“Why even make something like that?” said a young man who was preaching the dangers of Netflix’s distribution of the French coming of age film Cuties.
“It did win a director award at Sundance,” I defended.
“I don’t care! Think about it! What kind of man is even making a film like this? Holding a camera and capturing these videos of sexualized young girls dancing? It’s just fucked up.”
“The director is a woman,” I said, which was not intended as a gotcha but did seem to absolutely surprise him. I realized in that moment that he had absolutely accepted the idea in full that this film is a piece of Hollywood pornography, a prurient grab for the attention of a culture being rotted out by leftist decadence. I suspect he conceived of such things as being within the purview of gross men—the kinds of men he very much does not want to be mistaken for, by others or by his own self. Frankly, Methinks some folks doth protest too much.
”Well have you looked at this list of the content of the film and why it has its rating?” He then showed me a list, which he had screenshot from IMBD, he said, but, didn’t look like IMBD at all to me (and I’ve been on there a bunch lately as I’ve been studying film), which detailed out of context all of the content in the film that caused it to receive whatever rating it received.
The list was quite gross seeming. Given such a list, it’s really hard to imagine that the film is not the things he says it is: a sexualization of adolescent girls.
But, I have a general rule about censorship: I don’t censor things or people based off checklists. I don’t draw lines around material in this way. If I did, I Believe I could exclude every single piece of art that has ever been created, based on justifiable criteria. I believe every single piece of good art can be split apart into decontextualized component parts and thereby misrepresented.
Did you know your kids are being taught about a teenager calling an adult for sex in catcher in the rye?
Well, maybe that’s an exception. Maybe it’s easy for you to throw that one out. It would be ok if they did burn that particular book you say. Or Lolita, or certainly American Beauty, or Portnoy’s complaint, the Philip Roth novel that made him famous and which, in Wikipedia’s dry language, includes “detailed depictions of masturbation using various props including a piece of liver.” How about Kendrick Lamar’s brilliant “For Free?” From To Pimp a Butterfly (you know: ‘this dick ain’t free, you lookin at it like it ain’t a receipt’)?
My point is not to convince you that any one of these belongs in the canon of great art, but to remind you that your bookshelves, movie collections, and iPods are full of art that can be deconstructed as Cuties has been, and reconstituted inaccurately as something other than what it most likely is: a genuine (And therefore dangerous) attempt at art, warts and all.
It’s always easier and safer not to make art and not risk being accused of being the weird person who held that camera. This reminds me of the time I was accused in court of uploading “naked drawings” of my children “to the internet.” That comic I made about helping my autistic son dry his hands in the bathroom at the dollar theater where there are no paper towels and the fans are so loud he needs me to dry my hands on my shirt, then hold my hands over his ears while he dries his hands under the loud machines, well, frame 1 is just me and him at adjacent urinals peeing, me the way I do and him the way he did at age 5, with his pants around his ankles.
Zoom in on that frame and make your list of reasons to censor, or to give custody to their mother:
Depictions of his children undressed
Depictions of children undressed with adults
Depictions of people urinating
What kind of person draws that? And just for fun? Wut?!
Artless people think it’s kewl to make art as long as it doesn’t ever offend them, and then they let themselves be yanked around by reductive examinations of the components of an art attempt—an attempt that may or may not have succeeded in the end anyway, but quite frankly that is not the point.
Making art is not cool; making art is dangerous. Always will be.
Anyway, if you’re interested in the debate over Netflix’s Cuties, I recommend you watch this trailer so you have some sense of what the film actually attempts. I don’t know if the film is good, I don’t know if it’s garbage, and I don’t know if it’s a worthwhile effort to explore the topics it’s after, but I certainly think it’s a lot more than a checklist of things that might offend you: