TOXIC CUTENESS

I don’t know about you, but when I think of Bambi I immediately picture his clumsy first attempts at walking. The way he first stands up full of confidence and curiosity, boldly stretching his thin little legs, and then collapses again with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. His uncertainty grows, his ears go back, and he looks at us spectators with his big doe eyes, as if asking for leniency.

To make sure I didn’t get anything wrong here, I watched the scene again – and what can I say? Cuteness overload! “Oh my! Well look! Well isn’t he cute?” say the animals when they see the newborn fawn, vocalizing exactly what you yourself are thinking – or rather feeling – when you’re watching it. The other animals in the forest call him “little prince”, “young prince”, or simply “little one”. Awwww! The scene is almost a lesson in cuteness: Bambi is needy and vulnerable and thus inevitably prompts instincts of care and protection, while likewise promising innocence and guilelessness. He is free of greed, cynicism, anger, hatred, or violence – all in all, a rather idealized depiction of cuteness.

That said, the power dynamics of cuteness are even more complex. The image could also be read as an allusion to the most famous scene in the movie, namely the death of Bambi’s mother. Is Bambi standing here, startled by the hunters’ first shot, at the winter feeding ground? Either way, it is the key moment in the film, which also signals the end of Bambi’s cuteness. When it becomes clear that his mother has died, the fear arises that Bambi’s vulnerability, his neediness, could have been responsible. And suddenly the question is turned on its head: How much cuteness and thus vulnerability can I actually expect others to accept? How dangerous can cuteness – in the sense of self-infantilization – be even if it is unintentional?

Meanwhile, a supposedly understanding conversation between close partners may also conceal “gaslighting”, a form of psychological abuse when information is systematically distorted in order to challenge the other person’s ability to perceive things.

Cosima von Bonin’s protagonists have forfeited their cuteness not only aesthetically but also emotionally – and that goes even for the cutest of them all, Bambi. On the one hand, it’s a little sad, because these are characters that shaped many a childhood, because the characters embodied qualities that we once emulated, which we found to be cool or (in their weaknesses) cute and lovable. When Cosima von Bonin confines the Bugs Bunny character to the trashcan, with him goes the cunning behavior of which he was also capable. If you watch the Looney Tunes episodes more closely, then you might well be inclined to accuse the cute bunny of “blame shifting” here and there, as the title suggests.