'Cuties' was CHAOTIC...and Complex.

hi everyone welcome to this video my name is t if you're new here i really do hope everyone's day is going well today i'm here to talk about the movie cuties it's the way i had plans to avoid this movie at all costs because i was getting requests left right front and center to review this movie even before it came out this movie was obscene and i totally get why some people are outraged at the execution of this movie totally get why they're outraged totally get why they're upset why they're uncomfortable and i even kind of understand the people who are petitioning to have it removed from netflix so let me be clear i am not defending this movie i am not denying or dismissing its exploitative nature at all some things just don't need to be shown in order for us to understand what's going on just like d'angelo wallace said there are many emotionally charged groundbreaking films such as precious that tell horrendous stories without showing us those horrendous actions i can agree with that completely and still say the message that was delivered in this movie absolutely needs to be talked about children feeling the need to choose an exploitative path in order to escape their constrictive reality is absolutely a problem that absolutely needs to be addressed whether you're uncomfortable or not so that's what i'm doing today oh we gonna talk we believe that we go and talk about the shock of it all but ultimately we need to have a grown-up conversation beyond that not omitting that definitely not encouraging it either simply going beyond it and look i totally understand if you're not ready to do that if you don't want to do that that's perfectly fine i swear you're not hurting my feelings but you best to get the [ __ ] up out of here quickly cuties is a french film by writer and director maimuna du clay i tried according to the official netflix description for the movie 11 year old ami starts to rebel against her conservative family's traditions when she becomes fascinated with a free spirited dance crew and here were some of the pictures used to promote the film i'ma stop you right there any non-creepy sane adult would see these pictures and immediately be uninterested if not in the very least disturbed because these pictures coupled with the description promote so many problematic themes let's start with the first one adultification adultification in most contexts is all right no scratch that adultification by t's colloquial definition like i'm not reading this off of anywhere this is just based on my understanding adultification is inappropriately viewing and treating young black girls as adults in both public and domestic environments in more extreme cases edulsification also promotes viewing young black girls bodies as more mature than they are and expecting and even encouraging the exploitation of their bodies because of this now although the bias of adultification can be placed on girls of any race it's mainly used in the context of black girls because studies have shown that people truly believe that black girls need less nurturing less comforting and less overall support than any other race of child the bias of adultification holds black girls to the behavioral standard of grown women so this leads to things like black girls being met with a harsher level of punishment in instances where non-black girls would be met with compassion and sympathy it also leads to things like their hairstyles their clothing their dances being sexualized in instances where other races of girls could do the exact same thing and still maintain their rightful innocence there's a great video by georgetown law that explains this quickly and in much greater detail and i would suggest everyone go give it a watch now just a side thought though objectification in the anatomical sense is obviously very predatory and creepy as hell and it thrives in such a weird paradox because on one end you have these people who encourage young girls to dress like adults and they get a thrill out of it and those same people also encourage the infantilization of grown women to dress like children take for example the schoolgirl fetish that we even saw britney spears use as a major marketing tool in the early stages of her career what the [ __ ] was up with that there is absolutely no reason why a grown woman should be able to sport children's clothing that was made for children and it'd be considered erotic like no reason at all but i'm getting off track back to the movie cuties to me is the story of a young girl who is begging to be a young girl follow me she's trying to escape adultification she's trying to escape objectification but the only two options she's exposed to both exploit her just using different methods aside from the strict rules of modesty that are sternly enforced by her family we see ami serve as a second mother to her two younger brothers we saw her feeding them shopping for groceries with them and remember she's only 11. and that is so common i'm sure we have all seen maturity demanded of young girls way sooner than they're demanded of young boys if ever this expectation of girls to serve as interim mothers to small children and their families while they're still children themselves that is also a form of adultification and i mean that could cause anyone to feel resentful to intensify these feelings in ami's family a woman's obedience to her husband is considered obligatory to be respected and to make it into heaven we hear those actual words while ami is at a religious gathering but we see it personified a couple scenes later when ami is dancing in a room by herself with her shirt tied obviously trying to embody the cuties but she hears her mother coming so she hides under the bed her mother is being instructed by her aunt to call up all of her family and friends to inform them that her husband ami's father has taken a second wife now she's being instructed to do so because the streets was already talking rumors were already starting to swirl so that was kind of her way of getting ahead of the story and saying no no i'm not being taken for a full i knew about this the whole time in fact i'm happy for them even though that was a complete bold face lie her mother was literally weeping beating herself up like physically hitting herself between these phone calls as ami hears this she starts to sob as well i mean who don't cry when they mama cry right so she pitied her mother but she also took note that all her mother did in response to this was be docile and fake happy for them because of this ami started to view her mother as weak and that i believe that is what sparked that spirit of rebellion within ami at that moment she said enough is enough because i mean try to look at it from ami's point of view her mother has been modest she's been respectful she cooked she cleaned she got married she bared the children she did every single thing that was expected of her and what did she get in return the responsibility of having to plan and cater her own husband's marriage to another woman the responsibility of having to prepare a room for her husband to sleep with another woman in under her roof ami said not that which is why when she saw angelica she was pretty much hypnotized ami could not even divert her eyes because what she saw was a whole new world a whole new option when angelica was first introduced she was wearing a crop top and dancing very expressively not explicitly yet i want to emphasize that because i know everyone was watching on their toes waiting for it to happen waiting to see all this exploitative dancing that everyone was talking about but it didn't happen all at once it happened gradually over time and that was intentional after omni sees the cuties dancing a few times she becomes more and more desperate to be one of them even though they bullied her at school and even nicknamed her homeless but them throwing rocks at her and calling her names wasn't enough to scare her away because remember to ami her being accepted by the cuties was her only plan of escape and i know what you're probably thinking like plan of escape she's not in prison and i get that but look she's 11. you have to remember at that age everything is amplified everything is hyperbolic any minor inconvenience is the worst thing in the world so even though we as adult viewers recognize that the path that she's trying to head down with the cuties will not gratify her any more than the past she's currently on in her head anything is better than the past she's currently on that's why she ends up stealing her cousin's phone and she started to become familiar with the world of social media she started watching explicit music videos and studying them in some scenes we also saw her bonding with angelica and in her down time omni practiced the cuties dance moves tirelessly just waiting for the opportunity to become one of them and she finally got that opportunity because angelica ended up getting in a fight with one of the members yasmin and they needed a replacement now aside from them meeting a new member what really pushed angelica to induct ami into the cuties was ami showcasing all of those explicit dance moves that she learned from watching those music videos you see that scene that scene is where i noticed a distinct shift from expressive dancing to explicit dancing and i say that because i mean we watched the same movie you you know what i'm talking about but another thing i noticed the dance moves that ami was doing are the exact same moves that are in the wob dance that's viral on tick tock right now and while that dance is really fun and it's really popular it is by no means appropriate for children by no means at all and that's exactly why angelica inducted her into the cuties that's how she got on the dance team after that there's a whole scene of ami teaching the rest of the cuties these dance moves easily easily one of the cringiest and most disturbing scenes of the entire movie and at this point in the movie we see things getting more and more intense for both ami's social life and her home life everything starts to take a drastic turn take for example a few scenes after that ami gets woken up by her mother at like five o'clock in the morning to help prepare food for her father's wedding and her aunt even says to ami today i will teach you how to become a woman it just serves as a reminder that while omni doesn't quite understand the concept of womanhood one thing she knows for sure any kind of woman that they're grooming her to be she don't want it she she wants no parts anything but that remember that video i did on sex neutrality i believe that's exactly what the director was trying to showcase in this movie she was trying to convey that polarization if you watched that video you would have seen me explain that society views female sexuality as a binary system so on one end we see extremes such as purity culture which riddles women and girls with shame and fear from a young age and on the other end we see the extremes of objectification culture which encourages the female body to be shown but only for the purpose of male consumption but what is also true about both of these extremes that ami doesn't realize yet because she is a child both purity culture and objectification culture tether a woman or a girl's worth to her physical body and it invites outsiders to have authority over that ami is clearly trying to fight against purity culture but she just like many other women and girls doesn't know that other options exist aside from objectification so it's not that she really really wants to be on stage dancing in the little last clothes gyrating everywhere it's not that she found that as her calling it's that she doesn't want to be waking up at five o'clock in the morning chopping up onions so she's sweating on the face and crying from her eyes it's that she doesn't want to be calling up her cousins in 15 years pretending to be happy that her husband is marrying another woman remember she's 11. i have to keep saying that so she doesn't fully comprehend why dancing like that is so inappropriate for her age she doesn't fully comprehend the potential psychological trauma that she could be left with for objectifying herself this way all she knows is at least i won't end up like my mama that is why ami took it so far because she felt like she was fighting against a loss of freedom look at all this stuff that little girl did aside from the dancing look at all the stuff she did that was completely unlike her she started a fist fight she stole her cousin's phone then oh my gosh she tried to undress herself when her cousin tried to take his phone back and she pushed jasmine in the river and watched as she nearly drowned chaos i'm pointing all this out to say the explicit dancing while it is obscene and it's disturbing while it's the thing that made us the most upset about this movie and rightfully so it is just one thing amongst dozens of others that ami did in rebellion of in rejection of this model of a well-kept woman that she was predisposed to and it seemed like the only person in the movie who caught on to that was the imam that they invited over to analyze ami he said himself that there was no devil within ami and even mentioned to her mother that it was okay to leave her marriage proving that ami's behavior was really just a cry for help and the scene before that when she froze on the stage while dancing that's when she realized that even though she seemingly escaped the shackles of purity culture she didn't advance to freedom she just found herself in a different suffering same devil different face it was just the remix and you see that closing scene where she skips her dad's wedding she puts on regular normal clothes and she goes downstairs to jump rope with kids her age that was when she reclaimed her childhood and like oppa and preach said she accepted a sense of modesty as well and she found her middle ground that made her comfortable without feeling the need to perform for either her family or her friends listen it was absolutely a chaotic movie absolutely an uncomfortable movie and i would not watch it again let me put it that way i would not watch that movie again i think i would have preferred to read it yeah it would have been better for me if i could read it in a book than watch it on screen but the message it promotes still has value it does and i was thinking you know would this movie have been better received if the girls the main cast was like 16 17 you know closer to adulthood would people have been more receptive of that and i mean like yeah probably more than likely but it would have diluted the message because i mean yeah 17 year old girls go through this as well but so do preteens and going back to that theme of adultification while the bias of that can still be placed on 17 year old girls and it's wrong if we only start talking about it months before they are legally considered adults all of that trauma gets washed under the rug but if we want to use this as a cautionary tale we need to start talking about this long before girls turn 17. families need to remedy the examples they're setting for their girls long before they turn 17. so it was a risky move to make these girls 11 but the harsh reality is that's when the madness starts stop denying young girls their childhood at home in public on the internet stop denying young girls their childhood thank you all so much for watching especially if you made it to the end of the video be sure to leave your thoughts and your comments down below give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down however you're feeling today and subscribe for more content i'll catch you in the next video bye [Music] you

Channel: undefined

Views: 163,362

Rating: 4.9477153 out of 5

Keywords: cuties on netflix, cuties netflix, cuties movie, d'angelo wallace cuties, aba & preach cuties, adultification, adultification bias, georgetown law adultification, cuties adultification, cuties exploitation, cuties outrage

Id: dpuvcDtRoSM

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheUltimateSalesman]

How much does Netflix pay for a promo video like this?

[u/FabulousFabes]

Awesome —insightful. Thanks

[u/The_God_of_Abraham]

I didn't realize the director was a Senegalese woman. That certainly complicates the narrative.

This Youtuber seems like she'd offer better dinner conversation than 90% of Reddit. Sharp and critical, but open-minded. Assertive, but acknowledging that her perspective isn't the universally correct one.

Dang. Actually, is she single?