The more I think about it, the more I think the problem with Cuties is even though it's supposed to be about being "caught between two cultures", it's really much *more* about culture #1 (conservative Muslim immigrant culture) than culture #2 (hypersexualized Internet culture)
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And yet I remain very sympathetic to that point just from my own upbringing There are all kinds of reasons it's a fucked up message -- "These kids grew up like this BECAUSE OF THEIR REPRESSIVE PARENTS, I BLAME YOU MOM" But it's such a viscerally satisfying one
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I don't actually think all the things that went wrong in my life were because of my parents, and honestly when other people try to instrumentalize that I get really mad ("I'm just trying to save Asian women from their repressive home life", says the creepy white dude in college)
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And yet how can you not still be MAD about this shit ESPECIALLY mad because they insisted, and still insist, that all the stupidest, most destructive things they did was them trying to help and protect you
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I guess this is the strongest argument you can make for Doucouré's motives being impure as a filmmaker Like I don't think she's a predator or that she herself has sexual interest in children But I do sense a tinge of envy when filming the Cuties scenes, of that mixed reaction
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Like she knows it's fucked up, and she wants you to agree it's fucked up, and yet a small part of her actually wishes she'd had the guts to do this when she was a kid "My mom would've fucking DIED and you know what it would've SERVED HER RIGHT"
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(I'm saying this is a bad thing, for the record, that it's a bad reason to make this movie and a possible reason the movie is "worse" than it could be, that it's slippage between her POV on this topic as an adult and her attempt to be sensitive to an actual kid in the 2010s)
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But I mean people who say Doucouré got into filmmaking for the sake of softcore porn with preteens are obviously wrong, like 180 degrees wrong Her obsession as a filmmaker is with the love/hate relationship with Islam
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Cuties is an expansion of her short film, Maman(s), which is just a movie about the plot about a daughter watching her dad take on a second, younger wife and her mom pretending to be okay with this This endless silent scream as everyone around her treats this like it's okay
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That's the story she keeps wanting to tell, that's the story she came back to here, and the actual stuff about the Cuties in Cuties is the "expansion" of the story Maman(s) was the silent scream and Cuties is "What would that scream sound like if she could give it voice"
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"If Islam is constantly telling me that this is okay, that this isn't fucked, that this is what being a woman is like and I have to just accept it, what is the loudest, nastiest, harshest, most final way I can spit in the face of Islam and of Allah"
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"Oh, dressing up like a whore and selling my body on the Internet and shaming all my ancestors? Then I guess that's what it's gonna be" (This isn't literally how it happens in Cuties but it's really obvious this is the meta-narrative behind Doucouré making it play out this way)
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And, I mean, shit, I get it I literally wanted to become a Satanist for a brief period in my life because I was just so angry about what church had done to me, what it had stolen from me -- and that's as a boy, as a relative beneficiary of their sick system
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I don't think that's actually a universal narrative -- most of the other Cuties don't have Amy's backstory at all -- and I think the laser focus on it is potentially damaging, like it's true, the movie doesn't have nearly as much to say about sexualization as a general problem
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But what's there is very raw and real, even if you think the execution of the dance crew part of the movie is bad enough the movie as a whole shouldn't have been made
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(The one thing about Cuties that was most hashtag-relatable to my childhood wasn't any of the stuff about twerking, obviously, but the whole thing with Amy having to attend her father's second wedding, the dress just sitting there the whole time as this looming harbinger)
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(And the sense of liberation she feels when her mom tells her she can skip it, how all of a sudden the weight lifts and she realizes she doesn't want to be part of Cuties anymore either I should talk about my story with baptism sometime)
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End of conversation
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