“Not since ‘The Birth of a Nation’ has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as ‘Precious,’ Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.
Worse than Precious itself was the ordeal of watching it with an audience full of patronizing white folk at the New York Film Festival, then enduring its media hoodwink as a credible depiction of black American life. A scene such as the hippopotamus-like teenager climbing a K-2 incline of tenement stairs to present her newborn, incest-bred baby to her unhinged virago matriarch, might have been met howls of skeptical laughter at Harlem’s Magic Johnson theater.”Jesus.
It’s written Sapphire.
It’s directed by Lee Daniels.
It’s produced by Tyler Perry.
It’s produced by Oprah freaking Winfrey.Do the Obamas have to walk into the Rose Garden and say they enjoyed the movie? Do you need Coretta Scott King to climb out of the grave and give Precious two thumbs up?
What kind of a pedigree do you need in order to trust a narrative?
When The Color Purple debuted the African-american community collectively lost their shit. No one came within ten miles of a script with an African-american theme. Whoopi Goldberg says that for a decade the only black actors who could get a job in Hollywood were her and Eddie Murphy.
When is it going to be okay to make a movie about lower-class African-americans?
NPR ran a great interview with Sapphire and asked her about this very issue. The whole segment is worth a listen, but the end especially addresses the criticism by Armond White of the New York Press.
Though she initially worried that allowing her work to be adapted to film would reinforce negative stereotypes about the black community, Sapphire says that times have changed in the 13 years since her book was written.
“In 2009, we have a tremendous range of black families in the media, form the Cosbys to the Obamas, so now, I think, we are safe enough and secure enough to show this diseased situation with the hope that we can see it as something that needs to be healed, as opposed to something that we need to hide from the public’s view,” she says.
And, Sapphire says, she hopes that her film will inspire people to have more understanding and compassion for girls like Precious. Recently she was approached by a white woman in Utah who told her that after seeing the film that she would never look at an overweight black woman again with the same judgment:
“After seeing this film, she had to deal with an obese black woman as a feeling, intelligent person as a person who dreams, as a person who wants the things that she wants. So we brought up a stereotype, and we cracked it open, and a human being comes forth.”
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