I just came back from seeing 'Precious':
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.
Black pathology sells. It’s an over-the-top political fantasy that works only because it demeans blacks, women and poor people.
That's Armond White, a (black) movie reviewer for the New York Press, who seems to think that all movies about black people should have an immaculate protagonist, an unthreatening premise and a triumphant denouement.
I usually roll my eyes at this shit. Armand White is a known cinematic asshole, always the first to jump on a contrarian bandwagon. He spends most of his review attacking Oprah, Tyler Perry and the movie's director, Lee Daniels, as 'media titans' and 'a pathology pimp'. I've been reading his reviews for years, and he always pulls this shit where he judges every movie primarily on its political message. Its actual content and quality-- how honest it is, how compelling it is -- always come second.
Then I saw 'Precious'.
Fuck. Did it have to be a bucket of friend chicken that Precious steals and binges on? Did her mother have to have lines like 'I only leave the house when I'm playing my numbers?' There are scenes, especially in the first half and particularly the one where her mother scams a social worker for a welfare check, that feel like they were written by an Appalachian militia.
'Precious and her mother share a Harlem hovel so stereotypical it could be a Klansman’s fantasy,' White writes. 'Fuck!' I thought, watching Precious's mother force-feed her a plate of pig's feet as retribution for forgetting the collard greens, 'he's right!'
Imagine watching a movie with an all-Native American cast, where the first 45 minutes were just characters sitting around an evergreen-wooded trailer saying things like 'I sure do love this firewater!' 'Let's make money selling roman candles!' and 'Let's scam the white man by opening a casino!' As much as I hate to admit it, that's the sort of cringe I got watching 'Precious'.
Look, I'm a left-wing, overthinky homosexual living in Denmark, for pagan-ritual's sake. I don't know any more about the black experience in Harlem in the 1980s than I do about the Welsh experience in Australia in the 1870s. I do know stereotypes, however, and the way they get used as ammunition. It's genuinely unsettling to see them in life size, at 24 frames per second.
I fully admit that cringeyness, and Armond White's anger, come not from the movie itself, but from its failure to fulfill its obligation as Blackness Ambassador or whatever to the rest of the country. It is essentially us going, 'Egads, what will the white people think?!'
This reaction is incontrovertibly bullshit, I know. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously. Majorities do form their opinions of minorities based on culture. Depictions do matter, regardless of who's doing the depicting.
Minority groups spent the better part of last century fighting over the quantity of representation in mainstream culture. Now they're fighting over the quality of that representation. And that's OK.
I would be pissed if a mainstream, critically acclaimed movie depicted gays as meth-fueled promiscu-yuppies (and pissed-er, if I'm honest, if it was written or directed by heterosexuals). But at the same time, I get frustrated when the gay experience isn't depicted in all its complication and ugliness. We deserve to be just as nuanced as any other decadent, unbreeding population group.
In my mind, minority representation on film needs to be judged only on its verisimilitude. I can take welfare queens and teen pregnancy when they're in the service of something that, overall, feels true. As far as I'm concerned, 'Precious' fails not because it makes black people look bad, but because it's two dimensional and Paul Haggis-y.
Armond White sees the mother character -- an almost unadulterated cinematic monster -- as a blow against black people. I see it as a blow against art. Any character who literally throws a baby on the ground is no more representative of black people than Freddy Krueger is representative of Dutch-Americans.
Neither 'Precious', nor any other minority-themed film, is going to be the inspirational squeegee that finally wipes the last scum of bigotry from American society. It will be a great thing for America, and the movies, if we stop expecting them to be.
One of the most fun things I did in Sydney was go to a poetry slam. I'm not really into poetry (other than a brief Leonard Cohen written-word phase that coincided with my first week at secular summer camp), and I don't really know anything about it. Most of the poets gave the impression that they learned everything they knew from watching 'Slam'.
At the end of the night, we got the bright idea to attend the next week and read something up front. We ended up not going (due to a scheduling conflict with pilates. Yes, we are granola-sipping arugula-monsters), but I ended up writing something, so I thought I'd share it here.
To the girl I pretended to have a crush on in eighth grade
To the girl I pretended to have a crush on in eighth grade:
I’m sorry I pretended to like you.
In hindsight, it was a bad way to get your boyfriend to notice me.
Your name was Emma Something.
You looked like the fifth Abba.
Not that I knew who Abba was in eighth grade.
You were from the Midwest, and had a smile as wide and unnoticed as Montana.
You weren’t as popular as your hair color or breast size would suggest.
Your late-stage puberty made the straight boys uncomfortable.
I thought you were fabulous.
Not that I used the word fabulous in eighth grade.
I imagined us reading magazines side-by-side on couches at a ranch.
You would look over at me in the firelight
and grimace.
But, like, a happy grimace.
I decided to notice you so no one would notice me.
What’s the deal with Emma Something?
I asked a girl you weren’t really friends with.
Chosen for her likelihood to interpret and rebroadcast my inquiry.
On Tuesday a circle of girls terminated their conversation when I walked by.
It was working.
On Wednesday a boy said, ‘you like her, huh?’
But I mostly wanted to talk about your boyfriend.
I put your yearbook photo on the inside cover of my notebook.
As inconspicuous as a skyscraper in a hayfield.
I made sure to protest one time too many when accused.
Suddenly I was the pervert instead of the sissy.
It was ingenious.
Not that I knew what ingenious meant in the eighth grade.
Not long later, I stopped seeing you in the halls.
Even though I knew the routes your boyfriend took to all his classes.
You were avoiding me.
The next semester we were assigned to sit next to each other.
I left my notebook in my backpack.
I tried to talk.
I said, ‘Where are you from?’
You said, ‘Oh God.’
I’m sorry I pretended to have a crush on you in eighth grade.
Maybe we could have been friends.
Instead we sat, silent, next to each other.
You didn’t look over at me
though you definitely grimaced.
Yesterday I bought a collection of Bernard Shaw one-act plays (fuck Dan Brown, plays are the best things to read on airplanes) and something called 'The Jewish Century'. Together they cost 8 Aus-bucks.
The Jewish Century starts out like this:
Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.
The Jewish part I'm not so sure about, or at least I haven't read up to the author's justification of it, but the rest of that is a great description of the social history of this century. Eight Aussie bucks, man.
A more profane, less articulate version of this paragraph occurs to me whenever I find myself untying my shoes in front of a conveyor belt:
Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.
Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.
