After half a year of putting off the inevitable, I finally did it: I watched Precious. To be fair, I had a lot of pre-conceived notions about what the film would be like because I had talked to so many people about it. I was biased and thought that it would make caricatures out of black mothers and play into stereotypes about black men's violence. I assumed that it wouldn't treat black poverty in an honest way and that it would sensationalize it. You know, I figured it would be over the top and use implausible story lines in a disturbingly bad way while talking about class and gender tensions within the black community. Turns out that all these prejudices I had were, unfortunately, true. I want to offer up a disclaimer: I am perfectly fine with the idea of making films that investigate the lives of poor black Americans. I find it problematic to try to shy away from these issues and I would welcome any film that gave identifiably human qualities and dimensions to its characters who experienced these types of tribulation. This film, however, does none of that and instead, it glamorizes pain and turn black women and men into monstruous figures who audiences can easily distance themselves from once they leave the theater. I don't care what anybody says about black art: it's always political in the way that it represents black people and it never has the luxury to avoid being a piece that is on display for both black and white consumption. Never. Whether it's pessimistic or cynical of me, I really do believe this. Anytime a text or a work of art is put out into the public sphere, it turns into a piece that serves to exemplify or represent black people. And I sure as hell don't want anybody, black or white, to look at Monique's portrayal of a black mother and to assume that she is an honest example of what black motherhood is.
Having grown up in New York City surrounded by black women of all different socioeconomic classes, I have seen a whole range of the way mothers treat their kids. There are the doting moms, the yummy mummies, the worn-out-Princeton-grad-I-should-be-in-a-work-environment-but-I-stay-at-home mothers, nonchalant young adult mothers, angry mothers who threaten to beat their kids but who subsequently spoil them with material goods and there are mothers who are just plain nasty. But within this spectrum, all of these women appear human to me. Being human involves a plurality of temperament and a range of emotions. Monique never moves beyond a constant grumble in the movie. She sounds like she's about to bark at any moment and she shows not one shred of love for her daughter or family in this film. Not one. In the moment that she does seem to be at peace, holding Precious' new baby, her sweetness fades and she does the unthinkable: she hurls the newborn across the room. I don't doubt for one second that there have been black mothers and grandmothers who act this way and who are this violent all the time. But I know, or I have to believe, in my heart of hearts that these women don't represent the majority of black maternal figures. The danger with a portrayal like this is that it puts this depiction out into the stratosphere for ignorant and semi-ignorant people to assume that this reflects what black mothers are like. I find it naive to assume that people with very little knowledge of black culture outside of pop references such as this movie (and there are many, many people like this) don't turn the media sources they see into generalizations about what black life is.
In addition to my visceral discomfort with Monique's demonstration in Precious, I really felt undone by the way the film packed on layers and layers of stereotypes without ever trying to dismantle them. One of the most heated subjects within the black community in America is the issue of skin color. Luckily enough, I did not grow up around black people who turned shades of skin color into an area of discussion or debate. It wasn't until I reached college that I started to hear people distinguish between those with lighter skin and those with darker skin. Since I've become more familiar with these ideas about standards of beauty and skin color, it's dawned on me that director Lee Daniels made a very poor choice in electing to have Gabourey Sidibe, who has a very dark complexion, play Precious while her beautiful and inspiring teacher is played by Paula Patton, who just so happens to be have light skin. Why does Daniels specifically choose to make the dark-skinned character be the one who is,arguably, substantially less attractive (facially) than the light-skinned woman? I don't care if the director is somehow toying with light vs. dark debates and trying to investigate them. He doesn't do it successfully and this commentary on the inherent beauty of all black skin gets quickly lost on audience members who Daniels' refuses to educate about this subject.
The other really unnerving component of Precious is that it is so intensely visual and bodily that it reinforces negative stereotypes about black bodies and people. Never in all the films I've ever seen involving white people has a female character been shown being raped. It's not like we hear about it in the background of this film and our imaginations are left to run wild. We watch the man's sweat drip off his body as he repeatedly forces his way into Precious. What makes this even worse is that the man is her own father. But if the story wasn't sensational enough, we get a part of the film where Precious is forced to sexually please her abusive mother. Sexual assault and rape are topics that are so deeply horrific that turning them into a spectacle like this is actually a terrible disservice to discussions and ideas about how to combat this rampant problem. It's not that I don't want the rape scenes to be part of the film or part of any discussions of these issues within the black community (because I don't always mind airing out dirty laundry if it can be done in a beneficial way.) I think these are truly important conservations or subjects to be broached but as soon as you turn something as grotesque as rape into a visual part of the story line, you remove its power. If the film can show everything, what makes the incestuous rape scene any more or less horrible than the scene in which Monique tries to throw a television set at her daughter? If the story is a monolith of horrendously egregious abuse, how can we distinguish between the nuances and differences of the awful things she encounters? Furthermore, in thinking about this film as a representative piece of work, it's unimaginable to think that a director would use these scenes to play into ideas about how terrible black parenting can be. Why do black people have to be the ones who have the moral duty to be "honest" about how horrible some of their parents are? Doesn't this burden ever fall on white people?
And another series of questions: Why does Precious' baby have a ridiculous name like Mongo? why doesn't Precious do anything but look down at the ground for the entire movie? what purpose does it serve to have her baby have Down Syndrome? why must she be illiterate? why must she be morbidly obese? why does she steal and subsequently eat an entire bowl of fried chicken until we watch her physically throw up all the food? why doesn't the girl smile until the 54 minutes into the film? why does her rapist father happen to be either sexually promiscuous enough or addicted enough to infect her with HIV? And why doesn't a gay black director notice that this sort amalgamation of stereotypes and negative portrayals has a detrimental effect on how black people are viewed? This time I'm really being dead serious: what's up with that?
