How Precious is Igniting Some Much Needed Conversations

I was planning to see Precious this weekend, but a few of my friends have conflicts and want to wait to see it as a group next weekend. I've decided to wait next Saturday to see it in a group rather than see it by myself.

Anyway, here are some interesting articles and blog posts (when are the non-white incest survivors going to weigh in on this topic? I'd like to know how non-blacks, who have intimate experiences with the subject, respond to this movie? Does the movie give voice to their own pain, or does the blackness of the cast allow them to keep a distance and from empathy?)

Black Youth Project Blog:

I begin by asking the question, what if the movie Precious was not told from the point of view of Precious, but told from the point of view of Mary. I know many of you are scratching your heads asking, “Who’s Mary?” Well, Mary is Precious’ mother. I think it is important that we know the name of the woman who is “solely” responsible for making her daughter overweight, infecting her daughter with HIV, allowing her father to rape her, and forcing her to quit school to get welfare. Given all of this, I think it is important to know the name of Precious’ mother, Mary.

Read in Full.

Also on BYP:

Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry said Precious was awesome and that everyone should go see it. Since I am the most obedient of Negroes, I saw it last Friday. If Flavor Flav is the world’s greatest hype man, this duo is officially the world’s greatest hype machine. I found Precious slightly underwhelming, uninspiring, and lacking much of what makes the novel, Push by Sapphire, so powerful. Sorry, Ms. Winfrey. I had no “A-ha!” moment.

Read in Full.

To Blacks, Precious is "Demeaned" or "Angelic" (NY Times)

“A white artist can make a film about a family of 10 drug addicts, and the public sees it as a film about a family of 10 drug addicts, not 10 white drug addicts,” Mr. McCall said. “A black artist can make that film, too, but you have to be aware of the history.”

Read in Full.

"'Precious' Girls Without a Happy Ending (The Washington Post)

I cannot recall another opportunity raised by popular culture that invited us to thoughtfully address the largely hidden issues of incest, violence and girls at the margins. As the executive director of a national organization that works to raise awareness about and to reduce violence against vulnerable women and girls, I am moved and grateful that attention is finally being paid to our forgotten girls. But this movie is in many ways a fairy tale.

Read in Full.

Empire State of Mind Unplugged

Update: Of course, it wasn't long before YouTube pulled the video (they are so lame!).  I found another video at some Rap Basement site. 

As a proud New Yorker, who used to turn up the volume in my car when Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' "Empire State of Mind" came on, while driving amidst the fall foliage on I 87, I'm really digging this stripped down version of the song:

So, Is the Military Too "PC," Or We'd Rather Just Demonize Arab Americans?

As someone who is appalled by the Islamophobic coverage of the Fort Hood controversy (seriously, did we ever implicate an entire race or group when the lone gunman was a white man, or when the domestic terrorist was Timothy McVeigh?), I find this smart critique of the media coverage by Alia Malek in the Washington Post a worthwhile read:

Arab-American history is long and deep in the United States but Arab and Muslim Americans are not part of how we imagine who we are as Americans or how we perceive what makes up the American experience. Now, in the national discussion among commentators, politicians, and others in the aftermath of Ft. Hood, we can see the dangerous effects of Arab-American invisibility; in that vacuum, acts of a single individual, Major Hasan, cast a shadow of collective guilt on millions of Americans.

Timothy McVeigh warped the interpretations of the Constitution but we easily dismissed that without pondering whether there was inherent evil in the Constitution. The same cannot be said of how we view the relationship between the Koran and violent behavior - we unfairly blame individuals' horrific acts on the teachings of the Koran. We ignore needed discussion of evident mental health issues, which were the focus when other service people have cracked and murdered their colleagues, and instead engage in lazy analysis about ethnic predilection of violence.

How can we move the conversation forward? If we knew more about the soldiers mentioned above and other Arab Americans, if their stories were familiar to us, if the origins of their names recognizable to us, how would the conversation be different?

Read in Full. 

Why Hasn't Precious Received The Color Purple Treatment?

Here's a really insightful review by Salamishah Tillet, founder of A Long Walk Home, which uses art therapy to address violence against women, in an article in The Root, titled "The Color Precious." The movie is finally opening this coming weekend in my area, so I'm looking forward to doing my own evaluation.

The Color Precious

Lee Daniels’ second film, Precious, fared quite well last weekend. Despite its soft release in only 18 theaters, Precious pulled in a remarkable $1.8 million, suggesting that on average, each theater made $100,000 off its showing. Even my brazen attempt to see the film in Times Square on Sunday night resulted in my having to purchase a ticket for Monday morning, because all four of the remaining shows were sold out in Harlem and Union Square.  

With its mostly positive critical reviews and its popularity among African-American audiences, Precious, for all appearances, has struck gold. In many ways, the cultural phenomenon that has become Precious harkens back to the financial success of The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name. A year after its original release date, The Color Purple, which also boasted a strong openinghad made almost $100 million.

However, unlike the favorable reception that has greeted Precious, The Color Purple sparked great controversy about its negative portrayals of African-American families, and, in particular, African-American men. Given their explorations of the similar themes of incest, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and colorism within the African-American community, why has Precious received so little backlash?

Read in Full.

Sesame Street Smarts

Sesame Street, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, is such a staple in our culture.  Nurturing us with our favorite muppets like Kermit the Frog and Big Bird (my favorites were Grover and Cookie Monster), teaching children diversity and multiracial, as well as multilingual, education, and bringing "head start" to urban children (hence its urban setting), this show has always been progressive.  This week, First Lady Michelle Obama will make an appearance to promote healthy and organic food.  

So, imagine my surprise to learn that the Fox News Network actually tried to make a "controversy" over an episode, which aired either last year or the year before, featuring Oscar the Grouch in his trash can offering a parody of news reporting.  He's a reporter for GNN (Garbage News Network -  get it?), and a viewer who is dissatisfied with his news show threatens to switch to Pox News (get it?).  Except a number of folks over at Fox News (and their conservative supporters) didn't get the joke since they believe this was some form of "liberal" political indoctrination of our children.  Hmmmm, sounds familiar?  Isn't this the same accusation leveled against President Obama when he was speaking to school children?

I mean, I have to believe that this so-called "outrage" over Sesame Street is itself a parody of the way marginal groups have often complained about racist and sexist indoctrination occurring in children's shows.  This has to be a joke.  It just has to.  Because, really, if this is not a joke, then we've got a bigger crisis on our hands than the economy and H1N1.  The "dumbing down" of America is a major, major pandemic.  

Seriously.  Anyone who has ever watched Sesame Street (and after 40 years that's a whole lot of us) should know that, when Oscar the Grouch and his fellow grouchies call anything "trashy" or vile or ruinous, that's supposed to be a good thing.  They wallow in trash, and this parody was an equal opportunity pun on the news media.  Shouldn't CNN also be offended that they were likened to a "Garbage News Network"?  And what about Walter Kranky and Dan Rather-Not (BWAHAHA! You gotta love Sesame Street for being able to appeal to the grown ups while entertaining the kids with muppets)?  

In short, where is our sense of humor?  Where did our basic understanding of puns and parody and the fun play on words (which has always been a staple of Sesame Street programming) go?  Are certain segments of the American population so dumbfounded at having the Obamas in the White House that they have lost all their senses (including their sense of humor)?  Or, has our education system failed so miserably that an extension of that education, via a children's TV show, is now too "complex" for a regular TV viewer's understanding?  

Scary stuff, I tell you.  But, in the mean time, I want to commend Sesame Street for keeping up the good fight in sustaining popular education and especially public television for persevering with a vision of education as fun and fun as education.  

Now, if only certain adults would lighten up, or just go back to school and learn some basic skills.

The Impossibility of Representation: The Spectacle of the Abused Black Woman

How do you represent black women's pain?  I mean, really represent it? How do you represent it as something that someone else can empathize with (not just non-blacks and men but black women ourselves)?  You see, for so long our "pain," our abuse, has been so distorted, so stereotyped, that any representation becomes problematic. 

I'm thinking of Rhianna's recent sit-down interview on 20/20 last night with Diane Sawyer.  She was so self-conscious, very much on the defensive (from the Sharon Stonesque Basic Instinct posture to the furrowed brow that indicated she was ready to mask herself.  It was self exposure but a very guarded one.  And who can blame her? 

Perhaps her most "authentic" moment was when she described the humiliation of seeing the photo of her battered face, first released by the trashy gossip site, TMZ, all over the Internet and on TV.  It was evident, actually, that this moment - even more than what Chris Brown subjected her to - is the one thing she's still traumatized over. 

And we wonder why her more recent images incorporate so much darkness and S&M spectacle.  Tell me if those images (the cover for her single "Russion Roulette" and her "Rated R" album) are not a performative attempt to reclaim her image and flip the script of the "abused black woman" as one who gains power through the spectacle of violence?  

"I am strong," she insisted to an incredulous Diane Sawyer, who had the audacity to treat Rhianna as some pathological freak and not the very typical woman who represents yet another statistic crossing all races, ethnicities, 

nationalities, and socio-economic levels when it comes to domestic violence.  No.  Being black means to not be representative, to in fact be a contrasting mirror that we safely hold up to and say triumphantly, "At least that's not me!"

  

And that black women ourselves do this suggests that we too have forgotten what we look like. Beneath the barbed wire and eye patch is yet another black woman learning to wear the "mask." It's for our own protection.  We must be "strong women," lest our scars and bruises get magnified and turned into a "lesson" for the rest of the world to treat as some sociological tract on why it is black people are so screwed up when compared to the rest of the world.  At least that's what the "representation" wants to tells us.

It is with this reality of the problem of our representation, or rather, the "impossibility" of our representation, that I'm reading various reviews of the independent film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.  Sadly, this film is not yet released in my area, so I can only go by reviews so far, and I'm getting some interesting news on this end.  There are those calling it "poverty porn," another accusing it of reinforced stereotype - especially concerning the mother - and I believe Armond White (who's always negative and who I don't pay much attention to since he likes Norbit) actually called it "Up from Incest, Child Abuse, Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty, and AIDS."  Or more specifically, "Flashbacks to Precious' rape contain a curious montage of grease, sweat, bacon, and Vaseline.  Later, (the director Lee Daniels, he of Monster's Ball fame) intercuts a shot of pig's feet cooking on a stove with Precious being humped while her mother watches from a corner."  Of course, I will have to see the movie for myself, but the idea that an obese black woman's sexual and physical abuse could be reduced to this iconography of urban black ghetto paraphernalia is disturbing.  (But then, I found Sapphire's novel Push equally disturbing, considering the ways she clumsily tried to recreate Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and instead came up with some horrendous book version of one of Kara Walker's grotesque silhouettes; curious too that both Push and Kara Walker are beloved by progressive whites who are fascinated by the "black experience").

Unlike Armond White, I'm not disturbed about the subject matter.  We don't get enough of these stories to begin with.  What I'm disturbed by is the spectacle of the Abused Black Woman who is reduced to spectacle and nothing more.  Where is the compassion for her pain?  If her representation can do that, then I won't be complaining about one-dimensional or overly prescribed images of our pain and suffering.

It's a fine line.  For example, I'm constantly debating with a good friend the merits of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.  I love that novel, and it's perhaps Morrison's greatest writing outside of Beloved.  But, my friend hates that novel with a passion (and Morrison by extension) because, when attending predominately white schools, the teaching of The Bluest Eye was always in the context of using this work of fiction as some sort of sociological thesis on the modern black family.  I would argue back that it's not the author's fault if certain audiences want to take from our fictional works some kind of "authentic" interpretation of black women's lives.  It's simply a response to their own "white guilt" for having never lived in integrated neighborhoods and communities where their own encounters with black folk could help figure out the difference between "fantasy" and "reality" of the black experience.  

Either way, once my friend revealed the problem of treating black representations through the veneer of "authenticity," I began to realize what Toni Morrison started doing in the wake of her first novel.  After The Bluest Eye, her subsequent novels began to get more and more fantastical, incorporating elements of magical realism, with characters who were so extraordinary, sublime and out-of-this-world (literally in the case of Beloved) that I realized, Of course! She's trying to make sure some ignorant non-black reader doesn't read her novel and think this is some "authentic" depiction of black life in America.  I mean, once you start reading about black women born with no navels, and black men who can literally fly like birds, and talking trees and demented rivers, you really need to give up on the idea of reading fiction to learn the sociology of the black experience!

The same applies to cinema, and already, I'm reading online various debates in response to Precious about whether or not this is an "authentic" portrayal of urban ghetto life.  Why are we invested in "authenticity" when it comes to the representation of black women's pain and suffering?  Why do we need to know if this is "real" or not? It's just a movie. It's just a novel. Or is it?

See, when we have real life occurrences of black women abuse victims, we either ignore them or we immediately assume they're lying.  So what exactly are we looking for when we insist that certain representations of black women's victimization are "real"?

The way I see it, our society has yet to fully embrace us as human beings.  Somehow, our blackness, our gender differences get in the way.  And until our full humanity can be recognized, it will continue to be "impossible" to represent our stories and our lives.  Until then, we will have to treat every new image that comes out in cinema or music or literature as suspect, no matter how well meaning they are.

Moreover, maybe we should all go grab our Rhianna eye patches to cover up what we don't want to see or to remind everyone else that we'll continue to wear our masks until you're ready to look at our faces underneath.  

Stereotypes Reinforced in Precious?

Here's a review about the new film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which seems to think so. It's titled "The Black Matriarch as Villain," by Juell Stewart, in Color Lines:

There has already been considerable Oscar buzz surrounding both Mo’Nique and Sidibe, and the film has received numerous accolades, including the Grand Jury Prize for the Dramatic category at Sundance and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The actors and director Lee Daniels deserve the praise they’ve received for making such a powerful movie.  

But beneath the film was something that I found to be problematic: a reliance on the villainization of Black matriarch—rather than a mention of systemic race issues—to make the larger message of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” more palatable.  

This is a problematic image to see in white media, but it’s even more disheartening to see in examples of Black media. What’s so problematic about Mary is that the woman is made into a monster with no redeemable qualities—a decision that isn’t only lazy on behalf of the filmmakers, but also wholly irresponsible to the African-American community.

But director Lee Daniels makes the critical mistake of ignoring the social and political reality that his characters inhabit.  Besides a title card in the beginning of the film and some outdated hairstyles, we as the audience see little of the forces that compel Mary’s actions. To ignore 1987 Harlem as the foundation for the permanent Black underclass created by the Reagan Administration through its abhorrent social reform policies—including the War on Drugs and welfare reform—is to ignore a crucial aspect of his characters’ lives.  

Read Review in Full.

Pictured: Mo'Nique as the villainous "Black Matriarch."

How the People Became Color Blind and We Came to America: A Multimedia Art Perspective by Faith Ringgold

This is too precious: View Here.

Michael Moore's Best Movie Yet: Capitalism: A Love Story

When I get more time in the midst of a super busy week, I need to offer a full review of a definite "must see" movie:

So, It's All About Hair Again, Is It?

First, there was the Tyra Banks' "real hair" spectacle.  Now, Chris Rock has a new movie coming out on "Good Hair."  Here's a clip from Oprah's show from earlier this week:

Here's the official trailer for Good Hair (I'm curious to go see this, actually, because the motivation behind Chris Rock's interest in doing this film stemmed from his concern as a father that his little daughters, whom he reassures that they are beautiful, are already understanding the difference between their own hair and "good hair"):