On Cuties — A Professional Child Actor’s Opinion on Child Exploitation
I joined the Screen Actors Guild at 11-years-old, on priority, so I could sell the world’s most popular carbonated sugar-water product.
Yes, it was Coca-Cola.
There were rules and guidelines which prevented Coke from using any kid off the street to sell such a product as theirs, and so I became a Must-Join for SAG (now SAG-AFTRA), in order to be represented by a union, which advocates for actors of all ages. For example, you can’t ask kids to work overtime. Your project deadlines are your problem, pal.
Christmastime commercials, in particular, are a big deal for Coke. So, they’d been open casting for three months, holding what we in the biz refer to as a cattle calls in LA, NYC, and Chicago. These are auditions where invitations are not limited, so hundreds of actors from every demographic try their hand at winning the role. These are mostly a waste of time for those auditioning, simply on the math, but I strolled in on my very first audition and got called back.
With Coke, I was personally cast and directed by Academy Award-winner Alfonso Cuarón, who had to sift through thousands of young schmucks before he and the marketing experts could agree that I was the face for selling millions of Coca-Colas. You’re welcome, Warren Buffett & co.
At the time, Cuarón was still working his way up the food chain. His biggest hit was A Little Princess.
Cuarón was a good guy. I liked him. He understood my personality well. We worked well together. He did not exploit me any more than what level is implicit in asking children to sell soda.
Although, come to think of it… he did ask me to work overtime so he could meet his deadline. Sharing that truth will serve as his small punishment for never inviting me to work with him again across his long, illustrious career. I mean dude, you made Harry Potter movies. I saved your project for you at age eleven. Thanks for nothing.
Seeing as I nailed my very first audition for a high paying gig, my manager pushed my mother to enroll me in real deal acting classes with a reputable teacher, Ann Ratray. With Ann, I learned all the really hard stuff. And it was really hard stuff: crying on command isn’t some trick of the tear ducts. “Real acting isn’t acting,” she said.
Author’s Note: I love my mother, and have fond memories of my acting teacher and manager. This article is NOT about them.
My auditions for independent projects, akin to Cuties, were nothing like my audition for Coke. Managers send only the qualified talent there, and instead of waiting in Disneyworld-length lines, you enter by appointment.
My new and improved dramatic acting skills saw me become a valuable addition to any serious filmmaker’s ensemble. So better auditioning opportunities followed.
I earned a small role on The Sopranos, and one of the short films I starred in, Jared (2002), about a young boy who develops a crush on his mother’s boyfriend, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Madrid Film Festival, and featured at the New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, among several others. Let’s end the autobiography here.
Recently, on the unholy day of 9/11/2020, Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg wrote,
“If I had the power to issue a single dictatorial edict, it would be this: If you want to talk nonsense about a movie on the Internet, you have to prove that you’ve actually seen it.”
It is perhaps not especially ironic that she did not consider using her fantasy dictator powers to issue the edict “Do Not Exploit Children.” Instead, she is protecting that infinitely more vulnerable, oft-victimized group: movies. Additionally, she’s using a logical fallacy in her defense.
What Rosenberg and so many other defenders of Cuties get wrong, is that the intellectual and emotional merits of the film are irrelevant in the challenges of child exploitation (or child sexual exploitation) made against it.
For whatever the merits of the film, its director Maïmouna Doucouré nevertheless required her actors to don those skimpy outfits (seen in the infamous Netflix theatrical poster) and dance in them on camera, in front of cast and crew and guardians, and to be recorded doing so for posterity.
By the way, I’m sure it took many takes and rehearsals to get those scenes right.
When I was filming Jared, directed by Joyce Draganosky, I didn’t have a lick of an understanding about the actual mind-state of a boy who wanted to cross-dress, put on make up, and date his mother’s boyfriend. Not a clue what that must feel like for a person, and not quite sure what the experience of the audience would have been watching it. The merits of the film did not cross my mind. I just wanted to get the acting job done, so I could return to not acting. You know, I felt how most of us feel about our jobs as adults!
Maybe these young actresses are empath-prodigies who truly understand the emotional stresses of the characters they portray. Maybe they analyze all angles of the story they are being asked to tell, in such a way that requires them to embody the spirit of the characters of that story. Yet, even if they do, they only understand because they have been forced to consider it carefully as part of their job, rather than be allowed to not work, and enjoy things children prefer to experience.
I want to make it abundantly clear that I am not a victim. I may not have liked the open rehearsal for Jared, which was performed for a packed theatre-like classroom at Columbia University, but I did enjoy screen acting. I was comfortable in front of the industrial-like filming environment of cameramen, boom operators, and grips. I was not comfortable stage acting, however, as it felt more personally invasive.
So, changing into women’s clothing in front of an albeit highly mature crowd of collegiate filmmakers, was not fun for 12-year-old Dane.
But it was no big deal. Performing the role didn’t change how I thought of myself, or cause any confusion about my own sexuality. Other than a glimmer in the eye of a very androgynous male, I have always been heterosexual, and no amount of acting could change that.
And yet, what other things might I have been asked to do, had the director been so inclined to ask? The veil of “employment” makes any request seem like part of the job.
Do I need to do more of those painfully vulnerable open rehearsals that I disliked? Does Alfonso Cuarón need more overtime? How far into discomfort did those Cuties stars have to go?
More importantly, who is able to defend them when it happens? Surely not some distant guild of actors and broadcasters far more concerned with securing bottom lines on royalty checks!
Yes, telling a story that explores the extremes of women who are forced to be covered (by religious dogma) versus those who are only-perhaps-not-forced, but-perhaps-forced to be uncovered (by societal pressures), is probably a good idea. We should tell that story.
Nevertheless, telling that story in a visual medium that requires young children to demonstrate it physically, was a bad idea.
There are, after all, forms of art, that would not demand such a trade: novels, animated films, podcasts, etc.
I am sure Maïmouna Doucouré’s heart was in the right place when making this film, but I am also sure that she, like Alyssa Rosenberg, must have disowned a bit of responsibility in the name of some higher good: that the film might stop parents from enabling those dastardly extremes.
Alyssa Rosenberg writes,
“Though its characters post provocative dance videos and wear revealing costumes, “Cuties” doesn’t present their actions as liberated or admirable”
This of course, is but another defense of the movie, and it does not consider the young actresses who must act out those provocative dances and actually wear those revealing costumes. Rosenberg’s defense, yet again, trades the exploitation of the actress as a necessary device for creating the film’s anti-exploitation message.
Cuties is exploitation to stop exploitation.
One more to wrap, from Rosenberg:
“I can see how viewers might be turned off by the way Doucouré shoots the dance routines, using close-ups of her young actors’ bodies both to show us their abilities as dancers and to make us deliberately queasy. But not liking that choice or not thinking it works in the way she intended does not make Doucouré an evil pornographer, just an ambitious director.”
I agree. However, please remember that the Nazis were not found to be the incarnation of evil, but in fact were found to have the same kinds of brains and psychologies as regular Germans of the period, thus enabling the democratic election of Adolf Hitler. It is not merely evil people whom we must urge to make better moral choices, but all people. Especially ambitious directors, am I right?
To be sure, voting for Hitler and creating Cuties are not equidistant from the most extreme point on the horribly bad choices spectrum. Still, it troubles me that it is only from the good Germans that we have heard emphatic regret.
