The Rawness

Click the following links for part 1 and part 2.

This installment of the Precious movie review is about an epidemic currently infecting our society that I call Scar Worship. I believe it comes from a combination of two societal trends that are currently everywhere:

1. unflinchingly dwelling on and continuously reliving misery and hardship, and
2. oversharing, in as explicit detail as the boundaries of good taste will allow in the belief that doing so proves our strength and our ability to deal with harsh realities will “raising awareness” and will somehow heal us

Many social critics call our current environment a “therapy culture.”  Frank Furedi discusses this in his book Therapy Culture, and Christina Hoff Sommers treads similar ground in her book One Nation Under Therapy.  While therapy culture has its good aspects, such as less blame being shifted to victims, more awareness of social issues affecting certain demographics and more people speaking out about problems that would never have previously been made public, the extremes that therapy culture has been taken to actually make victims weaker in the long run.

Dwelling on problems that have passed, reinforcing the feeling in victims that they will forever be emotionally crippled by whatever trauma was done to them and that such emotional and psychic scars will not only continue to haunt the victims throughout their lives but actually serve to define them…these are examples of therapy culture taken to its worst extreme: scar worship.  Scar worship is where a victim’s goal is no longer to heal their scars but to celebrate them and keep them forever fresh by constantly picking at them.  Meanwhile, the world is moving on without them and they’re still reliving their past over and over again, often trying to get closure from whoever it was the wronged them or trying to get sympathy from people they come across. They get so used to their nonstop pity party that they end up defining themselves by their trauma. It becomes their identity, and they begin to cling on to it for dear life because even a fucked up identity in the mind of most is better than no identity, and these people have reached a point where they have no idea who they are without their trauma.

In high school I remember reading a two-part interview in SPIN magazine between Camille Paglia and Celia Farber, which was reprinted in Paglia’s essay book Sex, Art and American Culture.  But the part of the interview that really stuck with me almost two decades later was the following exchange about rape victims and the different ways to approach the victim mindset (emphasis at various points added by me):

FARBER: One point that hasn’t been made in the whole rape debate is women’s role over men, sexually.  In the case of a rape, a man has to use brute force to obtain something that a woman has – her very sex.  So naturally she’s weaker physically, and will always be oppressed by him physically.  But in that moment when he decides that the only way he can get what he wants from her emotionally, or sexually, or whatever, is to rape her, he is confessing to a weakness that is all-encompassing.  She is abused, but he is utterly tragic and pathetic.  One is temporary and the other is permanent. I was raped once and it helped me to think of it like that.  Not at all to apologize for him, but to focus on my power instead of my helplessness.  It was a horrible experience, but it certainly didn’t destroy my whole life or my psyche, as much as contemporary wisdom insisted it must have.

PAGLIA: Right, we have what they want.  I think woman is the dominant sex.  Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of a woman’s attention.  It’s very interesting what you said about the rape, because one of the German magazine reporters who came to talk to me – she’s been living in New York for ten years – she came to talk to me about two weeks ago and she told me a very interesting story, very similar to yours.  She lives in Brooklyn, and she let this guy in whom she shouldn’t have, and she got raped.  She said that, because she’s a feminist, of course she had to go for counseling.  She said it was awful, that the minute she arrived there, the rape counselors were saying, “You will never recover from this, what’s happened to you is so terrible.”  She said, what the hell, it was a terrible experience, but she was going to pick herself up, and it wasn’t that big a deal.  The whole system now is designed to make you feel that you are maimed and mutilated forever if something like that happens.  She said it made her feel worse.

Commenter DF, in the comments for the last installment, left this gem:

This abuse mentality reached a new cultural low in my mind when I came to learn that one of the guys that has been crushing for my girlfriend tried to gain her sympathy by admitting to her that he was sexually abused. I’ve met the guy and he’s what I’d call uber liberal squared and the most pro-feminist male on the eastern seaboard. What is fascinating about this kid is that he’s in a position to pull tons of chicks but due to a crippling lack of masculinity (even my gf unprompted mentioned that he’s very effeminate) he gets almost nowhere. Lack of game goes without saying. What surprised me was that my gf told me he wasn’t the first guy to pull such as stunt on her!

Sadly, I’ve heard many similar stories, especially on college campuses and big city dating scenes.

And it’s not just the left or women that have a monopoly on scar culture, it’s everywhere. I deal with it on my blog all the time. I’ve been trying to preach to guys out there about how to be stronger, better men and there seems to be a lot of readers who instead take my writings as license to blame women for everything under the sun and whine and wallow in self-pity. It sickens me. I talk about the damage radical feminism has done to male identity as a means to an end, and that end is to grow into better men. But many guys out there miss the point and want to remain exactly the same and instead make whining about radical feminism and emasculation the end game. They worship the scars they received from rejection, emasculation, heartbreak, divorce court and don’t make any effort to heal and grow stronger. I especially find this among people who find my blog from reading Men’s Rights blogs and as a result make the mistake of thinking I’m a fellow Men’s Rights Advocate (I’m not. In fact my attitude toward the Men’s Rights crowd is pretty similar to Roosh’s).

Oprah is the biggest living prophet for scar culture. As I described in previous installments, she constantly celebrates her scars and keeps them fresh in various ways. She acts and produces movies that describe traumas and dysfunctions that mirror her own. She consistently names books to her book club that revolve around characters wallowing in misery and having indignities heaped upon them. She will invite any celebrity under the sun to appear on her show if they’re willing to air out their dirty dysfunctional laundry, like when she recently had Mackenzie Phillips and Whitney Houston on to share their horror stories.

Oversharing is now the norm, as described by the Daily Waffle blog:

Now, there’s nothing wrong with emotional disclosure. It is healthy in moderation: better than keeping negative feelings bottled up. To communicate freely is normal, natural and surely healthier than the stiff-lipped, stoic ways of the past, when expressing feelings was unseemly, not ‘respectable’.

Can you keep a secret?
But what I resent is the constant baring of souls, the unsolicited sharing of intimate secrets, and the incessant outpouring of emotion. It’s a post-Oprah Winfrey world, where gushing is good – and where you, dear listener, are the unpaid therapist. All too often, oversharing is an imposition on the listener.

‘I’m afraid it’s part of the psychotherapy age that people feel the need to reveal themselves,’ says Pat Doonbar, a psychologist who specialises in confessions. But be warned: it’s not real therapy. ‘What oversharers are looking for is for others to be uncritical sounding boards. That’s not healing.’

Moreover, there may well be negative consequences of people knowing too much about you. ‘It’s about appropriate self-disclosure,’ says Relate counsellor Paula Hall. ‘If we give out intimate details, it should be in a situation of trust, with close relatives or a counsellor.’

The trouble is, oversharing is part of the spirit of the age. One only need read a newspaper, turn on the TV or look on the internet to witness a babel of people talking about themselves. Chat shows, teenagers weeping on reality television, celebrity biographies by the yard, memoirs about appalling childhoods – all these show a society in the grip of oversharing. Some in the public eye seem to relish such self-exposure. Take Richard Madeley, as in Richard and Judy, who let viewers into the secrets of his vasectomy, and even his daughter’s first period, on TV.

Onion AV Club has recently weighed in on the same topic:

Over the last century, we’ve evolved from a society hindered by unhealthy repression—taking our most painful secrets with us to the grave to spare our loved ones distress or social shame—to one that values the importance of unburdening and “exorcising our demons.” For most, this involves years of intense therapy sessions, followed by even more years of learning to cope with the revelations they engender, then slowly rebuilding a new life, where you accept those demons as part of who you are, but not the sum total. It’s a deliberate, frustrating, incredibly private process—unless you’re famous. In which case, you just go on Oprah.

Oprah is a listener. Oprah is a giver. Oprah is the warm, matriarchal hug that says things are going to be all right. Oprah is also the illusion that we, as a culture, take the harrowing confessions of her guests and learn to draw inspiration from them—which no, we simply gawk in horror at them, then dwell on and debate each other over the sordid details. For example, did anyone come away from Oprah’s recent interview with Whitney Houston with a greater understanding of why she spent most of the last decade in a drug-fueled stupor, or leave feeling inspired by her newfound commitment to rehabilitation? No, we came away with a few crazy anecdotes about Bobby Brown spray-painting “evil eyes” on the wall, a handful of carefully deflected non-answers, and plenty of forced “lessons you’ve learned” that Oprah shoehorned in to create the illusion that all of these things were somehow symbolic of a redemption arc that never really materialized. But oh, it’s cathartic, and look how brave she is, and see how we can take our pain and grow from it and so forth—and isn’t Oprah caring for providing a safe place where one can get those sorts of things out in the open?

Except some things have no business being out in the wide open. Some things do not need to be processed under the watchful eye of millions. Yet this is how our oversharing culture has lately learned to process things, and this is why you get revelations like the one absolutely everyone has been talking about today…

Leaving the central story aside for the moment, however, it’s the sideshow to this whole nauseating affair, the way it’s become endemic of how our culture now processes its tragedies, that I also find distressing—and it raises a question about our disturbing need to make our private problems public, and the way doing that almost automatically negates their impact. Phillips has said that she wants to “put a face on consensual incest,” and that’s a brave and noble intention. But outside of writing a memoir and appearing on Oprah to talk about said memoir, there doesn’t seem to be much else to that intention, at least so far. (Though it’s always possible that further speaking engagements to fellow victims, charitable donations, and the like will follow.) And that definitely goes for Oprah too: On her show, she prompted Mackenzie Phillips to cut right to the chase and cough up the incest story right quick, lest her audience assume this was another cut-and-dry “how I got sober” narrative and change the channel. And of course, as with anything Oprah does, it was all under the auspice of “confronting our pain so we can learn from it.” But what, exactly, did we learn today from this shitstorm, other than that John Phillips was probably the worst father in the world (which, you know, we already knew that), Mackenzie Phillips has a book for sale, and that Oprah—like our entire oversharing society—pretends to be sympathetic when really she’s just acting as a classy surrogate for her audience’s gawking? And will this finally be the nadir of the celebrity memoir, or—as some have already half-jokingly speculated—just the bar everyone else has to clear from now on? The idea that Mackenzie Phillips endured what she says she did is certainly tragic; that still we’re finding new, unnerving ways to turn confronting that tragedy into entertainment may be equally so.

Much of this critique also applies to the so-called “healing” and “learning” we’re supposedly undergoing when we see the freakshow of incest horrors in movies like Precious. I already gave one theory about why Oprah and her cohorts in scar worship love wallowing in this filth so much, and that is that they want to normalize dysfunction. The more they can convincingly paint the world as a predominantly dysfunctional place filled with incest, abuse, trauma, exploitation and teen pregnancies, the more normal their childhoods become by default. But there’s another reason besides normalizing dysfunction, and that’s self-aggrandizement. The Oprahs, Tyler Perrys and Lee Daniels of the world have a vested interest in painting a picture of typical black life as being as dysfunctional as one can imagine, because by doing so, they make their own success stories sound that much more remarkable. The successes Oprah, Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels have had are remarkable in their own right, but in a meritocratic society that lauds the concept of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, their success stories become that much more remarkable if they can portray the environments they came from as being as hopeless and depraved as one can imagine.

People buy into this myth of Oprah as pro-woman and pro-black, but she’s not. She’s pro-Oprah. Period. Everything she does is motivated by narcissism and self-aggrandizement. Take for example the “down low” myth about their being an epidemic of black gay men pretending to be straight. There is no scientific evidence that this is more prevalent in the black male community than any other community. But based on the flimsiest of hearsay, Oprah was willing to dedicate a whole show on it and make “down low” into a household phrase and a supposed national emergency. If she was really as pro-black as people say, don’t you think she’d think long and hard before throwing black men under the bus with no proof?

Keith Boykin has written about the down low myth here and here. And one of the best pieces on the down low myth was by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Slate, and this excerpt was best, because it also gives some insight as to why so many white commentators of all political stripes also seem to love the movie Precious so much:

In the face of all the skeptical science, why is the belief in the Down Low menace so entrenched? For starters, there’s the phraseology, which hints at some carnal secret society, and is catchy to boot. It also helps that the Down Low is the sort of threat that white commentators of all political stripes like to condemn. Conservatives get to disparage black people’s inherent amorality (a band of men is endangering their families to have sex with other deceptive men), liberals can attack our inherent homophobia (the black community is so thuggish that the men can’t even admit to being gay), and everyone gets to agree that black America is, in a nutshell, a nuthouse. In short, shaking your head over the DL is the perfect way to shake your head over how awful it is to be black.

And what does Oprah get out of it? She gets to paint more black women as victims of awful, deceptive, sexually depraved black men. Her personal narrative now becomes cultural group narrative of all black women. Like she did during her big break when acting in Color Purple and continues to do to this day by backing Precious, she is only as pro-black as she needs to be until it clashes with her personal agenda of self-aggrandizement and scar worship, and at that point she’ll willingly help throw black men under the bus in order to make black women, and by association herself, look admirable.

White conservatives watching Precious get to lambast the Great Society and point fingers at the welfare queen stereotype Mo’Nique plays to prove how progressive liberal policies have ruined the black community. White liberals have a new movie to feel good about feeling bad about, absolving their guilt and proving once again they are the most caring people on the planet. Black people get a new meme in their neverending victimology and self-pity narrative. And Oprah and her ilk get to further normalize dysfunction while making their own success stories appear that much more remarkable.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out who doesn’t benefit from all of this.

Picking up where I left off in yesterday’s Part 1 of my Precious review, I’m now going to cover the history of the biggest promoter of the Precious movie, Oprah Winfrey. I’ve already covered how incest, abuse and dysfunction are recurring themes in the works of writer/director Tyler Perry, director Lee Daniels and author Sapphire. But Oprah is the bar-none queen of focusing on these pity-party-as-empowerment themes.

Oprah got her start in The Color Purple as an actress. It was a movie filled with black women who were victims of incest, physical abuse, verbal abuse. She regularly profiles sob story victims of abuse and dysfunction. She rarely finds a sob story she can resist, which is why she was so easily taken in by James Frey’s fraudulent junkie memoir A Million Little Pieces. Con man Yellow Kid Weil in his memoir discussed how a con man’s biggest tool is his mark’s greed:

DURING THESE YEARS I DISCOVERED MANY THINGS, BUT MOST
important I learned about people, their strong points and
their weaknesses — especially their weaknesses. All the people
I swindled had one thing in common — greed, the desire to acquire
money. But that was not always enough. In numerous cases there
was some other factor, some small desire that helped me to clinch a
deal…

I am not talking about small swindles, where an honest person loses his money. I have never been a party to such schemes. I have never taken a dime from honest, hard-working people who could not afford to lose. But the victims of confidence games are usually people who are wealthy and can afford to pay the con man’s price for the lesson.  I ought to know. I’ve had dealings with some of the wealthiest men in the country. They had plenty of money, but they fell for my schemes because they were greedy for more.

Weil said greed was responsible for creating the type of gullibility that made for an ideal con game target.  And it was Oprah’s greed that made Oprah the perfect target for James Frey con: she’s a glutton for dysfunction.  Her greedy appetite for it is endless.  She binges and purges continuously on confessions of degradation, paeans to personal pain and orgies of persecution and self-pity.  She can’t get enough.

Doubt me? Look at the books and movies she tends to produce or promote on her show.  Brokeback Mountain.   Tyler Perry movies.  Beloved, about ex-slaves living in degradation.  Is it any surprise Oprah was the venue MacKenzie Philips chose to reveal her own incest drama?  Go through Oprah’s Book Club selections and check out how many of her selections have to do with incest, sex abuse, rape and family dysfunction and you’ll discover a lineup that makes Lifetime Channel’s programming look like The Disney Channel:

• The Bluest Eye (black girl raped and impregnated by her father then beat by her mother, then later raped a second time by her father who commits suicide while the black teen becomes delusional and insane),
• Black and Blue (wife is abused by husband, who later tries to track her down and kill her for leaving), 
• Breathe Eyes Memory (black woman Sophia’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother, who was a victim of a rape, which produced Sophia.  The mother has nightmares of the rape, gets pregnant later in the book which causes nightmares of rape to worsen, starts imagining the baby is talking to her in the voice of the rapist, and the mother eventually kills herself while pregnant by stabbing herself in the belly with a rusty knife 17 times). 
• I Know This Much to be True (which covers deformity, insanity, AIDS, diabetes, SIDS, rape, homosexual rape, lesbianism, incest, wife battering, child abuse, police brutality, war, murder, suicide, divorce)
• She Comes Undone (A girl named Dolores’ parents divorce after the death of her infant brother dies at birth, and her mother has a mental breakdown.  She gets raped at 13 years old by a married, trusted older neighbor and becomes impregnated as a result of the rape, but later miscarries.  Depression causes her to overeat and become obese as she gets older, and her mother ends up getting murdered on the job after a big fight with Dolores.  She gets attacked and groped in college by some mean girls and frat boys, which causes her to run into the arms of a lesbian for protection.  Lesbian seduces her after both women engage in a night binge eating and binge drinking.  Later attempts suicide, ends up in a mental hospital, is forced to have an abortion, has a dysfunctional abusive marriage to the man who forces her to have the abortion, then is financially bled dry and cheated on by her husband).
• Middlesex (hermaphrodite is born to an incestuous marriage of brother and sister and has a whole ton of issues, too many to get into here)

I know it’s tempting to believe I’m just cherrypicking selective books and themes to make her look bad, but I challenge you to go to this page and research the plot of every book on that list not written by Bill Cosby and deny that these are by far the dominant themes of the stories that interest her.

Something else of interest. Tyler Perry also suffered through molestation and abuse. Guess who encouraged him to come out about it?

Filmmaker Tyler Perry has revealed that Oprah Winfrey inspired her to speak up about his horrific childhood days when he was abused by members of his family.

Earlier this month, the helmer had written an email to fans disclosing the violence he suffered at the hands of his father and paternal grandmothers during his childhood.

He had also revealed that a man in his neighbourhood had molested him.

Now, the ‘Madea Goes To Jail’ filmmaker has said that a 1991 special episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, in which she spoke about the verbal and physically abuse she was subjected to by her family members, made him realise how cathartic letting his secrets out could be.

“After I found a dictionary and looked up ‘cathartic,’ I realised what she (Winfrey) was saying, so I started writing,” the Daily Star quoted him as telling People.com.

Perry added that his new movie ‘Precious,’ co-produced with Winfrey, would raise the issue of child abuse.

He said: “The story of abuse in our community and in many communities is still a taboo subject.”

Oprah herself has gone on the record about her own abuse history repeatedly. She has discussed being raped at 9 years old by a 19 year old cousin, the first of three relatives she claims to have molested her. She said this abuse led to her becoming promiscuous and becoming pregnant at 14 years old, a baby she lost.

And this is where Oprah’s enthusiasm for the movie Precious comes in, and it goes a long way to explain her overal cultural agenda. Oprah wants to normalize dysfunction. She wants to make her personal obsession into everyone else’s personal obsession. She wants to make it seem like a more omnipresent and pervasive problem than it actually is, because if she can make every tragedy that occurred to her become perceived as normal, her childhood becomes normal by default. If you view every cause, movie, book or show she champions through this lens it becomes pitifully transparent. And the whole world is falling for it. And when you look at the abuse resumes of everyone involved in the creation of Precious and compare it to the things that occur in the story, you can see how they’re trying to normalize every piece of abuse in their collective pasts almost like going through a checklist.

Not only is this culture of dyfunction becoming seen as normal, it’s actually starting to become the cool and trendy to make abuse revelations. It has become the publicity stunt attention whore tactic of choice today. Stars are falling all over themselves to one-up each other in lurid, depraved abuse confessions. In fact, just in time for the release of Precious in fact, guess what? One of the stars of the movie, Mariah Carey, is suddenly confessing abuse!

Mariah Carey has been abused.

The ‘Obsessed’ singer – who married actor-and-rapper Nick Cannon in 2008 – has spoken out about how she has been affected by the struggle she faced in previous relationships and hinted her ex-husband Tommy Mottola was responsible for her ordeal.

She said: “Abuse has several categories. Emotionally, mentally, in other ways. I just think you get into a situation and you feel locked in. If your situation is similar to one of the situations I’ve been in, which I won’t harp on. For me, to really get out, it was difficult because there was a connection that was not only a marriage but a business thing where the person was in control of my life.”

Mariah wed music executive Tommy in 1993 after he signed her to the music label CBS Records. They separated just three years later and divorced in 1998.

The 40-year-old beauty also spoke out in support of ‘Rehab’ singer Rihanna, who was assaulted by her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown earlier this year following a pre-Grammy’s party.

Mariah admitted she can empathise with the 21-year-old starlet’s experience of domestic abuse.

It won’t be long until a functional family and marriage becomes something to keep secret and be ashamed of.

Next in part 3: Culture of Narcissism and Scar Worship

I had my arm twisted into going to see the movie Precious with a group of friends. As it got the stamp of endorsement from both Oprah and Tyler Perry, I pretty much knew to expect to have my senses mercilessly pummeled with propaganda about how poor, unfortunate and relentlessly abusive the mere act of living is for black women. But I must say, even with that in mind I was still unprepared for what I actually saw in the theater that day.

Not since Birth of a Nation OR Amos and Andy have I seen a movie portray blacks in such a positive light. It was quite possibly the most uplifting movie since Saw I through VI or Hostel. Not since the rough sex humiliation genre was created in pornography has a movie worked so hard to empower women and portray them respectfully. In all seriousness, if this movie was directed by a white person, based on a novel from a white person, and was being promoted as an authentic black experience by white media personalities instead of by Oprah and Tyler Perry, I guarantee you it would be picketed to death and considered a travesty. Yet because it gets the seal of approval from the top victomology tastemakers in Black America today, we have black people not only celebrating the most vile, disgusting minstrel show in decades but also encouraging nonblacks to view the movie in order to learn about the “authentic” black experience. In fact, I’ve encountered black people cry racism against white people who accuse the movie of exploitative and stereotypical and demeaning. That’s how twisted it’s become: we now have blacks not only celebrating insulting black stereotypes but angry at whites for not praising them as well.

The best way to describe this movie is “poverty porn.” I understand the desire to shine a light on unpleasant issues. It can also be arguably positive to be graphic and make the audience uncomfortable in order to avoid sugarcoating something unpleasant and to make the audience really care about something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. But Precious goes far beyond those first two goals and aims for pure shock value and emotional manipulation and twisted titillation. The scenes where the character Precious is being raped by her father shows a montage of shots that include pig’s feet frying (because she’s a fat, greasy piece of meat, get it?), then slow-mo closeups of Precious’ father applying handfuls of Vaseline to his sweat-drenched privates, cutting to Precious being mounted by said father and graphically humped, with shots of Precious’ mother watching from a doorway, then more closeups of bacon frying in fat (in case you missed the ham-fisted (pun intended) metaphor the first time around), then closeups on Precious’ morbidly obese body rocking back and forth from the humping…really now? As the details and depictions of abuse keep getting piled on higher and higher in increasing detail it becomes clear that director Lee Daniels is using the guise of a “message movie” to both giving himself license to be as fetishistic, lurid and morbid with the subject of abuse as he wants to be and giving the audience license to be titillated and scandalized to their heart’s content because everyone knows it’s a “message” movie, which somehow makes the voyeurism noble rather than twisted and indulgent.

The plot, if you don’t know, is about a morbidly obese, dark-skinned Harlem 16 year old illiterate ghetto girl named Precious who lives with her verbally and physically abusive mother, and has been repeatedly raped since the age of 3 by her father, resulting in two pregnancies, one of which resulted in a Down’s Syndrome child named “Mongo” (short for mongoloid).  The mother, when not verbally and physically abusing her at length, sometimes takes the time out to sexually abuse Precious as well by forcing her to perform oral sex on her while the mother masturbates.  The ghetto black boys in the street taunt her when she walks by and shove her to the ground for kicks.  Her mom blames her for the fact that she was raped by her father, is shown cursing out the Down’s syndrome baby Precious has by her father and later trying to injure the second baby Precious has by her father by dropping it and later trying to drop a giant TV on top of Precious and the infant from a great height (the TV narrowly misses).  Just as Precious escapes her toxic home environment and moves into a halfway house and starts feeling like she can get a better life, she discovers her father just died from AIDS and she is HIV-positive.  But wait! The move ends on an inspirational note.  What’s so inspirational after all of that you may ask?  Well, Precious gets to beat up her mom in one scene, gets to tell her off and make her feel crappy for once in a later scene before walking out of her life for good, and gets custody of both her kids to boot.  Sure she has no job, a death sentence, an 8th grade reading level, no family support system and two kids she has no means to support and who have no one in sight to take care of them when Precious dies, but don’t be fooled it’s an inspirational ending because she gets a small revenge on that mean old mom I guess.   Yes, her life goes from outrageously, improbably, cartoonishly shitty to just really, really shitty, which somehow now passes for inspirational.  The only thing I’d be inspired to do if I was remotely in Precious’ shoes after watching this movie is commit suicide personally, but hey, I’m not an Oprah fan or a NY Times movie critic so what do I know?  As a nonliberal I’m obviously morally depraved or emotionally stunted not to see the beauty of this movie.

The big problem with this movie is that it doesn’t care in the least about poor blacks. It just totally exploits them as sideshow freaks to gawk and laugh at, a vehicle to satisfy the various personal agendas of the creators and audience members while pretending to be an exercise in nobility and compassion.  I watched it in a predominately black theatre, and many of the scenes the audience was laughing or cheering at were disturbingly inappropriate, and much of that seemed deliberate based on how over-the-top the subject matter was presented. 

Let’s look at the people involved in this movie, either as creators or promoters.  Lee Daniels, the director, is openly gay and has been very vocal while doing press about this movie to describe how he was abused growing up by his dad for being gay. Oprah has long been vocal about the incest and sexual abuse she received growing up. Tyler Perry has recently come out as a sexual abuse victim and has gone on the record with his childhood horror stories to the press. Mo’Nique, one of the stars of the movie, has gone on the record as an incest and abuse survivor. Sapphire, the author of the book Push that the movie Precious is based on has said that she was an incest victim from the age of 3 years old. And with the exception of Mo’Nique, each of these participants is incredibly obsessed with stories of abuse, sexual depravity and dysfunction in their works.

Lee Daniels was the producer of Monster’s Ball, another piece of depression porn, race baiting and explicit sex scenes masquerading as social commentary and penetrating insight into the human condition. Next he produced the movie The Woodsman that was all about child molestation. Then his directorial debut Shadowboxing was filled with shock-value violence and sex, including an heavily-implied interracial incest angle between stepmom Helen Mirren and stepson Cuba Gooding, Jr.   The author of the source material, Sapphire, seems to have a preoccupation with rape and abuse stories in her work.  As bad as the movie was, her book is more intense, more graphic and more prurient, describing in detail how Precious performs oral sex on her mother, and ebonically correct passages like this:

He slam his hips into me HARD. I scream pain he come. He slap my thighs as cowboys do horses on TV. Shiver. Orgasm in me, his body shaking, grab me, call me Fat Mama, Big Hole! You LOVE it! Say you love it! I wanna say I DON?T. I wanna say I?m a chile. [...] Then my body take me over again, I come again. My body not mine, I hate it coming.
Afterward I go bafroom. I smear shit on my face. Feel good. Don?t know why but it do. [To the credit of the movie's creators, they somehow found the restraint to leave out the shit smearing.  Maybe they did it to avoid an X rating because I doubt it had to do with a desire to exercise good taste]

Tyler Perry’s works are also often filled with harrowing, detailed tales of abuse happening to characters over and over before things are allowed to end on a slightly more uplifting note.

And then there’s the reigning queen of the abuse-fetish, Oprah. Oprah has had a longstanding obsession with harrowing tales of dysfunction, abuse and incest, particularly involving black women (as well as pie-in-the-sky vague self-help cliches).  We’ll pick up tomorrow in Pt 2 with an in-depth analysis of Oprah’s career and mindset, and I’ll explain the selfish, self-serving motivation that explains why Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry and Oprah enjoy and promote such stories of dysfunction porn.

Click here for Part 2.