If the decidedly grim Brothers Grimm were born in post civil rights/third world population explosion-America and had lived and written their characteristically macabre stories today, the resulting works may have bore a striking, equally discomfiting resemblance to Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire aka Precious (2009), a less than supernatural but far bleaker modern ghetto fairy tale that even the imaginative Grimm brothers couldn’t conjure up. Directed by thoroughly self-obsessed black queer Lee Daniels, and based on the original, largely autobiographical novel “Push” by aberrosexual negress Ramona Lofton using the Afro-typically ostentatious moniker, “Sapphire”, Precious is a starkly realistic, and at times horrifying slice of life work about the turbulent and thoroughly disturbing adolescent years of a morbidly obese, fried chicken lovin,’ 16 year old mother of two, that delivers to the audience not only a brutally candid depiction of “traditional” (post-1960s) inner city American Negro life in 1987 (which remains unquestionably about the same, if not worse, today), but also renders a scathing, inadvertently incriminating portrayal of black culture, indeed reminiscent of similarly crafted “victim” genre films which seek to elicit pity and compel empathy from the viewer but ultimately serve to only further alienate and disgust the audience (in much the same way that certain films by queer auteur Rosa von Praunheim, specifically It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society In Which He lives (1971), sought the same sort of effect in offering a sympathetic, yet ultimately ruinous representation of hot-blooded homos). Indeed, with its rampantly chilling depictions of keepin’ it in the family incest (namely father-on-daughter rape resulting in pregnancy and daughter-on-mother assisted masturbation), flagrant welfare abuse, sickening scenes of family violence, fried chicken thievery and grotesque gorging of soul-sucking soul food (attention all ebony expansion porn/feeder enthusiasts—this is the film for you!), and a general sense of hopelessness that might render anyone suicidal, not least of all the racially-conscious white viewers largely funding debauched lifestyles like those depicted in the film only on a much grander scale, Precious, while classified as a drama, is wholly deserving of a slot in the top ten horror flicks of the last decade.
May 5, 2013
Precious
If the decidedly grim Brothers Grimm were born in post civil rights/third world population explosion-America and had lived and written their characteristically macabre stories today, the resulting works may have bore a striking, equally discomfiting resemblance to Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire aka Precious (2009), a less than supernatural but far bleaker modern ghetto fairy tale that even the imaginative Grimm brothers couldn’t conjure up. Directed by thoroughly self-obsessed black queer Lee Daniels, and based on the original, largely autobiographical novel “Push” by aberrosexual negress Ramona Lofton using the Afro-typically ostentatious moniker, “Sapphire”, Precious is a starkly realistic, and at times horrifying slice of life work about the turbulent and thoroughly disturbing adolescent years of a morbidly obese, fried chicken lovin,’ 16 year old mother of two, that delivers to the audience not only a brutally candid depiction of “traditional” (post-1960s) inner city American Negro life in 1987 (which remains unquestionably about the same, if not worse, today), but also renders a scathing, inadvertently incriminating portrayal of black culture, indeed reminiscent of similarly crafted “victim” genre films which seek to elicit pity and compel empathy from the viewer but ultimately serve to only further alienate and disgust the audience (in much the same way that certain films by queer auteur Rosa von Praunheim, specifically It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society In Which He lives (1971), sought the same sort of effect in offering a sympathetic, yet ultimately ruinous representation of hot-blooded homos). Indeed, with its rampantly chilling depictions of keepin’ it in the family incest (namely father-on-daughter rape resulting in pregnancy and daughter-on-mother assisted masturbation), flagrant welfare abuse, sickening scenes of family violence, fried chicken thievery and grotesque gorging of soul-sucking soul food (attention all ebony expansion porn/feeder enthusiasts—this is the film for you!), and a general sense of hopelessness that might render anyone suicidal, not least of all the racially-conscious white viewers largely funding debauched lifestyles like those depicted in the film only on a much grander scale, Precious, while classified as a drama, is wholly deserving of a slot in the top ten horror flicks of the last decade.
After brazenly walking off with a large bucket of fried chicken from a local “chicken and trout” style shop (her mother won’t give her any money, not even after she is presumably forced to assist her in masturbating in one particularly nauseating, yet thankfully unseen scene wherein she sickeningly summons her daughter to “come help mama out”) in order to feed both herself and the growing appetite of her gestating brother/child, poor, penniless Precious voraciously consumes its contents on her way to the alternative school where she becomes acquainted with her new teacher (incidentally, right as she is regurgitating all of the half-digested fried chicken into the school bathroom’s trashcan), a lipstick lesbian of mixed race origin who calls herself “Blu Rain,” along with a motley crew of contrasting yet equally ghettofied American and Islander negros and Hispanic females that one comes to expect in today’s inner city America—among them a hardened black butch (perhaps the most feral and menacing of all the lesbian subtypes imaginable), a petulant Puerto Rican or Dominican who instigates fights (and is subsequently thrashed and throttled for her transgressions by a suddenly and surprisingly pissed off Precious after calling her fat), a Jamaican negress who is hardly intelligible, and a prissy and popular black chick who likes to be in the spotlight at all times. As Precious continues her studies at the school, she slowly but surely learns how to read and write, albeit still at an elementary level, and in spending a significant amount of her time with “Mizz Rain” and her new ghetto girlfriends, Precious’ self-esteem is greatly elevated and she starts to feel hopeful that her life will truly change for the better. At the behest of school administrators, Precious meets with a social worker of ambiguous racial origin, Ms. Weiss (played by the annoyingly orgasmic singer Mariah Carey of black/Venezuelan/Irish origins who, quite interestingly, replaced Helen Mirren who was originally sought for the part) to discuss the horrific physical and incestuous abuse she has suffered at the hands of her mother (and the repeated rapes by her very own father by whom she is currently pregnant). Shocked by such arrant allegations, Ms. Weiss and Blu Rain strongly suggest to Precious that she consider relinquishing her son to an adoption agency immediately upon birth, such that both he and she can go on to lead relatively normal lives. In characteristically Negro fashion, Precious vehemently refuses, even though she knows that her son’s impending birth will very adversely affect any positive prospects for her future.
Following the birth of her son, whom she bestows with a rather Afrotastic name, Abdul Jamal Lewis Jones (and who was lovingly attended to at birth by assumed homosexual, “Nurse John,” played by Lenny Kravitz, another individual of mixed origin being both half black, half Jewish—suggesting something of a theme to the film), Precious brings the baby home with her, only to experience perhaps one of the most epic scenes of violence and abuse in the film in which mother Mary flagrantly drops the newborn infant to the ground (after kindly asking Precious if she can hold him), and upon Precious’ stealthy exit from the debauched home with her screaming, presumably injured little brother/son, Mary exacts further damage by trying to drop a TV on Precious’ head from within the stairwell of their high-rise section 8 tenement. Just narrowly avoiding the heavy projectile with baby Abdul in tow, Precious finally vows to herself to never speak to her mother again and winds up living in a halfway house. Following this highly traumatic incident, Precious makes a vain attempt to move on with her life by continuing her education and trying to raise her son in as nourishing and loving of an environment as an unwed, teenaged black mother raising her own brother/son possibly can, but inevitably, mother Mary re-enters Precious’ life to deliver perhaps the most foreboding, despairing news that she could possibly hear—that her father, a black brother presumably of the depraved “down-low” persuasion, had contracted the HIV virus and subsequently died from complications of AIDS (and probably quite quickly, as was the case in the early days of “gay cancer”). Either immediately choosing to deny the implications of her father’s death or altogether failing to connect the dots, Precious implores her mother to be tested. Precious is finally punctuated with further abject misery and horror with the discovery that Precious is indeed HIV-positive (baby Abdul, quite miraculously, is not). The tragic ghetto tale ends on a terribly bittersweet note with Precious continuing to attempt to improve her condition, but the shocked audience is certainly left to wonder: who could reasonably go on with their languishing life in any plausible way being essentially illiterate and morbidly obese, after having birthed two children by her own father, and winding up HIV-positive? Perhaps I am looking at the film strictly through the lens of my own mind and existence as an individual of an entirely different racial constitution, but surely by now, I would have taken my own life years prior seeing the bleak hopelessness of the situation, but this of course suggests the inherent, quite obvious differences between blacks and whites.
-Magda von Richthofen zu Reventlow auf Thule
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