Shut Up, They Explained

It’s Friday! Let’s talk about something appalling!

One

I’m sorry to say that I’ve been reading articles and tweet threads about this new awful Netflix offering—Cuties. I’ve watched a couple of clips of it, and tried to swallow down the “critical” explanation that it’s actually not just child pornography, but “very important” for dramatizing “the difficulties of growing up female in a sexualized and commercialized media culture.”

Here’s an insane paragraph:

“Cuties” is a film of the center, and it’s aesthetically of the center—it depicts the unconsidered without advancing to the realm of the subjective, and it doesn’t allow its young protagonists much discourse, outer or inner. It’s not a movie of introspection and self-consideration; it’s more a story of the rule than of the exception, of what’s unduly extraordinary about the effort to live an ordinary life. As such, it’s a story of French society at large—its exclusions and the exertions demanded to overcome them. Though many of Amy’s actions are dubious, her spirit of revolt is nonetheless sublime and heroic. “Cuties” dramatizes what people of color and immigrants endure as a result of isolation and ghettoization, of not being represented culturally and politically—and of not being represented in French national mythology. Its underlying subject is the connection of personal identity to public identity—and the urgency of transforming the very notion of French identity, of changing the idea of who’s considered the representative face of France. That idea is brought to the fore in an extraordinary, brief, symbolic ending; it’s enough to give a right-winger a conniption.

Two

My goodness, if objecting to this film makes me a “right-winger” I guess you can go ahead and apply the slur. I’ve basically embraced the ridiculous term TERF (trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist…a person who believes that being biologically female is a thing) so sure, cast my rational, moral, and aesthetic objection as a “conniption.”

Three

Fortunately for me, I have a coherently cobbled together worldview that allows me “discourse,” both “outer and inner” such that I’m not at the mercy of The New Yorker. Truly, for such a time as this, all the people of the world who have rejected any objective moral discourses of reality are backed into an illogical, hysterical, and unimaginative corner. That the way that the writer/director/whatever of this “film” chooses to “critique” the horrors of the sexualization of little girls is by displaying those horrors on the screen for tons and tons of people—lots of them actual men—to watch beggars even irony. That The New Yorker would notice that we need no “discourse” from them, the little girls, is great, I guess, but that’s not a point to be celebrated. Quite the contrary, actually.

Four

Way back when in college I read everything I could by Assia Djebar, an Algerian woman who lived through the horrors of the French-Algerian war, and who talked at length in a lecture I got to hear, about the efforts that women undertook in that conflict. At first, they went about dressed in western clothes, having thrown off the veil. But then they realized that if they took back their traditional clothes, they could smuggle weapons unseen by the French. Of course, gradually the French caught on and made brutal examples of some.

Djebar’s lamentation was not that women participated in the fight for independence or suffered along with them, it was that after independence, they were not included. They were not ever able, at least in her lifetime, to put off the veil neither physically nor metaphorically. Goodness, I need to go back and reread her.

Honestly, I wonder what she would have made of a film like this. It lacks, what do you call it? Nuance? The evocative truth that women occupy a stressful place in the tapestry of human relationships?

Five

Rod Dreher tweets someone who says this: “Let’s grant that Cuties is a genuine attempt to grapple with the no-win clash between patriarchal traditionalism and a modern sexualization of girls that is itself a result of patriarchy. This is not—should not be—a forbidden topic. In fact, it’s a fascinating basis for drama,” which I can absolutely agree with…but, obviously they, the makers of this “film,” do not want to make that kind of fascinating drama. If they did, they would not exploit girls why they were doing it. Also, I don’t think we would delude ourselves that anyone at all actually wants to think about this cultural class one because it would be too painful, and two, because the inner and outer logic of the thing would make your head explode.

Six

Why? Because the gospel of the age—the I must find myself and be happy and everyone must affirm me—necessarily prevents the human person from having any “discourse” or “conversation” or anything like that. It necessarily becomes the twerk on the screen, the consumption of the little girl, the falling silent of the voice forever. And that’s because, when each person is god, only a few of the gods will win out before all the other gods, most of the gods will not have a chance to speak. The brutal rendering of the childish-female body on a screen for the grotesquely wicked man and his enabling women is all you’re left with.

Seven

So no, this “film” isn’t stunning or brave. And the people who took advantage of these girls are going to be answerable for eternity to a God who not only speaks himself, but invites lots of other people, women and young girls included, to call out to him, to lift their voices in his praise, to use words to express the depths of their own selves. Go check out more takes while I go shout at the weeds in my garden.