I remember seeing the trailer to Precious many moons ago at a screening for Madea Goes to Jail, which I was brought to against my will. Seemingly every Black person in Central Florida was there and many of them actually thought Precious was a straight up Tyler Perry production. You can't really blame them since on paper Precious is right up his alley thematically. I ended up seeing the film and while everyone else volleyed between sorrow and disgust, I thought it was one of the most brilliant comedies I had seen in a very long time. I did not get why people were crying. This is a satire right? I've seen enough of Lee Daniels' work to know that he greatly enjoys using camp to make a point. If you watch the first few seasons of Empire you'll get my point the exact nanosecond Cookie shows up. But at the time, most audiences took the film for face value and it pretty much killed any appetite for this film overnight. Urban dramas or Hood Films had been dwindling in both production and popularity but they hadn't entirely died yet by 2009. Precious in many respects was the last nail in the coffin for the Hood Film having any mainstream popularity or even much popularity in its own community. One could argue that Tyler Perry took most of the same themes and just repackaged them in a more pious presentation. Precious definitely had an effect on how his work was perceived but I get more into that in his write-up which is here:
It's important to clarify the differences between Lee Daniels and Tyler Perry because the two do get compared a lot. Both make female focused dramas largely targeted towards the Black community. Both engage in some harmful stereotypes in their work, Lee in particular loves the tragic Black mother trope. Both are producer-directors who have a very identifiable style although Lee is the closest one out of the two who is anything resembling an auteur. The key difference is that Lee Daniels understands the language of cinema. The man definitely has an eye for captivating visuals. He knows how to get good performances out of his actors. The production value in his work is always fantastic. He's a very good director. He's is a bad writer and no amount of good directing can overcome a bad script. He's also not great at picking scripts if the bulk of his filmography is any indication. He didn't write Precious and the fact that's a cohesive film that doesn't have fiftyleven different things going on makes that fact very obvious. Please watch The Paperboy if you'd like a firmer illustration of what I mean. It's unhinged in the best way and I get a kick out of it. Because Lee Daniels understands how film works, and seems to have a thing for period pieces, he knows how to use that knowledge to make commentary on the medium itself. Precious imagines her ideal self as a blonde white girl and we get this information entirely non-verbally with her visualizing herself in the mirror that way. He has Precious prounce around like Diana Ross in her fantasies to impress her imaginary boyfriend Light Skinned Biracial Pretty-Boy No# 25706, although it was 2009 so maybe he was the model after they perfected Corbin Bleu. He uses Telenovelas to help Precious express her emotions in a way only slightly more dramatic than the film proper. He creates a New York that feels gritty, unforgiving, brutal and you understand entirely how a place like this could produce Precious. At the same time, his presentation of all these things and more is so campy and over the top, you can't help but wonder if he's taking the piss out of you.
A perfect example is the scene with Mary in the welfare office. In-universe, she is trying to garner sympathy from Mrs. Weiss and not lose her check. It makes sense narratively why she is acting the way she does. But in practice, it's almost vaudevillian. Her face is white, she's blubbering the whole time, her speech ranges from heart wrenching to insane with very little transition--it's pure camp. Mo'inque delivers her finest comedic performance in this film. She is insulting Precious with well timed quips. Her moments of physical abuse are so over the top and burlesque that it almost reminded me of a John Waters film. Even her body language and facial expressions are pushed to the utmost level. She doesn't just glare at Precious. She stares daggers straight into her soul. She doesn't corner the girl. She stalks and circles her as if her own daughter is prey. She's the best part in a movie that is already pretty solid. Camp thrives on delighting in bad taste and Mo'inque is swimming it in here. If one could change up the music and the lighting, they'd be forgiven for thinking these were deleted scenes from The Parkers.
On that note, Precious is one of the all time great film characters. Yes she suffers a lot, almost to cartoonish proportions, but she also exercises agency. She's the one who tries to learn to read. She's the one who reports her mother to the feds. She's the one who decides to leave and start a new life. She's the one who takes the chicken. That scene, funny as it may be, is actually pretty pivotal. You see her think about it, she's planning it out. The wheels are turning in her head. She takes it regardless of the consequences and runs away. She shows us early on that despite her circumstances, she's ultimately not just a victim. She rejects the idea everyone has about her and who she should be. She resolves to be the one who changes her own life. This film gets compared to The Color Purple and they do share some thematic elements. The key difference is that Precious ultimately makes her own happy ending and Celie does not. She's also very funny at times and has a dry sense of humor to her that many characters in similar films never get to display. She suffers but she doesn't feel like an avatar for suffering only to be gawked with shaking tisking heads.
Precious as a character feels like a response to the type of characterization that women who look like her tend to get in a lot of Black media, especially at that time. But more broadly, Precious as a film is a distortion, subversion and dissection of the misery porn/Hood Films that dominated Black media for a while. For one, it's a female led narrative which you'd think would be more common but this flavor of film was often from the male perspective. The hurt and damage the male characters inflict on women in those films is still from that point of view. Rarely do the women get to express their opinions or pain in a way that gives them an inner life. Black women are raped, beaten, pimped out, drugged out and in some cases killed in a lot of these films. In Precious, the men do not matter. Yes, one kicks off the plot and the characters do discuss the impact on men in their lives. But nearly every consequential character shown onscreen is a woman. The relationships Precious builds are with other women. Even the abuse we see onscreen is largely done by a woman. Precious does have a lot of anxiety as it regards men and her attractiveness to them but that is largely something she overcomes by the end. In any other film like this, most of these women are side characters at best. Here they get to control the narrative.
The absolutely dismal state of a good chunk of the characters is outlandishly overdone that you can't help but laugh. Here's a thought exercise: imagine that this story about a Black morbidly obese, illiterate, HIV positive two time teen mom abused by her own alcoholic, obese, uneducated mother who envied her infant daughter for being lusted by her father was written and directed by a white guy. Takes on a completely different tone, doesn't it? I actually told my roommate who is white that the director was named Ari Sapperstein and he told me that this was one of the most deeply racist films he had ever seen. I did tell him the truth but the fact that the maudlin levels of poverty, abuse and overall misery the characters endure feels like the work of a white writer who was trying to capture their idea of Black inner city life. The New York portrayed in this film isn't the hustlers' playground or an urban jungle full of opportunities for a hungry nigga with a dream. It's not overly dark to the point of seeming out of this world either. The stark lighting feels like a spotlight. Precious doesn't come home to a ghetto filled with colorful characters. The neighbors largely ignore her when she's being abused and she doesn't make friends until she's in what's essentially a remedial school. Mary isn't a long suffering mother character hoping her baby can get out of the hood. She's a product of an environment that itself is a product of a failure on the part of our society. The book plays all of this completely straight and in my opinion is much harder to get through than the movie.
If you're somewhat media literate, then you can see the dark comedy elements in the film. Even Lee Daniels thinks of it as a comedy. Mo'inque had a hard time getting through some of her monologues because she was laughing too much. They apparently had a hell of a good time making and I wonder if they ever thought it'd get this far. But most audiences took the film entirely seriously and I think that's what nixed the desire for anything else like this. Similar to when The Color Purple premiered, Black audiences were somewhat divided. Many felt that the film was so extreme it was almost unwatchable. As I said, the film paints an almost parodic depiction of inner city and the obstacles Precious endures especially THAT scene where Mary asks her a 'favor' could be too much for people to stomach. I think it's worth considering the context in which the film was released. Precious came out in 2009 the same year Barack Obama became president. Black Americans had a sense of hope for the future for the first time since probably the 60's with the signing of the Civil Rights Act. There was this feeling we had 'made it' and that assimilation and integration groups like the Italians, Irish, Jews and so on had experienced would finally happen to us. A film like Precious which on the surface dealt with very regressive and offensive depictions of Black womanhood and Black family life was considered gauche. Our president is Black and our Lambo is blue. Black Americans wanted media that spoke to JaQuan making six figures a year in Atlanta as much as it did Sharonda struggling on welfare in The Bronx. This is also why during the early to mid 2010's you saw an increase in comedies about the Black community largely removed from real world issues, think Girls Trip or Think Like a Man.
Precious showed Black audiences exactly what they had been watching for twenty years at that point and they were not pleased. Lee Daniels basically said 'damn, y'all like this shit forreal?' for two hours. Is there much daylight between something like Precious and Baby Boy? Not really. I think the comedic angle definitely played a part in people's perceptions of the film. I wouldn't say most people think of it as a comedy but it's so absurd in its drama and presentation that you can't help but laugh. Precious did its job so well that you really don't see this type of film anymore. If you do see films that wade into the misery porn waters, they tend to be indies and/or queer films. Moonlight is the closest thing I can think of and that film is decidedly not a comedy in any respect. If there are other films like Precious being produced then they aren't being widely released and not seen by wider audiences. Nothing like that has been nominated at the Oscars again except for Moonlight which itself feels like a response to the hypermasculinity of the 90's Hood Films.
The Hood Film didn't exactly go away but it shifted its approach and focus. American Gangster wasn't exactly revolutionary in its approach but it did make money and it elevated the Hood Film to the same operatic heights that films like The Godfather, Casino, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed achieved. Ridley Scott isn't a flashy director but he's certainly a classy one. The Black protagonists and their world are portrayed with the same level of dignity and style all his other protagonists get. If Precious and Moonlight are responses to the Hood Film, then American Gangster was the refinement of it. It delved into the person of Frank Lucas and unpacked him in a way you rarely saw with Hood Films in the 90's. Power, Godfather of Harlem, Empire, P-Valley, BMF, The Family Business, Snowfall and so many others have followed in this path. The characters here are still drug dealers and criminals but now they present themselves as legitimate businessmen. These buttoned up slick mouthed characters get much more moments of pathos than their spiritual precedents ever did. We've moved on from the roughneck portrayals of Black men struggling in the hood to basically doing The Goodfellas but for the heavily melenated.
As the years go by, I think history will only be kinder to Precious. It has yet to achieve the status of 'problematic but classic' that The Color Purple, and honestly a lot of Black media, has attained. But people are revisiting both the film and their feelings on it. Precious is hard to watch not only because of the subject matter but because the subject matter is presented in a way that makes you uncomfortable and therefore forces you to analyze the themes in other films of that type. I think it deserves the same 'this film still holds up' type of adulation that much poorly constructed films get all the time. It's a hard watch at first but once you see everything Lee Daniels is playing with, it becomes a fun one.
