Discovering Precious

On Thanksgiving night Brock and I began a tradition--which makes this the first annual--of going to see a movie after spending daylight hours stuffing ourselves with turkey and dressing. We were fifteen minutes early to see Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, but I suppose that was equitable to be thirty minutes late on Thanksgiving because the movie was already sold out. Fuck, even Old Dogs was sold out, not that I would've considered seeing it. I may have been sweet potato-fat, but I still had my dignity.

We bought tickets to the 10:30 movie instead and returned home to clean for the two-hour interim. So we did and I was grateful for our being forced to see the later show so that we could leave the house looking perfect and cranberry-cleaner smelling (another thing I love about Thanksgiving, besides getting fat: its insistence that you change out of dark perspectives). I stuffed the requisite tissues and can of Diet Coke in my purse since I'd heard this was the kind of movie you have to prepare for.

And it was, oh my god, it was. It's been years since I've seen a movie with this kind of intensity, and even as I say that phrase--it's been years since--I feel I'm hitting a false note because honestly I've never witnessed anything comparable to this. Monster's Ball, In the Bedroom, you both are so weak. While watching this film, at the point you hope-hope-hope something awful doesn't happen to your sad protagonist, Precious, it happens, but much-much worse than you expected it to. I won't give away details, because presumably you will see it and we can talk about it. My point in writing this is instead to reveal to you the odd behaviors occurring around us as we watched the movie, and try to discover why it went down this way.

I won't mince words: we were the only two white people (as white as I can consider myself) in the movie theater. We were the first to arrive because we wanted our perfect upper-deck seats, and the auditorium filled up quickly. Something else I won't mince words about, even though it's perverted and I'm not proud of it: it's thrilling for me to be a dwarfed minority in public places. For a few moments I feel like, hey brothers and sisters, I'm one of you--I care about the same things you care about, watch the movies you want to watch, empathize with the very feelings you own. In other words, I love all of you.

Before you react, just know I realize how very Harper Lee, how very dumb-admiring-from-afar-white-woman this is of me. My heart might be something to admire if it were for my oft-piddling brain.

Tangible evidence of why my thrilled mentality was problematic: the audience members behaved very badly throughout the entire movie. I'm not saying they fulfilled any racial stereotype, no, it was worse than that. On the whole, this audience hated the movie. It might be said here that the entire cast of Precious is black, and that the characters' circumstances are beyond bleak, and that the way these elements are evoked on the screen are hyper-realistic. Literally you can see every pimple and scar and twitch of a character's face. The camera is unrelenting. Much like a horrible car accident, you know you must look away for fear of what's inside, but you can't. And when you look, you cry at the inexplicable. In short, Brock borrowed half of my Kleenex. My husband is not a crier.

But around us people were bored. They were texting. They were laughing at those horrifying scenes that tensed up my calve muscles, tensed up my teeth. Moments when the movie gave us a brief respite from the sadness and one of the characters said or did something hilarious, the audience remained stoic, texted some more. Every one of the audience's visceral responses was the exact opposite of mine.

* * * * *

Let me give a brief respite from this audience analysis and take you a year or two into the past. I was (and still am) in love with Barack Obama and was dedicated to electing him our next president. So along with making phone calls, door knocking, and spreading the word as effectively as family and Facebook will allow, I was becoming someone else I'm not very proud of now: a vigilante.

The perpetrators I was to uncover and out to the world were the racists. I saw them everywhere I went. White man in a fishing cap = racist. Old white woman with perfectly manicured French-tip fingernails smoking a cigarette outside of Buddy's gas station = racist. Mini-van with a Sarah Palin bumper sticker = mini-van full of racists, even the kid in the carseat (okay okay--future racist). It was a sense I got from certain people. Of course I didn't believe all whites were racist, but if I felt something askew about them, if they squinted at the sun in a certain way, Racist was the invisible sign I'd frame above their heads. If what I was doing weren't so damaging and ignorant, I would've seen myself as a hapless Inspector Clouseau. Instead I was the one-woman member of the John Birch Society, only in reverse.

Months and years later this reminds me of the story my landlord Clay told me about when he was held up at gunpoint by two black men in his home. The lesson he learned, he said, was to be more vigilant around black people. Of course not all of them are bad, he reminded my increasingly horrified visage, but after the robbery he'd picked up a sixth sense about these things, and in public he was able to root out the bad ones from the good.

Meanwhile I thought the Palin rallies had similarly taught me where rotten could be found in white. But I justified this to myself: I was on the right side of history, and these dipshit troglodyte bottom-feeders prayed to God that the nigger would go to hell. They truly deserved my contempt.

Please don't equate these admissions with the idea that I blindly supported Barack Obama because of my reverse-John-Birch-Society mentality. I haven't been sitting around these past five years after poor milquetoast Kerry was defeated and looking for a splendid black man to support. He just showed up, happened to be black and was a terrific writer and brilliant mind, the latter two being the reasons why I ultimately supported him (and which admittedly have little to nothing to do with politics or someone's ability to run the government, but I didn't--and still don't--care much of a lick about that).

* * * * *

So the audience members I blindly loved in my blind comraderie did not love me nor Precious. When the movie was over I slapped myself silently a couple of times to restore color to my cheeks (how 19th century of me), dried my eyes and walked with Brock to the men's bathroom, where I waited outside. A group of ladies walked passed me and lamented, "Shit, we shoulda seen New Moon. We coulda seen Old Dogs."

I wanted to stop them and ask what they were looking for in their movies, what kind of entertainment they thought a bunch of white teenage vampires who--gasp!--cannot fuck could provide them. Yes, this is snobby of me--there, I said it: to hell with New Moon--but I'd just seen a transformative, real, existential kind of movie, and these women seemed put out by it.

Secretly I wanted to say, Do you know what's good for you? Do you need me to tell you what can be learned from this film?

John Birch Society all right, but not so much in reverse at this point.

All the way home I cried intermittently for the movie and for the audience reaction. Brock suggested this particular audience reaction (he's a very careful, deliberative liberal white man) might have rejected the movie for its sheer realism. "It's Thanksgiving, after all," he said. "Most people probably don't want to experience this kind of pain today."

Then I asked him about Tyler Perry, why his films are so popular among the black community. I described to Brock the Perry film I just saw a few weeks ago, Why Did I Get Married?, in which four couples go on a mountain retreat to reevaluate their lives together. What was stunningly lame about this movie was how each couple and each individual fit into some black stereotype I believe was created mostly by white people (or media, or history--essentially, white people): there was the always-drunk woman, the fat god-fearing woman, the rampant infidelity among three of the couples, the welfare-check collector, the gold digger, the guy with VD. The characters were black but they weren't real. Even if black people of these types do exist, these particular characters struck only one note in the entire range of human emotions and behaviors. They encapsulated one or two ways of being only, and that just isn't right, Mr. Perry. Though he's clearly doing something right; his movies are some of the highest grossing of any auteur filming today.

"They watch him because he's easy, because he doesn't make them think," suggested Brock.

Then again, what the fuck do I know? Where are my real, fleshed-out human black friends for whom to base my Tyler Perry character comparisons? Why aren't they coming over to my mini post-Thanksgiving party today?

My black friends are out there, I'm sure, living meaningful, purposeful lives, reading Richard Wright novels and working diligently to support minority voting rights and absolutely falling in love with the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. I just haven't met them yet.