Discussion I

Film Review

The Welfare Queen and the Great White Hope

Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire (2009) (Lee Daniels, director)

The Blind Side (2009), (John Lee Hancock, director)

With domestic box-office receipts of some $50 million, Precious is the most extended encounter many Americans will have with black welfare recipients, and it reaffirms in every respect the most insidious stereotypes of the Welfare Queen and the rapacious black male.

If we inhabited a media world in which images of welfare families and, more generally, poor people of color were common, then perhaps we could and should think differently about Precious. We could judge it based upon how well it captured something about this particular family, or of pre-gentrification Harlem in the late 1980s. We could focus, as many rightly have, on the extraordinary performance of stand-up comic Mo’Nique as one of the worst mothers you’ve ever seen on film, yet one we come to pity and even understand, if just a bit: she’s a cruel, ugly monster, but Mo’Nique makes her a human one, not a caricature, and her more than two dozen Best Supporting Actress awards were earned. We could note the fine debut of Gabourey Sidibe and the wrenching tale of the title character she plays: raped, beaten, and emotionally abused since age three by her father and mother both, at age 16 about to give birth to her second incestuous child, virtually illiterate, homeless for a time, and HIV-positive. Where most would surrender to the impossibility of it all, Clarisse Precious Jones somehow rises up to take control of her life: she enrolls in an alternative school and, thanks to dedicated teaching, sassy classmates, and her own hard labor, even wins a literacy award from the Mayor’s office; with the help of a social worker played by Mariah Carey she confronts her mother and separates from that toxic household for good; she flirts with a sexy nurse played by Lenny Kravitz; she reclaims her children (the eldest of whom has Down syndrome), and by the end of the film is on her way toward happiness and high school, though probably not the celebrity she yearns for in the film’s dream sequences. The story is typical Hollywood fare, in its way, even if the setting is not.

But precisely because the central characters are black welfare recipients, it is not typical fare. American movies offer the public few images of the poor and welfare reliant, and almost never as the main characters. Perhaps not since 1974’s Claudine has a relatively mainstream movie had a family on welfare at its heart, although HBO’s The Wire does set much of its story in Baltimore public housing projects. It’s a curious absence, given how central the demonization of welfare has been to post-1960s backlash politics. Since these are families we so seldom see on film, and places (especially the welfare office) that movies rarely venture into, we have to ask if the director has a social responsibility to explain that the very dark

New Political Science, Volume 32, Number 3, September 2010

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/10/030453-5 DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2010.498215

image of poor women he presents is not typical (and it is a dark image, since there seems to be some correlation here between the lightness of a character ’s skin and their positive virtue). I instinctively want to ask more of Precious, and want to impose upon it some duty, to burden it with more weight than it wants to bear; but I also suspect that it is unreasonable and perhaps even dangerous to do so. Almost all artists, after all, are of necessity representing a part rather than the whole; it is from all these parts that we then each assemble, in cubist fashion, our own interpretation of our own mediated world. It is the viewer who ultimately has the obligation to make sense of any act of artistic creation or interpretation.

And yet . . . as Martin Gilens (see Why Americans Hate Welfare) and others have shown, relief programs and ideas about the work ethic are already racialized in the minds of Americans. What then is the impact of these 109 minutes of widely viewed, well-publicized, much-discussed film, which could have first been pitched to the studios by Charles Murray and the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector? Here we have, after all, an obese, pregnant child living in a profoundly dysfunctional single-parent household and attending a raucous and undisci- plined public school where she’s earned As just for showing up. Her mother is on welfare and food stamps, collecting for both Precious and her grandchild, lying to maintain her benefits and staging domestic scenes so that it appears to the social workers that her grandchild lives with her and Precious instead of with Precious’s grandmother. Yet the mother seems capable of work, even if she’s a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered, slovenly, chain-smoking, lottery-playing layabout who spends her days and nights listless in front of the television, waiting for Precious to cook and serve her meals. Precious’s father, who is, of course, also the father of her children, lives elsewhere and when present at all seems interested only in sex with the women of the household. About the only other men we see are hanging in the streets, causing trouble. And not to leave out even the hoariest of tropes, for breakfast one morning Precious not only steals, but steals a bucket of fried chicken. Betraying, perhaps, some of the politics of the filmmakers, one of Precious’s first acts of defiance is to tell a social worker some of the truth of her home life—thereby getting herself cut off of welfare. It’s an act of heroism here. Later her teacher points to the grave harm that welfare has done to her mother.

There are women on welfare who seem every inch the Queen, and there’s no reason to accuse the author or filmmakers of invention out of whole cloth. But such a type is, at best, some small minority of recipients. Most women, as decades worth of social science show, use relief for brief periods of time (about 18 months, on average) in ways most Americans seem to think appropriate: as a bridge between jobs, to escape an abusive relationship, to complete a college degree, as a means of accessing Medicaid for their kids, or to care for a newborn child or a sick family member. Given the pervasiveness of the stereotype, however, shouldn’t a filmmaker—and, especially, a black filmmaker—seek to undermine it, not to reinforce it? Or is that asking him to sacrifice an artistic goal for a political one, or to tell a story I want told, instead of his own?

One of the reasons why 1980s Cruising spawned protests from gay men was that movies at the time rarely offered them as protagonists, and when they did the characters were ineffectual fops, or, as in Cruising, sociopaths, sex addicts, and serial killers. But today, because film and television offer a much broader (if still circumscribed) array of images of gay men and lesbians, we no longer worry quite so much that each portrayal has a duty to represent the whole, or to present

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a positive image: that’s a mark of progress. We can better tolerate the stereotypically flighty and effeminate gay man (Jack in Will and Grace, say) because we also have crime-fighting, time-traveling, bisexual Jack Harkness on Torchwood and the exhaustingly dull gay professional couple on Brothers & Sisters. No longer does one character need to represent the entire class of things. But there is no multitude of welfare types in the movies. There’s just this film right now. Surely some (much? most?) of the audience assumes that this is a glimpse into the typical Harlem household, especially given that Precious so powerfully reinforces decades worth of malignant political rhetoric.

There’s a lovely 1949 essay by Ralph Ellison called “The Shadow and the Act.”1

Ellison’s subject is D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, one of the most influential—and explicitly racist—films in the American canon. As he writes:

In the struggle against Negro freedom, motion pictures have been one of the strongest instruments for justifying some white Americans’ anti-Negro attitudes

and practices . . . While the Negro stereotypes by no means made all white men

Klansmen, the cinema did, to the extent that audiences accepted its images of

Negroes, make them participants in the South’s racial ritual of keeping the Negro “in his place.”

Efforts to “deny the Negro’s humanity” were hardly new, but:

with the release of Birth of a Nation the propagation of subhuman images of Negroes

became financially and dramatically profitable . . . the anti-Negro image is a ritual

object of which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator.

For Ellison (we can find this in Siegfried Kracauer’s writings on the political uses and consequences of 1920s German cinema, too) the racism of Birth of a Nation and other less well-known films of the era served a social and cultural function. This dehumanization, he argued, helped shore up the foundations, “legal, emotional, economic and political,” of Jim Crow. Set aside the intent of Precious’s filmmakers (I am aware of no evidence to suggest any base motives on their part). Doesn’t the film risk making itself an ally of Reagan and Goldwater and Gingrich? Or of South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, who said in January of 2010, when talking about the dangers of free school lunch programs:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small

child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re

facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so

what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know

any better.2

One of the striking things about movies featuring homeless single men—just recently there’s The Soloist (2009), Resurrecting the Champ (2007), and The Pursuit

1 Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act (1949),” in Phillip Lopate (ed.), American Movie Critics (expanded edn) (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 192 – 97.

2 “S.C. Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer Compares Helping Poor to Feeding Stray Animals,” CBS News, January 25, 2010, available at: , http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_ 162-6139186-503544.html ..

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of Happyness (2006)—is that while the (often, though not always, black) man may appear to be the subject of the story, he almost never is. He exists, rather, as an object to be acted upon, as a means toward the redemption of another (who is often, though not always, white). The Soloist presents itself as a film about a Juilliard-trained cellist, played by Jamie Foxx, who struggled with mental illness and homelessness, but it’s really about the reporter, played by Robert Downey Jr., and his efforts to reclaim meaning in his work and save his marriage. Ellison makes a kindred observation about the movies he’s examining: “Obviously, these films are not about Negroes at all; they are about what whites think and feel about Negroes.” He asks us to note the “profuse flow of tears and sighs” from white audiences: it’s a sentimentality that takes the place of a clearer-eyed examination of social trauma and political wrongs, yet serves its function—self-congratulation. This was surely at work when audiences went to see The Soloist or, in much larger numbers, Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Many went not to see the film, but to have seen it, so that they would be able to report having seen it and to note the Very Important Issues it raises; perhaps, even, they went to be redeemed in some small way. Precious, it seems to me, fulfills some of that function too: the act of seeing the film substitutes for action directed at the problem and, comfortingly, confirms the futility of trying to solve it, since most of these characters seem irredeemable and designed to engender disgust or, at best, pity.

The racial politics (if not the class politics) are complicated here by the fact that the author of the book upon which the movie is based, the screenwriter, the director, and two of its most notable producers—Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry— are black. Winfrey and Perry are, of course, among the wealthiest and most well- known African Americans alive today, and their involvement is further complicated: both are childhood abuse survivors, and both have told interviewers that it was the story of Precious herself they focused on; it was her struggle and her eventual survival, if not triumph, that drew them to the movie. As Winfrey told Entertainment Weekly (June 11, 2009):

I realized that, Jesus, I have seen that girl a million times. I see that girl every morning on the way to work, I see her standing on the corner, I see her waiting for the bus as I’m passing by in my limo, I see her coming out of the drugstore. And she’s been invisible to me. I’ve done exactly what the people in this film did to her. I’ve seen her and not seen her. And I thought, “That will never happen to me again.”

Perry told the same reporter:

I was watching, like, 60 or 70 percent of my life played out on screen in front of me. I was sitting in my house, in my screening room, taken back 25 years to my childhood, looking at Mo’Nique’s character and knowing that that was my father, and still to this day, it’s the same way. So I was like, “People have got to see this.”

What responsibilities do these (exceedingly wealthy) celebrities bear for the dissemination and, thanks to their imprimatur, legitimization, of the most invidious stereotypes of poor blacks? And yet, in addition to its many film festival and critics’ organization honors, Precious won directing, screenplay, and best film awards, among others, from the NAACP, the Foundation for the Advancement of African Americans in Film, and the African American Film Critics Association. If prominent organizations of African Americans valued Precious enough to single

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it out for so many honors, who am I, a professional-class, white male, to pass judgment on the manner in which it represents poor, black women?

But I will, nonetheless: Precious is a beautifully realized portrait of survival, and a nasty and pernicious piece of work.

The Blind Side is a much more familiar and simpler kind of movie: the gruff but lovable hero is here played by Sandra Bullock. In the past, the character was played by Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver and Jim Belushi in The Principal. Sometimes, this character is lovable but not so gruff (see: Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers). Sometimes our hero is white, but not always (Morgan Freeman, Lean on Me). The narrative tends to unfold in predictable fashion, and at the heart of the story is the rescue of the poor (usually black and Latino) children from hopelessness, apathy, and despair. In the case of The Blind Side, economically enough for these recessionary times, it’s not the usual classroom full of children to be saved but just the one. But we always learn that the seemingly troubled and irredeemable kids really are all right; they’re just misunderstood and haven’t been on the receiving end of enough tough love. Once confronted with our gruff- or not- quite-so-gruff-but-nonetheless-lovable hero, after some time, and even some setbacks, they emerge from their shells, stand on their own, or take wing, for example. The taking wing part in The Blind Side is revealed as a talent for playing football, getting passing grades, and going off to college.

As I’ve already complained, in most movies that appear to feature poor people of color, it’s the redemption of the middle-class or well-to-do white protagonist that really sits at the heart of the narrative. The means to that end is an African American teenager named Michael in this version, and he’s more or less a football- playing cipher: large, passive, quiet, protective, a force mostly to be acted upon, not to act. The Blind Side’s particular take on this tale is no better but probably no worse than most of the others. Bullock has her charms, and country singer Tim McGraw turns in a creditable performance as the hapless, supportive husband. Through him, we are further meant to admire the gosh-darned determination of privileged Bullock to do the right thing, even when her rich friends raise their professionally plucked eyebrows over her latest do-gooder crusade (that is, the re- making of Michael). But she’s Sandy, dagnabbit it (and still America’s reigning sweetheart, I’m told on good authority), so they love her for it, with a little shrug and a hint of affectionate eye-rolling. Noblesse oblige lives gallantly on, in soft Southern accents and smart outfits. It’s not nearly as good a movie as Precious, but it makes up for it by being more innocuous than insidious.

STEPHEN PIMPARE Yeshiva University q 2010 Stephen Pimpare

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