‘Cuties’, Netflix, and Computation

Nina Lutz
17 min readOct 20, 2020
Disclaimer:
The following is not a peer reviewed academic publication.
I’m not a parent or child advocate or film critic.
The purpose of this article is to make the reader consider why the visual treatment of these materials came to be, not to provide a concrete answer or suggestion.

In September, Netflix added the film ‘Cuties’ and well…there was a scandal. Soon #CancelNetflix was trending on Twitter.

Amongst all this lots of folks were asking my opinion about the Cuties poster. I actually have never had so many people ask me to write an essay before.

A lot of this was spun out from some of my previous work and from me telling some folks that I would love to work at Netflix after I graduate in June (if anyone from Netflix is reading this please please hire me when I graduate).

The spark of this fire was this poster, very different than the French poster (the movie is a French film) on the left.

Left: the original French poster, Right: The Netflix promotional image. Source: Deadline.com

When I was being asked about this it came down to these 5 questions:

1. “Nina…Nina…Nina have you seen this?!”

2. “Nina, is this scene from the poster actually in the movie?”

3. “Nina did they photoshop the actors or edit their bodies?”

4. “Nina…Nina…WHY IS THIS?!”

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Nina Lutz

Instead of making computers think like people, I want to use them to make us think about other people.