Movie Review: "Precious"
Many viewers have hailed the recent release as Oscar-worthy because it's "raw" and "powerful." As Peter Travers of Rolling Stone writes, "Once Precious gets its hooks into you, no way is it letting go." Whether the Hollywood elite reacting to exclusive private screenings or Facebook users turning their status updates into a populist endorsement of the acclaimed but controversial Lee Daniels film, they have praised its courage to delve deeply into the problems of sexual and physical abuse and poverty, while shattering the silences surrounding HIV, offering an "authentic" coming-of-age story of a young black woman who will, in Maya Angelou's vernacular, "rise."
But I'll post a warning here beyond the MPAA rating system: Viewers of this film without a solid understanding of how racism works must be accompanied by a historian. That might curtail audiences' leaving the theater having interpreted fiction for fact and seeing the protagonist, Precious, as a composite of all the African-American female youths in America's inner cities.
From reviews and comments, I gather that white viewers, particularly, seem to be startled into some new cognizance by hyperbolic scenes like Precious's mother dropping the girl's infant on the floor or throwing a TV at Precious. They don't seem to be as moved by the subtle moments such as when Precious's teacher asks the class to write a fairytale so that the students, all of whom have their share of struggles, can begin the process of imagining another life and crafting an alternate reality. Critics and audiences home in, as proof of the film's potency, on the outrageous scenes of a mother chasing her daughter up a narrow staircase or a father menacingly unbuckling his pants.
The problem is that Precious tacitly justifies its ugliness as a path toward ultimately improving the lives of young black girls in American ghettos. The implicit rationale is that the grittier the film, the more sympathy and empathy it will garner among white and affluent American audiences. Daniels understands the mission of the film as bringing about change. In a recent interview, he said, "Precious must bring about change. Otherwise there is no hope for humanity. … How could you look at this movie and not change or think differently?"
But do films really work that way? Is a picture like Precious, which reveals such struggle and abuse, actually able to spark social progress? Or is it more likely to substantiate stereotypes? And when African-American filmmakers and actors create such a work, are they change agents or barkers beckoning us to a poverty-porn peep show? Their motives may be benevolent. But is their art?
That historian accompanying you to the theater would tell you, within a broader context, that black actors and story lines attract mainstream appeal and attention when they expose taboos. This, the artists hope, will lead to social change. Since the publication of slave narratives in the 19th century, abolitionists and black authors have believed that if they transgressed societal expectations in the name of a more noble political commitment, it justified discussing sex, which in the 19th century was considered taboo in American letters. For example, Harriet Jacobs, the former slave and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, broke 19th-century conventions by deftly implying rape acts throughout her autobiography.
Readers in the 19th century and literary critics today justify her breaking social conventions of the day and raising the controversial subject of rape because, in so doing, Jacobs could expose the violent sexual abuse committed by slaveholders in the antebellum South. According to abolitionists, if Northern readers learned about these ghastly acts of violence, they would then join the abolitionist movement or, at the very least, financially and politically support the cause.
While Jacobs's text may have mobilized some white Northerners to join the abolitionist movement, or at least convinced white audiences of the horrors of slavery, we cannot and should not assume that a similar rationale will apply today to audiences of Precious. Unlike Jacobs's autobiography, which had a movement clearly attached to it, Precious floats in the stratosphere of amorphous political agendas, and has a better chance of anchoring itself onto a stereotype than mobilizing a movement. While well-intentioned people may exit the theater with a genuine and heartfelt concern for young women living in the inner cities, their hopes do not have a clearly defined campaign to funnel into. Instead, it is more likely that Precious will become, whether intentionally or not, a powerful illustration of life among the black, urban poor. And viewers who have not been widely exposed to the varieties of humankind and the vagaries of American existence will not limit their assumptions to "black, urban poor"; for them, to be black is necessarily to be urban and poor.
Within the context of African-American cultural production, Precious lacks the social critique and political message that defined previous landmark works. In the 1950s, for example, the publication of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun crossed over to white audiences and became a blockbuster success that included many political subthemes and a damning critique of American culture. It exposed a poor black family's home, where, like Precious's, rats also resided, but Hansberry delved much deeper.
Raisin indicted the American dream by revealing its limitations for black people when white Americans prospered in a decade of consumption and relative consensus. Hansberry's drama informed white theatergoers that Eisenhower's plans to move family life into the newly designed suburbs were quite difficult, and, at times, downright impossible for black families—even for those who remained upright citizens and exemplified good American values. By challenging the American dream, Hansberry used the poverty and pain of the Younger family to deliver an important social message. We can't say the same for Precious.
Within the cramped quarters of the Youngers' apartment, Hansberry found the room to explore the complicated and intricate personalities of the various characters. Beneatha Younger emerged as an intelligent and ambitious young woman, who explored the then-taboo talk of black nationalism. Long before the white American public learned of Malcolm X or heard the famous slogan "black is beautiful," Beneatha paraded on stage in African-styled garb and brought to the Younger home an African man, who stood in direct contrast to the stars of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner almost a decade later.
Furthermore, Beneatha had ambition; she wanted to go to medical school. It is easy to overlook this fact today when reading the play after Americans have seen an African-American, female surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders. But this was truly an amazing idea given the period, Beneatha's class, and her race. In the recently released film An Education, a film set in a 1960s English suburb, the white high-school protagonist demands that her headmistress list the career options available to a young, intelligent female. The headmistress stares back at her blankly, offering as a complete list: teaching, or possibly something in the civil service. Hansberry, on the other hand, created an African-American character set in an earlier decade who could imagine and dream beyond such pitifully limited societal expectations.
[Excerpt, see the rest at http://chronicle.com/article/Are-We-All-Precious-/49458/]