So I saw Precious, again, last night with a group of friends. We all just laughed at it. A friend and I spent the two hours reenacting the "Precious! Precious!" scene from Silence of the Lambs. The exception was one girl who watched the movie cuddled up to her boyfriend in terror, inexpressibly disgusted at the torrent of despair porn the film inflicted on her. It wasn't the reaction you'd expect from a film that, to take a random critical blurb, is "full of life and love, well-meaning and, judging by the reaction in the US, a genuine and important phenomenon that says act- don't dwell- on your dreams."
But it's not surprising that bougie middle-class critics liked it. Precious is class warfare, naked and in-your-face class warfare, albeit of the patronizing liberal variety. To put it as simply as possible: everyone in the movie who's working class (save for Precious) is an awful person, while everyone who's a middle class professional is an absolute saint.
The film doesn't exactly give the poor characters devil horns and draw halos around the wealthier ones, but it comes as close as possible to doing so with one of the crudest devices available to film: it makes the poor people physically ugly (and very black), and it casts pretty and light skinned actresses as the middle class professionals (Mariah Carey is one of them). And boy, does the movie rub that difference in your face. You're treated to extended sequences of Precious' obese mom eating a greasy piece of chicken or dancing in skin tight clothing before going out to a club. The intended reaction of such lingering and voyeuristic shots is nothing but sheer disgust. There's an Oberlin student out there somewhere with 1000 words on how this is "the exploitation and objectification of black bodies"; suffice it to say that this isn't observant sociology but zoology.
Above are the good guys in the movie. The first, Mariah Carey, is Precious' social worker: patient, helpful, and smiley, not the harried and overworked bureaucratic functionary that real poor people are accustomed to working with. She directs her to light-skinned woman number two, Precious' teacher, who's a lesbian- I think we're actually meant to rejoice at how progressive that is- that lives with her partner in a tastefully adorned house with plenty of books and, I think, a piano.
And for the working class people? There's Precious' stepfather, who is only shown raping and impregnating her in flashbacks; the previously mentioned obese mother who hates and abuses Precious for being raped by her husband; obnoxious classmates in her old school who tease her for being fat and won't let her "learn" (her white teacher, on the other hand, is portrayed as another well-meaning savior, although he's helpless against the tide of cruelty directed at him by the poor kids); and street kids who harass and hurt her on the street for being overweight. Her neighbors in her apartment are invisible, non-existent; they don't even call the cops when Precious' mom beats her or pop their heads out of their apartments even to investigate.
There are her fellow classmates who are all girls and thus are all naturally bitchy, catty, and superficial. They're all initially hostile to Precious but are magically civilized by the light-skinned teacher (as is the typical power fantasy in these movies), and they even accompany Precious to the hospital where she gives birth to her baby- although they spend most of the time there hitting on a light skinned doctor. There's literally not a single poor character in the movie who is kind, or intelligent, or at all mutifaceted. At best the poor characters are just window dressing, at worst they're repulsive caricatures. And all of them are there in their resplendent ugliness simply so the film can brag that it's "keeping it real." The film's "gritty realism," however, is deployed in only one direction on the socio-economic ladder.
Precious herself is neither good or bad; she purely neutral, having less agency and independence than any other film protagonist I've seen for some time. Most of the film she spends crying and moaning about how she "can't do it," which sets her up to be immediately reassured by her betters. She's merely the territory, the beautiful soul, fought over by the working class beasts and the middle class beauties. The film is tireless in patronizing her, but the two ladies pictured above do all the thinking and acting for her- which is the real reason the establishment critics like the movie. (Spoiler alert: the light skinned middle class people win her from the poor people in the end.) The name of the film even implies as much: she's "Precious," like a gem, a pretty object owned by somebody to be doted upon.
Anyway, if I was a poor, working class person, particularly a poor black person, I think I would be absolutely furious at this movie. The system that represses them is beautiful and heroic for trying to save the poor from their own awfulness; the problem with poverty is poor people themselves. Now one can see why Precious received the critical acclaim that it did (it got a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes) in spite of its absolute lack of good qualities: it tells middle class critics that working class problems are all theirs to solve, that their failure in solving them isn't their fault, and that their ideology of patronizing liberalism is the savior of America's wretched. Like much propaganda, Precious is the voyeuristic exploitation of caricatured human ugliness for narrow political purposes.
