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The freakout about #Cuties bothers me more than almost anything I've seen in a decade as a critic: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/
Two things are simultaneously true: #Cuties depicts disturbing, age-inappropriate behavior by young girls, AND it unequivocally views that behavior as sad and harmful to the girls involved. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/
#Cuties *also* directly traces that behavior to the influence of social media and the way content algorithms drive consumers to more extreme content, as well as to the absence of strong parental influence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/
I am so deeply disturbed by the charges that this movie is child pornography, when it is, among other things, an argument about the effect of near-pornography on young girls. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/
Saying otherwise isn't just a gross mischaracterization of the actual film itself, it's a really horrible thing to do to the director and to the excellent young actresses in it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/
You can definitely have an argument about whether some of the scenes that show child characters behaving in inappropriate ways are shot in ways that undermine the point. But the most notable one is also constantly intercut with expressions of concern, sadness and even disgust.
If conservatives, who have jumped on the debate over #Cuties, want to be taken seriously as cultural arbiters, they have to be able to talk about the *text* of a movie like this in an honest, responsible way. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/
I'm just disgusted and sad.
I do want to highlight this @roddreher review, which I think grapples fairly with the issues I highlighted about how some of the dance scenes are shot, and comes down in a different place than I did, which I can understand. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cuties-netflix-pretty-babies/
I think @roddreher's sadness for the young female characters in #Cuties gets mixed up with a harshness towards them, but I'm sympathetic to this more frustrated reading of the film even as I disagree with it. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cuties-netflix-pretty-babies/
