Posted on | March 17, 2010 | No Comments
Like many people, I got caught up in the hype about Precious. I had heard about the film adaptation some time ago and looked forward to seeing the film. After viewing it however, I was left with the feeling that I had been party to some sort of pornographic escapade- getting off on the misery of an obese black woman. I struggled to find the right words that could convey my concerns…until I came across this post which captured my feelings perfectly:
The Nerve of Precious
Son of Baldwin
http://www.sonofbaldwin.blogspot.com/
This is a criticism of the film
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Many black people will not abide such a thing. We are very protective of most black achievements. It does not matter that the film presents our community in an extremely negative light. We prefer poor representation to no representation at all. Also, we seem to find this type of subject matter “authentic,” whether we have had similar experiences or not. This may be because we have internalized beliefs that legitimize certain views of the black experience. We consider healthier depictions, like
The Cosby Show for example, pure fantasy. Even those of us whose lives are more like
The Cosby Show than
Precious believe this to be true.
Black gay people, in particular, refuse to hear any disparaging words about the film. Understandably, we feel a strong solidarity with director
Lee Daniels, who is, himself, openly gay. We also appreciate the positive portrayal of gays in the film. And because we endure a
peculiar persecution from the black community at large, we freely support any vehicle that takes black people to task.
I. Precious Agenda
The Oscars have a well-documented history of rewarding films that
confirm damaging black stereotypes. This is not to suggest that some of these stereotypes have absolutely
no basis in reality. There are a few blacks who—
sometimes proudly—embody them. The problem is that Hollywood (in conjunction with the
mainstream media) makes it seem that the stereotypes are the norm and non-stereotypes are the exception. Coupled with the fact that Hollywood and the media largely ignore or do not assign the same weight to
these same images in the
white community and you have the makings of the white superiority/black inferiority paradigm. With its story and imagery,
Precious helps to cement these philosophies in ways that rival shameful American works like
The Birth of a Nation and
Gone With the Wind.
II. Precious FlawsIt is a challenge to evaluate
Precious as a work of cinematic art because beyond its flawed racial politics, there is little else there. Set in the 1980s, it is a cornucopia of black stereotypes: pig’s feet, collard greens, fried chicken, non-parenting, predatory violence, sexual deviancy,
Mammy images, abortion clinics, welfare offices, obesity, shoplifting, disdain for intellect, gambling, out-of-control children; it is all in there. But what it does not have
is context or an intelligent examination of the characters’ lives.
We never get to see why Precious’s mother (“Mary Jones” played by comedian
Mo’Nique a.k.a. Monique Imes-Jackson) is the woman she is. We never understand why she lives the life she lives. As far as the film is concerned, poor black people—and
only poor black people—live this way because they are barbarians who use whatever cunning they possess to exploit the American public assistance system. Most importantly, it is the white man’s burden to endure and, perhaps, civilize these creatures. We never get to see what roles Reagan-era economics and institutionalized racism play here.
Remember all of the great American
novels and
other media that contained Mammy figures? Remember how Mammy was presented as someone who existed solely to serve the whites for whom she worked? Remember how her toil was presented as a necessary and redeeming part of her character? Remember how her personal life was never investigated? In Mary Jones, we have both the New Millennium Mammy and the justification for past Mammy portrayals. Mammy had to toil away for white folks so that she would not become a welfare queen. Her home life was ignored because as kind as she was to her employer’s children was as evil as she was to her own. According to
Precious, Mary Jones is what Mammy becomes when she is left to her own devices.
Precious (played by newcomer
Gabourey Sidibe) is a figure of almost pathological passivity who does what she is told by everyone around her. She would have evoked pity if the filmmakers had not poured the pathos on
so thick. Instead, her experiences are comical before they become absurd.
Precious is not just a receptacle for the AIDS virus or the monstrous things her father, mother, and boys in the neighborhood do to her. She is also a vessel for the self-hating messages of the filmmakers. “I want a light-skinned boyfriend with curly hair,” she narrates. The film never investigates her reasoning. It never gives her the opportunity to understand how or why this line of thinking is self-destructive or that it should be overcome. Quite the contrary, the film confirms that this is what she should want—and what the audience should want, too. The casting makes that abundantly clear. If the film is to be believed, dark-skinned black people are either evil or unlovable, take your pick. Only light-skinned black people or white people are worthy, and only they can be saviors.
Moreover, the film’s narrative is incomplete: Precious’s journey is truncated, unfulfilling, and offers no catharsis. She goes from bad at the beginning of the film to bad (maybe even worse) at the end of it. The literacy theme that was the novel’s saving grace is almost completely abandoned in the film. Given primacy is a voyeuristic sadism that seems to revel in what Precious endures. The audience is encouraged to await Mary’s attacks on her with the same curiosity and thrill they experience when Freddy Krueger from
A Nightmare on Elm Street thrashes one of his victims.
Despite the critical acclaim, most of the cast’s performances are painfully one-note. Mo’Nique is an angrier, darker, heavier version of the character
Halle Berry played in
Monster’s Ball. Her portrayal lacks breadth and nuance. Gabourey Sidibe is a darker, female version of
Coronji Calhoun’s character in Monster’s Ball. And given her enormous presence, it is rather astounding how little of her shows up on screen. Critics laud her performance as “quiet,” but “silent” is perhaps more apt. The other characters in the film (Precious’s teacher—played by
Paula Patton—and her fellow classmates) are cardboard cut-outs from any generic afterschool special. Only one person in this film shows any range. Surprisingly, it is
Mariah Carey as Precious’s welfare case manager. She is able to capture both the bureaucratic distance and fleeting empathy of a social worker (and she is the only human being in this film.
As the cumbersome title does its best to remind us, the film is based on the novel
Push by poet and author
Sapphire (a.k.a. Ramona Lofton). For years, Sapphire declined offers to turn Push into a film because she believed that given American racist perceptions, the results would be disastrous. With the election of
Barack Obama, America’s first non-white president, she thought
now was the time for a film adaptation. She believed Obama’s presence would balance out anything revealed in the film. Sadly, she was wrong.
First, the counterbalancing burden is far too great for any one individual. Second, Obama is thought of as an “exception”; his light skin, white upbringing, and possible lack of ancestral slave ties allow whites a guilt-free way to relate to him. Third, it is possible that Obama actually confirms the most consistent message in Precious: The lighter your skin, the better you are. In permitting this film to be made, Sapphire made a dreadful mistake for which we will pay an exacting price.
Perhaps that would not have been the case if the film had been given to anyone but Lee Daniels to direct. Daniels’s psychopathy is written all over his work. He is obsessed with sexual abuse, incest, interracial relationships, and light-skinned black people. In a New York Times interview ironically entitled
“The Audacity of Precious,” Daniels had this to say:
Precious is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced against people who are darker than me. When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.
This is clear to anyone who watches the film. He continued:
Anybody that’s heavy like Precious — I thought they were dirty and not very smart.
Which explains why he was astounded by Sidibe, a nearly four-hundred-pound, dark-skinned black woman who is highly articulate. Generally, when people imagine overweight black women, they think of someone like Mo’Nique: a crass, loud, funny, overweight sister-girl who can cook and is always hungry. Though, Mo’Nique’s appetite also manifests itself in other ways.
Mo’Nique is an opportunist. Examining her body of work—
The Parkers,
Soul Plane,
Domino,
Shadowboxer, the voice of “Jamiqua” on
The Boondocks, and now Precious—one thing seems clear: Her willingness to embrace and defend demeaning stereotypes of African Americans is closely tied to her desire for economic security. She would not show up to promote Precious, despite all of the accolades and acclaim she received,
unless the producers agreed to pay her for her appearances. With Precious, she reveals that she is not even above exploiting her own experiences for material gain. She will tell anyone who will listen that she can vouch for Precious because, as a child, she was
molested by her older brother. Her assertions, meant to lend the film authenticity, come across, instead, as self-indulgent. As journalist and author
Jill Nelson keenly
observed:
Can you imagine Meryl Streep revealing she used to be a bushy tailed, carnivorous mammal or editor-in-chief of Vogue to market the authenticity of
The Fantastic Mr. Fox or
The Devil Wears Prada? Mo’Nique is not the only celebrity to exalt and exploit her abuse.
Oprah Winfrey has made a
billion-dollar industry of it. It should come as no surprise, then, that Winfrey—who, in many ways, functions as
the ultimate Mammy figure (whenever Oprah
steps outside of her Mammy position, she is
quickly checked by her
white following)—is one of the executive producers of this film. However, it is rather odd that Tyler Perry has co-signed on this. Yes, he, too, has spoken, in great detail, of the abuse he
suffered as a child. Yet, on the other hand, in one of his most lucrative films (
Madea’s Family Reunion), Perry uses incestuous lust as comedy (the scene involves a group of uncles imploring their young, scantily clad niece to bend over to retrieve beverages so that they can, unbeknownst to her, get a better look at her private parts). Hypocrites, it seems, always want to play innocent.
IV. Precious Truths
Precious seems to operate as a collective therapy session for its celebrity pushers; and because there is no professional psychiatrist to arbitrate the gathering (where is
Dr. Robin Smith when you need her?), Daniels, Mo’Nique, Winfrey, and Perry have no way to discern reality from their delusions. So, they offer up the film as representative of the black experience. “We are all Precious,” they claim. They mean themselves and “us black people.” They are, of course, insane. The error they make is clear and is deftly summed up by an
Arthur Schopenhauer quote:
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
The truth is this:Precious is, as
Armond White said, pornography. For what was sold as a sympathetic depiction of someone’s nightmarish experiences has, instead, all the makings of someone’s dysfunctional x-rated fantasy; its value limited to getting some of its audience off and some of its audience off the hook.
Posted on | March 15, 2010 | No Comments
Labour MP Ashok Kumar found dead
MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland was 53 and not thought to have any serious health problems
Labour MP Ashok Kumar was found dead today at home in his Middlesbrough constituency, it was announced today.
Aides called the emergency services when he failed to arrive at his office in the House of Commons this morning. Kumar, 53, was not thought to be suffering from any serious health problem and his death was described as “sudden”.
A former scientist, Kumar had been MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland since 1997. At the last election he had a majority of 8,000.
He was parliamentary private secretary to Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, who said he “deeply shocked and saddened by this news” and paid tribute to Kumar as a “doughty fighter for his constituents”.
Kumar also briefed served as MP for Langbaurgh from 1991, when he won a byelection, until 1992, when he was defeated at the general election.
Announcing the MP’s death to the Commons, John Bercow, the Speaker, said: “Ashok was a most assiduous member, much respected by the house and by professional background a very fine chemical engineer.
“I am sure members on all sides of the house will join me in mourning the loss of a colleague and extending our sympathy to the honourable member’s family and friends.”
Benn said: “It is very hard to believe that Ashok is no longer with us.
“Ashok was a pioneer, a doughty fighter for his constituents and a Labour man through and through, who cared deeply for others.
“He was also fearless in pursuit of what he saw as right. I came to value his friendship, his loyalty and his sense of fun over the many years we worked together.”
Fellow Labour MP Sir Stuart Bell, whose Middlesborough constituency neighbours Kumar’s, said he had an “untarnished reputation”.
“He has been for many years a fine parliamentarian and good constituency MP,” said Bell. “He built up his parliamentary majority and had every expectation of being returned to the house at the forthcoming election.
“He will be mourned by his many friends and colleagues.”
A spokesman for Cleveland police said a body was found at 12.30pm today. He added that it was too early to say whether the death was being treated as suspicious.
David Walsh, the secretary of Kumar’s constituency Labour party, said: “We all mourn our loss and all our thoughts are solely with his family at this tragic time.
“Ashok was a fine politician who served his constituency and his constituents with diligence and unswerving commitment.
“He was a natural fighter and a community leader.”
keep looking »
