Wipe Your Feet

I watched our screener of Precious last night.

When I heard about this movie, I felt both psyched and ashamed. Psyched because, as you may have noticed from my Hoardersing and Interventionizing, I really enjoy media that presents you with a horrible situation, then makes it worse. I can recognize brilliance in, and be totally entertained by, movies that are not of this Extreme category, sure, but I can admit that the genre of terrible life/extreme horror appeals to me. I’m not sure that I feel proud of this preference of mine, but I don’t want to call it a guilty pleasure. I’m not guilty. I like to watch horrible things happen, because it reminds me that people have imaginations. It’s also difficult to get your protagonist out of the situation you’ve put them in — a situation that you’ve compounded several times — in a way that doesn’t make people want to kill themselves after seeing your movie.

Is it manipulative to throw everything at your protagonist? Sure. “Oh, you don’t think, ‘Poor Precious?’ Wait until I do THIS to Precious!” I can deal with being manipulated by movies. I don’t like being manipulated in a way that doesn’t feel organic, though, and that’s kind of what I anticipated with Precious — I expected to stop in the middle of the movie and realize I was being manipulated, and then find myself unable to enjoy the story. How could you not expect this? Precious’ life makes Dickens look like Disneyland. Her child’s name is Mongo. The best I hoped for, to be honest, was camp — and that’s not something that in any way contributed to my apprehension. I love camp. But you could tell that this movie might unintentionally fall into the camp category. Fantasy flashbacks are something that I also find issue with, usually. In Hedwig, I had to kind of like, check my text messages when the janky illustrations and touching songs about completing one another popped up. But in Precious, these flashbacks served as a really welcome break from the POUND POUND POUND of bleakness on my eyeballs and brain. The flashbacks were just for contrast, they didn’t provide any alternate content, and this, I think, was a smart decision. Had there been a B-plot of Precious’ BET career, I may have taken a snack break. Instead, they were short, and full of boas.

Obviously, the real star of Precious is Mo’Nique. Mo’Nique has always been someone to whom I feel drawn, compelled to watch. I am not being ironic, at all. Mo’Nique, first of all, has, to me, the most beautiful face in the game. I could watch that woman eat clams, paint her nails, floss her teeth, or do her tax returns. Mo’Nique has some tough lines (talking about her “breasteses,” for instance) and you never once think, “Man, was Mo’Nique like, I don’t really feel like saying ‘breasteses’?” Mo’Nique first worked as a phone sex operator, monitoring conversations; I can only imagine the arsenal of life experience this must have provided. I can only imagine it, because I would not do it. It sounds horrible. She has a late-night talk show and works mostly as a comic. Maybe I didn’t expect this kind of brilliance from Mo’Nique, and now I feel like a first-class heel about it. This woman can do anything. I wish she hopped out of a fake dinner party conversation and into my real dinner party life. I hope she wins an Oscar and I hope she knows how much she blew my freaking mind in Precious, even though I don’t think she cares because she’s a big beautiful woman and she’s IN CONTROL.

Mariah Carey’s bleach-ghost moustache and keepin-it-realisms were used just enough. Glitter this was not. I didn’t want to see any more of Mariah than I did, but she did a good job. Her part seemed, to me, almost extraneous — I wonder if there were some cuts between her scenes with Precious? No matter. What color do you think I am?

I made my boyfriend watch Precious with me, even though my dad made him feel kind of ashamed that he was planning on accompanying me on a ride through the mind of a teenage girl. I think my dad had been under some pressure from my mom, who emailed me a few days ago to tell me that she has been watching reality TV about people who are over 500 pounds (a woman after my own heart), and was trying to form some kind of band of solidarity with Peter. Therefore, I offered Peter some of my Whole Foods sandwich as a bribe. The trick with offering food as a bribe is that you have to open said food, go “Whoa, this looks AWESOME” and then take a bite and be like, “Holy God, HOW DID THEY EVEN DO THIS TO A SANDWICH?” Then you pause. “Oh. Did you want some? Here, eat this while I go pop this in the player. No, no, it’ll be background stuff. While you enjoy this sandwich. Ooh, is this aioli? I forgot it had aioli!”

The problem with doing this for Precious is that Precious draws a correlation between eating and having a horrible life. Through a series of cuts that imply if this —> this, the viewer realizes that a good way to ruin somebody’s life is to serve them food and make them eat it. Bubblin on the stove? Having your father’s baby. Eggs in a pan? That baby’s got Down’s syndrome. Fix me some bacon? You worthless piece of garbage! The sandwich, half-decimated, sat until Precious had ended and SNL had begun. At that point, however, we were both invested. The sounds coming from our living room sounded like we were watching the home team lose at a particularly violent sport:

“Oh no, please!”

“Oh my God, no! Don’t do it! No!”

“Ah! No! No! Somebody please step in!!”

I had heard an interview with Lee Daniels on NPR a few months ago, when Precious opened. I decided that I didn’t really like him and that I didn’t feel like spending money on seeing the movie. I think, in retrospect, this worked out well because I got to see it for free (well, SAG initiation + dues, so I guess in a way I paid $2,000 to see it) in my living room. It was wrong of me to care about what Lee Daniels chatted about, because he made a damn fine movie. I’m admitting I’m wrong for the first time this decade, and it may be the last. Mr. Daniels, you did a great job. Congratulations.

[Edit: Jim Gibson reminded me of the title-cards-in-Ebonics fail. I have to agree. I didn’t even FEEL the Ebonics in the movie itself, so the title cards seemed to be an even weirder call; Precious doesn’t really speak in Ebonics. She speaks in Mumble. Why can’t the title cards be in Mumble? That I would have approved.]