, writing and performance are important to labeling a work.
Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 13:33
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Let's hear what the critics say!quote:There’s a saying in criticism that “depiction does not equal endorsement.” Art should be able to address taboos without necessarily advocating for them, but some surface-level readings miss what the work digs into because it’s not obvious at first glance. In the wake of conservative outrage over an early poster of debut writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré’s “Cuties,” this is a sentiment that bears repeating. The film actively critiques the very thing pearl-clutchers were mad about—the sexualization of children—but Doucouré received death threats. Amy Nicholson's thoughtful review, in which she chooses to discuss the film without any mention of its controversy quote:It’s a real shame that so many conservatives are condemning “Cuties” when they might find a great deal to like about the movie — and no, I don’t mean they harbor a secret taste for twerking preteens. Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 13:38
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Starks posted:This is all irrelevant. The issue many people have with the movie is not from an analytical perspective. To me and many others it's a labour issue - they really hired 11-year-old children and really made them act out these sexual scenes. I think that that's wrong no matter how powerful or effective the message. I don't need to watch the movie to know that they did this. Politicians arguing about the movie and demanding repercussions is absolutely politicized. Just because oppositional political parties aren't also arguing doesn't mean it's not politicized. There is definitely room to argue about how we use child actors in general. But your labour issue is, to an extent, unfounded with regards to Cuties, specifically. Here is the director talking about how they crafted the work environment: quote:The idea for “Cuties” was formed after Doucouré attended a neighborhood gathering in Paris and witnessed a group of young girls on a stage dancing in “a very sexually revealing way,” just as the characters in her film do. I can't speak entirely about France's laws with filming children and pre-teens, but I know that the US and Global film industry is stringent about that in general. Parents and guardians are on-set and approve of what their child is participating in. There are whole negotiations and contracts written up for actors and actresses--whether adult or child--about what they are willing to wear, how they will be presented, let alone what parts of their bodies will be shown on camera; so to assume that all of these practices were removed for one film is really only convenient for someone arguing against it. What bothers me about many of the arguments is that all of these ideas that "Oh these kids don't know what they're doing" removes agency from the people you claim are being victims. The actors are teenagers, there's no denying that, and there is definitely levels of maturity that they are just not equipped with. But to assume a 12 year old is--what? too stupid? too dumb? too immature?--to know the levels of the project that they're involved with really removes their agency*. You're calling them a victim, as if they somehow got roped into being in a movie, and didn't read the script, audition, talk with the director, talk with their parents or guardians, and talk with the child psychologists they hired, before the camera even rolled. In just my half hour of research and reading, more care was taken with the child actors in this film than Martin Scorsese used with 12 year old Jodie Foster playing a sex worker in Taxi Driver. Working conditions for children are pretty heavily regulated, moreso now than ever before. And exploitation can and does happen, yes. Look at Shia LeBouf, for instance. It's interesting that Cuties gets lambasted for it, when everything I read points to a lot of care being taken with how it was filmed despite it's controversial subject matter, when Nickelodeon exec producers are taking feet pictures of underage actresses and posting them on social media, and Disney execs have been creating burned-out performers like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan for decades. Like I said, there's a lot of room to discuss child labor in general, but I don't see Cuties being a good example of how it was done badly. *The average age of a child getting their first smart phone is 10 years old. More than 50% of children aged 12 have a smart phone. The average age a child begins watching pornography is now 11 years old. The recommended age for parents to start talking in depth about sexuality is 9-12 years old. The average age a person starts becoming sexually aware and begins searching for comparisons to see if they're "normal" is apparently 8-12 years old. I'm not saying this is "good" or "morally right or wrong" or anything, these are just facts based on research and polls and psychology studies that are easily searched. Anecdotally, having worked in after school programs to help tutor students, I was informed by many school officials that many of their students had already had The Talk with their parents by the time they were 10 years old. (In tutoring Science, I had kids ask questions about sex, and had to go find supervisors and attendants to know how to even deal with that.  )
Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 15:17
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luxury handset posted:i don't really think that 11 year olds doing sexualized dancing on a film set is all that damaging to them. it's a disturbing thing to portray for sure, like a tween lighting off a whole string of racial insults and curse words because that's what they've been socialized into through like unsupervised multiplayer gaming voice chat. but this sort of seems like shooting the messenger to me, kids this age are exposed to all sorts of confusing messages about sex and sexuality all of the time, in real life. i don't know if the young performers doing this dance is any more damaging than the actual real world depiction of sexuality that these girls, and other girls like them, would be exposed to in their daily lives Ding ding ding, we have a winner. USA is terrified of discussing sex and sexuality, and would rather crucify a cinematic insight into uncomfortable cultural manifestations that are also widely available through TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc for free.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:06
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luxury handset posted:i think you're confusing "agency" here for "consent". kids cannot legally consent to many things but they certainly have the agency to understand things like dancing, or even inappropriate sexy dancing if it were explained to them Yes, exactly; thank you.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:11
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Starks posted:No I don't think I am? Here's what google gives me: "Agency is defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices". Children don't have that freedom for their own safety because their brains are literally not developed enough to understand the consequences of their own decisions. It's not someone; it was me, the person you are arguing with; the one who explicitly said "exploitation does happen, it's a constantly evolving situation as these situations become public". As for the Mara Wilson thread, I just don't really have an answer for it. You're right, a 12 year old child may not be able to think about every disturbing way their performances may be perverted, but, again, they have to have parents or guardians who do think of those things, sign off on the children. That still doesn't mean a child doesn't realize what they are signing up for in their performance. What you're positing is, sadly, inescapable. I've heard adult female actors I admire say they found photoshops of them in bondage, rape fantasies, WikiFeet, etc. Showrunners, artists and animators get sat down at the beginning of their show or whatever being published and get told "Rule34 exists. We are going to show you what can and will happen to your characters," and then proceed to show them Rule34 stuff. This is true of any type of character, whether a bipedal rabbit with breasts or, like, Dexter from Dexter's Lab. Look at what happened with Mrs. Incredible last year. I bring this up not in defense of it, it's literally the inherent risk of being a content creator, including acting. And I understand the individual choice of saying "I wouldn't let my child be an actor." I wouldn't want my child (I don't have kids, mind) being a child actor until they're done with high school. But I also loved acting as a kid, and did plays and theater and dreamed about being in movies, and while fame or fortune aren't good goals for a child, learning the skills of acting, performance, team work, and everything else that goes into the artistry of acting, is valuable to a child. But what you're saying is really a bigger problem with society. Society and internet culture allows a space for perversity to flourish. Mara Wilson was Matilda and the little girl from a few Robin Williams movies, she never did a movie like Cuties, and she was still a victim. Saying "She was too young/dumb/stupid/ignorant to predict that she would be sexualized" is still victim-blaming. And your solution is "No more art that involves children." Which would still, in order to avoid what you're saying, involve no more animated films either. Which feels like a complicated, impractical band-aid to a bigger wound. You're saying "Let's stop making art that pedophiles/sexual deviants/disturbed perverts can masturbate to!" Why not put the same effort into arresting/rehabiliting sexual deviants and making sure they can't harm children or make art that makes them victims. It just seems like a really backwards solution that ignores the actual problem. It's certainly a bigger discussion beyond Cuties, even though as a film it is inherently going to be victim to that process.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:55
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sexpig by night posted:The story is about children, that's just what it is, it's about an actual human being's actual journey that took place when she was an actual child, what are you going to do, have a stunt 21 year old gymnast for the dance scenes? To emphasize this, the director has, in multiple interviews (and in reviews posted earlier), said the film was always intended for a pre-teen and teen audiences, for this very reason. While it was argued earlier in the thread that most media will always be marketed towards adults, that doesn't mean the artist--writer and director--had anything but her pre-teen and teen audience in mind when making the film.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:08
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Here's another weird wrinkle: Cuties is being lambasted for it's portrayal of pre-teens stepping into sexuality. And yet last year Good Boys had pre-teens stepping into sexuality, with jokes about getting blowjobs, the kids carrying around a sex doll (which they sell to a grown man), playing on a sex swing, and being in sexualized situations with teenage girls (played by actresses in their early 20's), and watching porn to learn how to kiss. The three titular Good Boy are the same ages as the Cuties stars. The movie was a hit and met very little controversy.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:16
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punk rebel ecks posted:A little off-topic but I heard someone reference Natalie Portman in "Leon: The Professional" as an example and that was something that made me uncomfortable. Like I'm not sure what the movie was suppose to say about her being "in love" and acting like the hitman's significant other. The director's cut is especially not cool. It's a weird, disturbing choice that's made legitimately concerning by stories of the director that have come out in recent years.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:12
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EA Sports posted:Mara wilson never trended on pornhub, asmuch as her experiences sucked. lots of people who are sex/porn addicts or predatory are going to get off on this stuff, just as most kids aren't even molested by pedophiles, but by predatory people A lot of your arguments seem to assume that (teen) boy dance routines would be uploaded to PornHub and enjoyed and not immediately reported, taken down, and the uploader put under investigation. Sex Addiction doesn't begin and end with pornography. Your argument defeats itself. Mara Wilson was target of pedophilic interests and fantasies, before PornHub, DeepFakes, or the Dark Web existed. She was still sexualized. Some weirdos just rented Matilda, dude. And yes, Mara Wilson did experience this as a child. While working on a film after her mother died. While playing a character with abusive parents and a murderous teacher who emasculates and tortures children. She's been getting rape letters from savage fanatics since before puberty. Your vicarious xenophobia and suggesting eugenics as a solution to pedophilia is really hosed up and you should log off the internet for a while and do some soul searching. EA Sports posted:My suggestion that parents would force their child actor to do whatever they could to land a big role is merely occams razor. in regards to dumping on the psychologist what other reason were they there? they were there to help them rationalize away Psychologists don't rationalize things. Have you been through therapy for your abuse? Therapists give you a safe space to talk and vent about your experiences. Through conversation they listen and make sure that there's no red flags or behavioral issues, no excess stress, and underlying issues. They can provide coping mechanisms for stress, depression, fear, etc., but if a child is being endangered, they are literally obligated by their profession to help remove that child from the harmful situation. They aren't brainwashing the children, they aren't normalizing everything. That you assume the director would maliciously endanger a child for 20-something days for a project, that their parents, who are on set, would allow their child to be abused for a camera, and that they have a psychologist on the payroll to brainwash a child, shows more of a deeper paranoia and nihilistic distrust in people that you are projecting. You are not positing objective truths. You are positing subjective paranoid fears you have of what could possibly have happened. Which, I understand, if you are a victim of abuse, why you would have those thoughts, but a message board about a movie isn't the best place for you to share those fears as if they are objectively about a movie that is being discussed. I would genuinely recommend you find a therapist you trust and work on that stuff. EA Sports posted:Showing little boys porn is against the law, so if a movie did it whoever is responsible for it should be arrested. I'm going to assume you're talking about something foreign or from the 70s/80s before people gave a poo poo about protecting children from hollywood. Good Boys came out last year and has a joke where the three boys, 11-13 in age, look up "How To Kiss" through google, and instead find a bunch of porn. One of the kids say "Why is she kissing his dick?!" From the viewer's perspective, we only see the back of the laptop and the faces of the kids horrified by pornography, while we hear the sounds of pornographic scenes. Now, through movie magic, the kids didn't actually see porn. They probably just looked at a blank screen and read lines which they memorized.
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Sep 17, 2020 13:31
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I know Mara Wilson has been used in this discussion, since she's been vocal about her experiences as a child actor, but I'd like to maybe try to start using other examples. Mara Wilson reads SomethingAwful and might be posting somewhere, and it makes me feel pretty awkward that she'd have to constantly read about herself, especially being a target of harassment, in the Cuties thread. Not banning discussion around her outright, but maybe let's limit it and use other examples.
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Sep 17, 2020 13:45
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EA Sports posted:The suggestion that eugenics might work was an absurdist example to strengthen my belief that the problem in near universal, and cross cultural. Since the sexualization of children was continually framed as a cultural problem in this thread. I don't appreciate being called a xenophobe over that, maybe something like humansapienphobic would work better. The combination of "poor English speakers" followed up with suggesting eugenics does not read as absurdism. It reads like a dogwhistle and a suggestion of eugenics as a solution. I'd rather tell you that it reads as hosed up and let you think about that than outright probate or ban you. We're debating; I don't probate or ban people for disagreeing, and you (should) be adult enough to accept when someone tells you what you wrote reads as xenophobic. Now, if you were to double down on it, or continue it, that's a different story. Even then, I'd have other people read the post and tell me if I'm misinterpreting what you wrote before I did anything. EA Sports posted:Mara was obviously let down by the adults who were supposed to protect her, if that was the case. Speak on that. How is a child failed by the adults in her life because anonymous pedophiles wrote her letters for starring in a movie? This goes back to previous arguments in this thread. If a child is in a film, whether the child is an actor, in a documentary, or an animated character, they are, by the nature of society (which you yourself are claiming to criticize) and internet culture, open to being a victim; not because it's wrong to be an actor, not because adults have failed them, but because human nature is open to perversity and vile behavior. This is a sadly inescapable aspect of culture. EA Sports posted:
IF that happened, you'd be correct. There is no evidence of that currently. This is your hypothesis of what possibly could have happened. Even then, the individual psychologist would have broken vows they've taken with that career and would lose their job. And I would agree that they hosed up and are hosed up. EA Sports posted:If the entire world of child celebrity history doesn't have you automatically assume the child is being pressured into this by desperate parents, well whatever that's your prerogative. im not a nihilistic rear end in a top hat for assuming the worst. Actually, I don't assume those things. A great example is The Florida Project, another independent film, made outside of the Hollywood system for the most part. The child actor was 8ish years old. The character she plays has a mother who is a sex worker. She lives in poverty. She is around situations that would be considered abusive. There is a part of the film where a pedophile approaches the kids in hopes to kidnap one of them. The director, Sean Baker, made sure that he provided a safe environment for the child to work in. Exploitation came up a lot in interviews. He said any real director with real care for their actors will always provide a safe work environment. She even went on a press tour to talk about the movie, and Sean Baker said, if there were any hint that she didn't enjoy it, he would have told her no to the tour. But she's a natural performer, she likes the attention, she loves working with Sean Baker and Bria (the actress that plays her mother), she likes being interviewed, she has endless amounts of energy for it, and her parents are okay with it. So, there are safe ways of telling these stories. You are free to assume the worst, I guess, but there's also plenty of room to assume the best, and that actors are able to tell a powerful story through performance that they are proud of and remain proud of. Again. I taught kids in this age group for a while. There are some kids that absolutely would not be suited for the limelight and pressures of a career in performance. But there were also kids who absolutely had the energy, mindset and familial support where they could do it safely. Not every director, producer, psychologist are monsters. Not every pre-teen actor is a victim. In fact, it's always the indie film sets that take the most care with this stuff, and the Disneys an Nickelodeons that wreck lives.
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Sep 17, 2020 15:10
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Horizon Burning posted:'It would've been okay if it was a documentary.' This is incredibly disturbing to me, because it basically says "I wouldn't watch this kind of exploitative stuff unless it was real." One of the most heartbreaking and disturbing films I've seen is the documentary Jesus Camp, which shows kids from like 6-16 go to a Christian summer camp, which brainwashes the kids and mentally and emotionally abuses the kids into a Christian lifestyle. I watch, in horror, as a 9 year old girl has an emotional breakdown, crying her loving eyes out, speaking in tongues, shaking because she wants to use her whole being to save her from eternal damnation in Hell. You watch, in real time, the irreversible damage done to a child in the name of religion. It's a powerful documentary and I think it's won a bunch of awards and considered one of the best docs in the past few decades, but the only way it was made was through the filmmakers using an unflinching eye towards the abuse. They couldn't intervene, because they would have been removed and disallowed the right to film. Hell, they use the girl as the poster. Morality and "doing what is right", which includes intervention, is not inherent with filming a documentary. Even one with a view that is against the subject matter it's showing (The Act of Killing, Jesus Camp), have difficulty with breaking the objective act of filming.
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Sep 17, 2020 15:17
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Fanana posted:Thanks for the great posts. I was wondering if you might share your source on this statement: "the average age a person starts becoming sexually aware and begins searching for comparisons to see if they're "normal" is apparently 8-12 years old" That specifically comes from The Mayo Clinic, but I also read up on this article about What Sex/Love Topics To Talk To Discuss at Certain Ages. There's also this BBC report on Pre-Teens and Pornography which seems to be a bit of fear-mongering, but I think the stats of ages compared to pornography use seems legit.
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Sep 17, 2020 15:24
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luxury handset posted:your entire argument hinges on this unchecked assumption that because the dancing makes other people uncomfortable, as it is intended to do, that it is then likely that one of the child actors in the movie would themselves also regard it as uncomfortable. it's a bit of a questionable thing to say about a child actor, who is probably the most aware person that the entire thing they're doing is a performance and therefore not real. it also depends on the idea that it's not the dancing itself which would make the actor uncomfortable, but rather people's reaction to the dancing. This just reminded me of when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a video of her dancing as a teenager posted to Twitter with a bunch of conservatives saying "Look at this stupid idiot! She should be ashamed! She's making a fool of herself! I would be so embarrassed!" and then AOC responded with "lol, I was a teen girl having fun dancing. What is there to be ashamed of? I look cute." edit: I should clarify, your talking points in this post are good and on-point; it just made me remember that recent "controversy" that is somewhat related. Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 15:34
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