CUTIES (2020) AND THE ALT-RIGHT PROBLEM
Black women do not deserve to be left unprotected by the media or ignored by their peers in times of distress.
Indi Mormont
Content Warning: mentions of paedophilia and racism
There’s an anti-beauty rebellion rising and for good reason. When you enter online spaces, it seems that women and fems have publicly declared their departure from the ‘male gaze’. They’ve redefined film theorist Laura Mulvey’s term from one that explains the sexual politics of the male gaze within the arts to one that means the shunning of anything that feels like performative traditional femininity. This supposed servitude is all a “scam!” Uncut Gems actress Julia Fox exclaims in her now infamous Tik Tok video. “Ageing is fully in,” she begins. “Dirty girl, ugly, not wearing clothes that fit your body type… All those things are in.” And although her point has heart and understandable cynicism of the patriarchal eye, her argument lacks weight. No matter how scruffy her bleached eyebrows are or how wild her hair is, she will never be classified as ugly.
But see, she can say this because—whether we like to admit it or not —we listen to people whom the media regard as beautiful. She’s white, thin, and famous. There’s an unwavering power behind every syllable uttered with her New Yorker twang. This privilege is even more prevalent when deconstructing her message as repackaged black feminist talking points made accessible to her mostly white female audience. Online activists that resemble the direct opposite of the beauty standard—fat, black, disabled, trans folks—are constantly torn apart and silenced on the internet for speaking out against the marginalisation of their identities. Regardless of Fox’s reductionist perspective and her constant association with the fashion industry, her praises are still sung while her intellectual black predecessors must fade into obscurity to avoid another harassment campaign against them.
Let’s consider the film equivalent: Mignonnes/Cuties (2020) by Maimouna Doucoure, a film now made infamous by the barrage of harassment against Doucoure upon its Netflix debut. Prior to its release, Alt-right conspiracy theories were spawned online after the provocative poster for the film was shared despite the fact that the director had no say or knowledge of the imagery, and the blame still fell on her, with social media consecrating her with the libellous claim of paedophilia. Funnily enough, the narrative online hasn’t shifted. Like our activists before her, Doucoure must navigate the online sphere as normal, but with the protective layer of limited comments on Instagram. Journalist Karen Attiah’s argument comes to mind: white women are able to make a film about black womanhood in France (such as Girlhood (2014) by Céline Sciamma) but “[a]s soon as a French-Senegalese woman decided to make a culturally authentic film about a first-generation immigrant girl becoming aware of her own body outside of the male or White gaze, outrage ensued.”
Cuties follows Amy, an 11-year-old girl originally from Senegal, who moves to Paris ahead of her father’s second marriage. New to Paris, her mother finds community in the small Senegalese mosque situated on the bottom floor of their apartment. It is here that the main theme of gender becomes apparent: the lead preacher teaches that the women ought to obey their husbands. At the end of service, Amy is distracted by upbeat Latino music coming from the laundry room. It is here she is introduced to Angelica, a girl her age who is wearing a tight crop top, dancing and attempting to straighten her hair with an actual iron. With this image imprinted in Amy’s mind, the next morning, she tries to iron her own curly hair, but it fails in a scrunch of her burnt hair hanging at the end of it. The difference between the girls’ hair stands as a metaphor for Amy’s failure at assimilation, thus foreshadowing that her escape to Europeanness will only end in catastrophe. However, Amy becomes enamoured with Angelica, and soon, Angelica’s dance group, Les Mignonnes. In voyeuristic fashion, Amy watches them during dance practice, and when the group warm up to her, they allow her to video them. She then goes home and copies these dance moves in her dimly lit bathroom. Her newfound hobby continuously becomes a point of contention with her duties at home, leaving Amy to make a choice between the two: French culture’s perceived freedom or Senegalese culture’s dutiful acquiescence.
In recent years, a trend has emerged in contemporary French cinema with a pointed engagement with heritage and history. It has become a place where filmmakers can propel a fierce attack against France’s colonial history and engage more thoroughly with the idea of ‘Frenchness’. Cuties goes from Wolof to French, from the mosque to wider French society, in a way that university lecturer Mari Maasilta characterises as “travel[ling] between and beyond geographic, national and cultural borders.” Doucoure has first-hand experience in harbouring a hybrid identity as her life mirrors Amy’s as a French-Senegalese woman with a polygamous father. With this personal anecdote, the scene of Amy’s mother crying at the fact her husband is taking another wife is heart-wrenching and provides a justification for Amy’s rejection of Senegalese culture and, later, the adoption of French culture instead. Doucoure powerfully shows Amy’s assimilation—albeit her escape from her mother’s fate—through her ‘makeover’: she prefers crop tops, skinny jeans and shorts as opposed to her baggy shirts and zip-up jackets.
Touki Bouki (1973)
However, Cuties isn’t a binary testament of Senegal = bad, Europe = good. Rather, like her predecessors, Ousmane Sembene and Diop-Mambety before her, Doucoure critiques European culture as a corrupted series of conventions that, on the contrary, groom young girls to be sexually desirable for men. In order to assimilate successfully, Amy ought to compromise her morals. She first steals her brother’s shirt and adopts it as a crop top, then goes on to bigger thefts of her cousin’s phone and her mother’s money. This is akin to Diop-Mambety’s protagonist, Mory, in Touki Bouki (1973), who steals from his community to raise enough money to travel to France. It is after this moral corruption that Amy finds herself a member of Les Mignonnes. The girls have an artificial sense of freedom to do what they please, which to Amy, is the kind of liberation she craves. As part of the group, she is privy to their desire to be viewed as older to attract boys. However, just like Julia Fox proclaims, desirability is a trap. After an altercation with the rival dance group, Les Sweety Swagg, Amy has her claim to womanhood ridiculed when she is ‘pantsed’ by one of the members, revealing her ‘little girl’ underwear. Angelica remarks that everyone is making fun of them and thinks they are little girls. To prove her womanhood, Amy posts a nude of herself which only gets her slutshamed by her peers and her mother, then subsequently ostracised by Les Mignonnes.
In her Washington Post op-ed since the controversy, Doucoure revealed that she made the film in hopes of generating a conversation about the sexualisation of children after spectating a risqué dance routine from young girls at a community event in Paris. In her research, she interviewed young girls who “saw that the sexier a woman is on Instagram or Tik Tok, the more likes she gets.” With these themes so obviously and eloquently explained, I am still haunted by the backlash and the harassment campaign launched against Doucoure. I was baffled by the sheer bastardisation of the film as ‘paedo-bait’. One may find plausible closure to render these detractors too uneducated to understand the themes presented, but it appears to be more insidious than that. This was a targeted attack against Doucoure launched by the Alt-Right and legitimised by ordinary people who perhaps were genuine in their attempts to protect children but found themselves playing into a conspiracy theory. If you have the pleasure of not being aware of what the Alt-Right is, let me update you on our current political landscape. The Alt-Right is a far-right, white nationalist movement that became widely known during Trump’s presidential run in 2015-2016. They’re often chronically online and dwell on racist, anti-semitic and harmful conspiracy theories that operate on the illogical assumption that the mainstream media is propaganda out to get them. For example, we have Pizzagate, a 2016 Alt-Right conspiracy theory that strongly believes that Democrats, like Hilary Clinton and John Podesta, are behind an international child trafficking ring and communicate their desire for children with pizza toppings. This was all generated from an utterly distorted reading of Podesta’s leaked emails hacked from the DNC servers where he looks to be ordering pizza.
Cuties arrived shortly after the WAP controversy, an overreaction from right-wing media with a slew of conservative pundits and grifters grappling at strings to characterise the song as part of a feminist manifesto to lure young girls into promiscuity. In a series of tweets, Republicans like DeAnna Lorraine quickly linked Cardi B’s meeting with Senator Bernie Sanders as a testament to her association with the Democrats. The reaction from Republicans implies a preoccupation with little girls’ sexuality and that they’ll defeat the Democrats’ devilish scheme to compromise it. With the firm belief that the Democrats are running Hollywood, Netflix’s release of Cuties featuring Les Mignonnes wearing their ‘skimpy’ dance outfits was the perfect fuel for the Alt-Right to provide legitimacy for Pizzagate; despite these outfits being the norm in dancing competitions if they would’ve watched a couple of Dance Moms episodes. It is easy to accuse a black woman’s character because, unfortunately, people will believe it without a second thought.
So, how did Cuties, an independent film from France with an unknown director, become the target of a hate mob?
One word: YouTube.
When asked, many ex-Alt-Righters—typically straight white men in their mid-to late-20s—single out YouTube and its algorithm as their entrance into extremist content. In a New York Times article, YouTuber FaradaySpeaks (Caleb Cain) describes his journey of radicalisation from watching self-help videos to aid his depression, to which the YouTube algorithm started recommending anti-SJW content. What makes things even more complicated is that these apolitical YouTubers hold a lot of power. From the offset, they pretend they don’t have a political affiliation and are just here for the truth no matter the cost. One of these YouTubers is Ready To Glare (Giulia-Christina Philipp), a California-based commentary YouTuber with almost 700,000 subscribers. Her videos cover various topics, such as YouTube drama and topical issues on social media. Philipp doesn’t label her videos as political, leaving an impression of her engaging with ‘unbiased commentary’ without an agenda. But the truth is that everything is political, and whichever ‘side’ Philipp decides to take poses an entrance to the political spectrum.
Phillipp’s two (yes, two) reviews of Cuties have amassed over 1 million views. I’ll cover the sequel to her original study with the thumbnail reading: “Twitter was right.” From the thumbnail alone, Philipp’s point of view is clear; however, what is worrisome is the language used within the video. Instead of attempting to grapple with the themes presented, she starts spouting the same Alt-Right nonsense you would see in a Breitbart article. She insults the film as a “coming of age story to paedo-bait”, arguing that the last dance scene in the film insinuates paedophilia. Constantly in the video, she ponders, “who is this film for?” and then accuses those who left positive reviews of the film of “saying weird things about the girls” yet, doesn’t show evidence of these reviews at all. What makes her video even more damning is her almost willful misrepresentation of the camera work. During the final dance scene, Philipp misidentifies Doucoure’s cinematography as ‘voyeuristic’, illogically pointing out that there are “slow-mo zoom-ins of young girls twerking.” This is not true; the final dance scene is filmed in fast cuts of medium shots of the girls dancing. What makes the scene compelling, and what Philipp grossly ‘forgets’ to tell her audience, is that Doucoure flashes to cuts of the audience’s shocked expressions—the shock is the point. The latter makes Amy reconsider her assimilation into French society; thus, she runs off stage as a visual cue that she no longer agrees with her previous decisions.
Nonetheless, Philipp even goes as far as to dismiss Doucoure’s efforts in critiquing sexualisation as ‘gratuitous’ despite not giving any reason why. Cuties was released four days before Philipp’s review, with Doucoure’s op-ed coming out two days after. Thus, Philipp didn’t give herself the time to research the film thoroughly. It seems that being the ‘first’ commentator was what was more important to her. Her video is still up and garnering views, with no apology sent to Doucoure for her role in the harassment. Whether you agree with Doucoure’s cinematography, we can all attest that being on the receiving end of a harassment campaign was unnecessary and cruel. The vile hate she received was one of the worst cases of misogynoir we have witnessed in recent years. Black women do not deserve to be left unprotected by the media or ignored by their peers in times of distress. It is often that they are discarded once they are no longer topical, their work tossed aside whilst their white counterparts are uplifted.
For once, maybe, listen to her words instead of running to pretend the issues presented in the film do not exist.
We, as adults, have not given children the tools to grow up healthy in our society. I wanted to open people's eyes to what's truly happening in schools and on social media, forcing them to confront images of young girls made up, dressed up and dancing suggestively to imitate their favorite pop icon.
And that's why I made "Cuties": to start a debate about the sexualization of children in society today so that maybe — just maybe — politicians, artists, parents and educators could work together to make a change that will benefit children for generations to come. It's my sincerest hope that this conversation doesn't become so difficult that it too gets caught up in today's "cancel culture."
One thing is for certain: You all owe Maimouna Doucoure a HUGE apology.
