A Precious Time of Year

For the last month, the movie "Precious" has taken up more of my discussion time than any movie in recent memory. Normally a film opens to peak buzz, which fades in about two weeks, and then it's on to the next thing. Not this time--the themes and questions "Precious" provokes just keep on growing. Below is a slightly edited version of a lively Facebook exchange I had with a friend and distinguished screenwriter, Matthew Wilder. He's white. I'm black. He didn't like the movie, I did. Read on. Erin Aubry Kaplan:

Matt, like you and the rest of the racially conscious set, I was prepared to NOT like 'Precious.' The images in the previews alone were enough to make me start dusting off the picket signs. But when I saw the movie itself, I was led right through the heart of those scary images into a real story about a real girl who happened to be black, fat, poor and saddled with a terrible family situation. Precious was the middle of the movie, she controlled it, not the images we tend to recoil from. They didn't dictate what I saw or felt. That was a power balance shift I hadn't experienced before, and it was an epiphany.

Matthew David Wilder:
Well, I guess here is the beginning of my objection to the arguments of "Precious" lovers...many of the arguments I've read suggest that those who dislike the movie are in some way "in denial about" ghetto reality. They seek to only have "positive" images onscreen (not especially enhanced by Armond White extolling "Akeelah and the Bee"). My belief is: represent the negative all you want...the problem is the POINT OF VIEW on that. And to me, the director Lee Daniels' view is extremely complicated, ugly, and, I suspect, unconscious.

Yes, the movie asks us to feel sorry for this girl and all the horrors visited upon her. But unlike in Spielberg's "Color Purple"--a movie completely dismissed by 90% of all thoughtful film watchers--our relationship to the lead character is not entirely one of sympathy, or empathy. It PARTLY is. But there is also another point of view, one that I believe is imported from reality TV. It's the "Ewwwww!" factor. Precious is pitiable, but also freakish and gross. Her home life is horror-movieish. The scenes of her and her mom chewing pig's feet, smoking Newports and watching "The $10,000 Pyramid" seem like something out of "Saw IV." We are not meant to sympathize but to giggle and cringe like we were watching Flavor Flav make out with Brigitte Nielsen on "The Surreal Life."

Erin Aubry Kaplan:
But you really need to ask yourself: why is Precious freakish and gross to you? Because she's big and black and outwardly dumb? Are you sure your judgment here isn't poisoned by the fact that you think ALL black people like her are reality-show cartoons? I'm not accusing you of any racial malfeasance. But I'm suggesting that because of our very freakish and gross American history with race, we give more weight to black images, good or bad, than we do to the substance of black people's lives. Black poverty is a very real problem and a very real way of life. It is not a cartoon. It is not a source of entertainment, though it is too often represented as such. I don't believe Lee Daniels' intent was to entertain us, but to get at a story that could only be gotten at through the awful context, because the awful context IS part of the story. That's the brilliance of the movie. He puts two things together that usually never touch.

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Precious IS freakish--there are not movie protagonists like her. Female protagonists in movies look like Anne Hathaway--or, if you want to stretch it, they look more like Paula Present or Halle Berry. I think that is the point of the movie--you can't believe that this girl, so obese her facial features are crowded into inexpressiveness by her sheer girth, is the lead in a movie.

There's nothing wrong with being a freak--that's no judgment. It's the point of view that's the disaster. For example, take Charles Burnett, a filmmaker I know you respect. In "Killer of Sheep" he took ghetto images that had never, or almost never, been seen on film before, and created out of them one of the most rhapsodic, haunting works in all of American cinema. But you don't have to be that high-minded. Spielberg took a "Precious"-like litany of horrors and made the humane (if melodramatic) "Color Purple." I frankly would rather see the Tyler Perry version of this story!

What offends me is the "doubleness" of the movie. Yes, it wants you to shed tears for this girl, or at least pity her from on high...but there is an unmistakable contempt for how life is lived in the ghetto that, if it had come from a white filmmaker, would be viewed as judgmental and condescending. But because Lee Daniels does his "gay black striver beatin' the odds" shtik in the press, it is viewed as sympathetic...and I think it is not entirely sympathetic at all. I don't mean to play Lee's shrink, but I think much of it is self-loathing.

Erin Aubry Kaplan:
Contempt for life in the ghetto? Who the hell doesn't have contempt? Have you ever lived there? So why can't we hate the ghetto and love Precious? This is my point about putting two concepts together that don't usually touch. They SHOULD touch, especially in black movies, which is why so many black films feel devoid of complexity and feeling and art. In a film like "Coal Miner's Daughter," it's understood that the coal mine is a rat hole, but we don't hold that against Sissy Spacek. Your animosity seems misplaced. I think you're reacting more to the idea of a stereotypical movie than to the movie itself. By the way, let's be careful about assuming some universal notion of a black ghetto. 'Killer of Sheep' was filmed in Watts, a poor black neighborhood that's a frigging paradise compared to Harlem. California is a totally different context - much more hope and a different set of expectations than exist on the East coast. Nor would I dare to compare the early 20th century rural poverty of 'Color Purple' to that of Precious. Plus the story of Celie was really quite different all the way around.

Matthew David Wilder:
Assume not, Walter Matthau told us, lest you make an ass outta you and me! I have lived in ghettos, some wicked ghettos...though I never ate pig's feet and threw a TV at anybody's head. Or saw any combination thereof. What do you think, Erin, I grew up chomping a silver spoon?

I think you are right to suggest that all ghettos are not created equal. But we are talking here about what is analogous in movie terms, not identical in sociological terms.

Here's the bottom line for me: what bugged me is that Daniels knew that just playing the sympathy card wouldn't work for him commercially, so he goosed up the horrors of Precious' home life--and I mean stylistically, not just in terms of how horrific the crimes against her are--knowing that that extra frisson of ickiness would put the movie over commercially, separate it from all the wholesome, uplifting black fare out there. He knew that giving it that E! Channel yucky sauce would make it commercial in a way all those well-intentioned movies aren't. And that to me is a damnable cynicism.

Make a lurid freakshow in the gutter if your gut tells you to: I certainly enjoy John Waters wallowing in filth. But then don't garland that campy grossout wallow in Piety.

Erin Aubry Kaplan:
Hm, I think your assessment of Lee Daniels' motives is a stretch. He didn't have to goose up any of the horror--did you read the book, "Push"? Let's at least blame Sapphire here. (By the way, I never ate pig's feet either, though I saw lots of people eat em...chicken feet too. Now that would really set Armond White off). I don't think he laid on the extra frisson of ickiness for freak-show value, I believe he wanted us to see the freak show, then go deeper to look at the girl living in it, the girl at the bottom of the well, so to speak. And even if Daniels had laid on the yuck of his own accord,, that would hardly guarantee a hit--people like their black ghettotainment with all the trimmings, i.e., hip hop score, snarling gangsters, etc. "Precious" has none of that. I'm sorry, but any story centered around a young, obese black girl with a grade average of 1.0 is doomed to pop-culture oblivion. Unless, of course, it has a heart.

Bottom line is, I'm rather sad that you see this film and its environs as "filth" and a "freak show" with no humanity to speak of. That is our biggest difference here. You know I respect the hell out of you and that you and I tend to see heart in the same films. But I think in case you are artificially dividing your opinion of movies from your opinion on sociology and how it ought to be shown on screen. It's just how we've all been trained to see and judge, and pre-judge, black movies. I hope "Precious" has shifted us all a few degrees north of where we've been.

Matthew David Wilder:
I think it's fair to ask...of Daniels...or Sapphire....is it REALLY likely that any household would have ALL the horrors that are described herein? Maybe half...maybe 2/3...but ALL OF 'EM?

And even if Lee and Sapphire swear on a stack of bibles *they saw it all and worse,* okay: it's up to them to dramatize that. Make it plausible.

I will just leave off with this. My problem is not at all with WHAT the picture represents (though I think Lee Daniels has stolen many a page from Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream," another everything-but-the-kitchen-sink grossout) but rather HOW he depicts it...which is partly empathetic but partly "yucky-funny" and partly just plain "ewwwwww!" I would ask you to look at how the father-rape scenes, the mother-violence scenes, and, most distasteful of all, the mom-hanging-out-at-home scenes are shot and edited, and I would ask you to tell me if the tone they create doesn't swing between Grotesque Comedy and Straight-Up Horror Movie. That seems to me a cheap way to give the (largely non-ghetto) audience a thrill, and keep them involved in what would otherwise be, yes, a boring movie about, literally, homework.

My point is: don't make fun of this girl, don't make her an oogy freakshow. I feel the movie does that behind her back. As opposed--for example--to Uncle John Waters, who would have us laugh our ass off at Precious and her Newport-Pigfoot Mama for the first ten minutes, then encounter our closeness to their humanity for the subsequent 80.

That, to me, is a lot more honest.

We didn't even get into the "black monsters bad, enlightened light-skinned people good" aspect of "Precious"...a dichotomy so extreme that if, say, Ron Howard pulled it in a movie he'd be flayed alive, and rightly so. Let's be frank: why are Paula Present and pretty Lenny Kravitz in the movie? Because Lee calculated that the audience would say, after all those Precious-and-Mom scenes, like the hero of Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" after a long day of BET auditions: "I don't want to see anything blllllllack for a month!"

Being the gentleman that I am, I am more than happy to give you the last word, and words, and paragraphs; and in the end, we will let Justice Mariah Carey decide.

(If Janet Jackson had been the Each One Teach One Nutritionist, the movie would be perfect!)

Erin Aubry Kaplan:
Who you calling light-skinned? Okay, that does it, I'm tired of black people lighter than a Trader Joe's bag being demonized as the angelicized black 'other.' It's suddenly way too faddy. Yes, there is a color dichotomy in the film, but there's a much bigger dichotomy in real life, trust me. And even though Paula Patton is lighter than the average bear, isn't her hair pressed? Does she have that good hair that Precious dreams about and that REALLY separates black from blacker, or is she faking it? People, please. While I totally get the field slave/house slave thing--I've lived it--in another, more criticial sense we're all just interdependent negroes trying to get over and save our asses from the total obscurity America has laid on us for generations. Ms. Rain does it teaching, Precious does it however she can. I do it writing impassioned blogs I don't get paid for...but that's another exchange, oui?

What else can I say, Matt, we don't agree. I don't see Precious being made fun of. She isn't yucky or funny or eww. I suspect there's no way she can be made palatable to you as a dramatic heroine, and that's the real problem. The John Waters treatment? Well that wouldn't be a drama, that'd be a freak show along the lines of "Napoleon Dynamite" (a film that I had some racial problems with). And p.s., I don't see Mo'Nique as freak show at all--that cold fury is something I've seen up close, and it's scary. Of course the fury is not exclusive to welfare mothers sitting at home watching TV. It's in other black women in all kinds of situations. But it speaks to something very real that black people rarely talk about, let alone put on screen. Maybe our different views on "Precious" come down to what we've seen in our lives, and/or want to see. My existential question remains, though: how do you portray black ghetto poverty, which is very real, without offending all of our imaginations? Is that possible, or artistically feasible? Yes, imagination can be more important than reality. But there are times when it should just shut up and listen.

Gabourey Sidibe stars as Claireece 'Precious' Jones in PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE. Photo credit: Anne Marie Fox.