Not So Precious After All

If the overly-hyped Precious isn't drawing the crowds Oprah hoped it would, I'm going to suggest that it's because it's not a very good story, nor is it filmed well. Blurry, out-of-focus shots compete with constant, needless camera movement and sudden black-outs between scene changes. Precious "tells" the story and also acts it: choose one or the other as a combination of both is a distraction. And, actually, the story just isn't very good, compelling, interesting, real -- pick a word, any word, that captures the essence of mediocre.

It's not a good film because it's too raw, too stereotypical, too racist, too vulgar, too poorly acted, and too poorly presented. I am offended by the "motherfucking" vocabulary, the extreme physical violence, the (*)incestual sex, the unwanted babies and teen mothers, and the emphasis on fried food, living the welfare lifestyle, and going through life unable to read/write/do simple math. If you don't want me to believe the stereotypes, don't make them the focal point of the film. As a white person, it's what I've always thought to be true and, as a black person, it's not a very positive portrayal of the race. Do ALL black people live on welfare, lie about their qualifications for the program to get more money, spend their money on cigarettes, fried food and booze? Are all black parents bad parents who abuse their children in more ways than the average psych textbook details? Are all black teens sexually active and unwilling to get an education or change their futures by getting jobs because their role models are rappers, professional athletes, and drug dealers?

No? Go see the film and that's the message you'll get.

The black teen actress who plays Precious ("this is my story," she states) is hugely fat and physically unattractive, with a flat affect and the compliant personality of a dish cloth until another student calls her fat. Then, she punches the girl without a second thought. Her mother is, in the daughter's characterization of her, "a couch whale" who does nothing day in and day out. She smokes constantly, watches TV, verbally, physically, and emotionally abuses her daughter, and allows her boyfriend, who is also Precious's father, to have sex with his daughter to keep him coming back around, affirming the stereotype of the black woman who can doll herself up to have sex with a man or go to the welfare office, but cannot pull herself up and get a job, marry him and hold him accountable, or go on with her life without him.

Precious escapes from the depths of her troubled life through role-playing fantasies, especially while she's being raped, looking for salvation in a media-driven future life when she'll wear beautiful clothes, have a hot man at her side, and earn lots of money for herself. However, that fantasy is not her life, nor her future. Her first-born is called Mongo, short for Mongoloid, because the little girl is a Down Syndrome baby. The baby lives with the g'mother, who brings her to the daughter's apartment when it's time for a visit from the Welfare worker assigned to verify their living conditions. The entire family's life is centered around getting the monthly welfare check, with the g'mother, the mother, and Precious willing to do/say whatever it takes to keep the money coming in so they can continue to live a dead-end life on the taxpayer's dime.

There is no message of hope: this is the way it is if you're black, and this is the way it's going to be if you're black. School is a joke: the teacher prepares a lesson for students who are tuned in to their own self-interests and totally tuned out to school, which they attend to keep the welfare spigot turned on. The girls dress, act, and talk like future prostitutes, turning all their effort and charm on getting a guy who'll give them a baby so they can add to the family's welfare income. The ego-centric guys drip in gold chains, talk smack, and grab their crotches to show their potential value to the girls walking by on the street. The grafitti is the dominant decorating scheme in the subsidized housing and the physical violence is beyond belief as the basic parenting skill of the women who have children to raise, no job skills, and no family support.

When Precious walks down the sidewalk at the end of the film, a baby in arms and a disabled child alongside, it's not a moment of hope, but a foreboding of a future of endless desperation. She's not going to finish her education; she's not going to attract a man to love her, marry her, build a family with her. She's going to repeat the lifestyle and abuse cycle her mother established, and then her children will teach it to their children. There is no hope that Precious will break free, that Precious will be "the one" in the neighborhood to make it out and up. They all have dreams of making it big on TV, but lack the tools, the talent, and the determination to make their dreams come true -- whatever those dreams may be.

Just because the film is (allegedly) about "The Black Experience" does not make it worth seeing. I remember walking out of a Spike Lee film many years ago that was required as part of a college class I was taking. I was offended by the constant stream of obscenities that substituted for an actual language (the students at the alternative school literally do not know the alphabet), the portrayal of black people as ignorant stereotypes (in the film Precious does not know the difference between the word insect and the word incest), and the constant sexuality that led me then to believe that if you're black, the reason you don't have time for anything worthwhile is that you're too busy having sex (the girls in the classroom change the old playground chant to "...sitting in a tree, f-u-c-k-i-n-g").

Seems as if, some twenty-five years later, not much has changed, judging from this year's Oprah offering, which is anything but Precious.

(*) A reader commented on my usage of this term, incestual sex, rather than the word rape, to describe the father's sexual violation of his daughter. The feeling from the film developed a sense of entitlement to the fathers and/or boyfriends from the unmarried women who gave birth to daughters. In the film it is NOT just Precious who is raped by the man she also knew as her biological father, but the incest is presented more as a cultural practice than an illegal criminal action.