Welcome back to the Literary Helpdesk, where we are asking: are there some stories that shouldn’t be told?
The uproar surrounding the Sundance award-winning film Cuties (Mignonnes) was everywhere last month. I find it so unlikely that you have missed all the rhetoric about this movie that I won’t bother recapping the story for you. There are many calling for subscribers to cancel Netflix over its distribution of an arguably pornographic film starring eleven year old girls, and on the other side there is the young filmmaker, Maimouna Decoure, and a large collection of critics and movie-types who insist those shocking scenes are in fact a critique, rather than a token example, of the sexualisation of children. Given that the scenes of sexy dancing in skimpy outfits were performed by real-life eleven-year-old girls, many are asking where the line between critique and exploitation lies.
It’s a question that deserves an answer.
Can one do the evil thing one is critiquing in order to critique it? I’m not using unfairly loaded language here: all sides claim to agree that the sexualisation and exploitation of children is evil. The question is whether there is any justification for the way Cuties critiques the evil.
Decoure has explained that the dance scenes were composite shots, i.e the routines weren’t filmed as such, but in bits and pieces and the footage was stitched together in post production. Furthermore, she says she didn’t give the girls a script of raunchy dialogue to memorise, but told them the story and let them act it more freely. Decoure talks about getting the girls into character by asking them to imagine themselves as animals — an innocent kitten or a fierce panther — making setting the mood for a scene into a child-friendly game. These methods of working don’t undo the fact that the dancing and the dialogue were in fact acted by children, but they do perhaps somewhat undermine the nightmarish images of a group of young girls being cast in a sexy dance troupe for the entertainment of adults. Perhaps.
Many of her comments show how concerned Decoure was about safeguarding the children she directed. The problem is that other things she says, though expressing that same care and concern, make very uncomfortable reading:
I created a climate of trust between the children and myself. I explained to them everything I was doing and the research that I had done before I wrote this story. I was also lucky that these girls’ parents were also activists, so we were all on the same side. At their age, they’ve seen this kind of dance. Any child with a telephone can find these images on social media these days…We also worked with a child psychologist throughout the filming. She’s still working with the children, because I want to make sure that they can navigate this newfound stardom.
This reads like a justification for grooming: ‘They trusted me, I gave them all the information to make an informed choice, and their parents approved of this anyhow: it was done for the right reasons. Besides, they weren’t really that innocent. They’re much more grown up than you think.” The comments about the child psychologist implicitly claim that the fallout from the experience is almost excessively positive — fame, acclaim — rather than the aftermath of exploitation.
There are sophisticated critics doggedly defending Cuties, but I am satisfied with the straightforward argument that one cannot justify sexualising children by claiming to offer a critique of the sexualisation of children, or to reveal the horror of using a child as a sexual image through repeated, drawn-out, hyped-up and sexual meditations on images of children. Because filming Cuties unavoidably sexualised the children who acted in it, both in what it required them to do and how it allows — even requires — us to look at them, I am comfortable concluding that it is a bad film, despite any cinematic merit or the awards it has won.
How we do things matters.
On this point: one of the more interesting suggestions I have seen in all the discussion about Cuties is that it is an appalling film, but would have been a good novel for adults, in which form it could have offered a critique without causing harm to any children. Filmmakers have a duty of care to their actors; authors can be as brutal as they like.
It may well be that there are no topics that are innately off limits for the artist, but there are most definitely examples of art that can make us morally complicit in either perpetrating or ignoring evil, or in more deeply integrating it into our culture.
Is this true, though? Are there no moral standards to which novelists are accountable? Certainly the history of public opinion is full of outrage over novels. DH Lawrence’s bonkfest Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which famously led to Penguin being tried, but acquitted, for obscenity in Britain in 1960 is the most famous modern example. This contretemps isn’t wholly unrelated to that surrounding Cuties, because although the book describes, in extremely moist detail, the conjugations of very consenting, but very adulterous, persons of legal majority, one of the primary sources of public outcry that led to the trial was the publisher’s intention to sell a cheap, unabridged version for the price of a small pack of cigarettes. This was viewed as an attempt to corrupt the youth.
Bring out the hemlock.
The literary example that seems most analogous with the debate over Cuties, however, is the reaction to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. This book was originally banned in Britain and France, though not in the US. The subject matter caused revulsion in a large section of society while amongst the literati the novel was lauded as a satirical masterpiece. Graham Green, for example, hailed it as a distinguished novel.
In the book, the narrator, who styles himself Humbert Humbert, describes his two year affair with his “nymphet” stepdaughter, Lolita, aged 12. After marrying her mother to gain access to his obsession, Humbert plans to drug Lolita before consummating his perverted desires upon the child. It turns out that Lolita has been learning all about sex at summer camp and through the progressive education at her school. Far from innocent, the child becomes the seducer, at least in Humbert’s narration. Like the girls in Cuties, Lolita is not a passive victim. Since the story is told from Humbert’s point of view, there is ambiguity over how much her power over Humbert is wielded defensively, naively, or in desperation. There is, however, agency in her behaviour.
To ask that readers engage only with the art in the telling of a perverted storyline is to ask them to abandon something essential of their moral selves in picking up the book, to read it from the vantage point of someone less than their full selves. There is a danger in this sort of enchantment.
Despite the topic of Lolita most definitely being sexual obsession with a child, even negative reviewers didn’t know what to make of it. Orville Prescott wrote for the New York times in 1958 “Lolita is not crudely crammed with Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs and explicitly described scenes of sexual violence. Its depravity is more refined. Mr. Nabokov…does not write cheap pornography.” Instead, Prescott said, “He writes highbrow pornography,” though he conceded that may not have been not his intention. “Perhaps he thinks of his book as a satirical comedy and as an exploration of abnormal psychology?” Prescott wondered. “Nevertheless, Lolita is disgusting.” Prescott theorises that this is because, “To describe such a perversion with the pervert’s enthusiasm without being disgusting is impossible.”
At around the same time, Donald Malcolm had a different take on Lolita in The New Yorker, seeing a rare form of satire in Nabokov’s work: “A gift for comedy seldom comes to a writer unaccompanied. Usually it attaches to some less endearing quality, such as a tendency to preach and moralize. Sometimes, as in parody, it is coupled with the flinty disposition of the critic. Sometimes, as in satire, it is joined to a spirit of ferocious indignation. But of all such pairings the oddest by far is the conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror. The result of this union is satire of a very special kind, in which vice or folly is regarded not so much with scorn as with profound dismay and a measure of tragic sympathy.”
There is actually nothing to suggest that Prescott and Malcolm read Lolita substantially differently. It is simply that Prescott attends to the story and is disgusted, whereas Malcolm attends to the art that constructs the story and is impressed.
Nabokov would endorse the latter approach. In a passage from his Lectures on Literature, he likens the writer to an enchanter and notes: “In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.”
There are plenty of stories for which we might accept this advice uncritically: to read sublime writing for the thrill of it seems a good way to do justice to the craft of the author. But to read a book like Lolita like that? Well, less a tingle down the spine and more a squirm. And then a feeling of revulsion, to have been enchanted and beguiled by a child pornographer.
To what end?
To ask that readers engage only with the art in the telling of a perverted storyline is to ask them to abandon something essential of their moral selves in picking up the book, to read it from the vantage point of someone less than their full selves. There is a danger in this sort of enchantment.
This is the same sort of engagement, or indeed non-engagement, Maimouna Decoure seems to be recommending for Cuties: admire the art, the way the critique is produced, but ignore the underlying moral structure of the total work of art. This is a dangerous hermeneutic. It reduces art to a conceit of the artist and reduces the reader or viewer to his capacity to appreciate the conceit. It may well be that there are no topics that are innately off limits for the artist, but there are most definitely examples of art that can make us morally complicit in either perpetrating or ignoring evil, or in more deeply integrating it into our culture. There is art with which we cannot engage without morally damaging ourselves. How we do things matters.
Victoria Seed is a writer and editor; she works in publishing.
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