Bad Feminist: Essays (28 page)

Early on Eliza, played by the immensely talented Adepero Oduye, has been separated from her children—an alarmingly regular occurrence during the slave era. Eliza is so overcome with grief she can hardly bear it. She spends most of her time sobbing, inconsolable. Solomon questions her grief sharply and offers some pabulum about wanting to survive. Before long, Eliza is sold off because no one wants to share in her pain or be forced to see it. Solomon is seemingly unmoved by this turn of events, which begs the question, which comes up often, of why the subplot has been included.

In the second half of the movie, Solomon is sold to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who is renowned for his ability to break slaves. Epps is insane and unrepentant. He has a predator’s fondness for Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), whom he reveres and abuses in equal measure. Ultimately, Patsey’s suffering is the most devastating in a movie where nearly everyone suffers. So profound is her misery that Patsey begs Solomon to kill her so that her suffering might end. He declines, which is as cruel as it is understandable.

It should be noted that
12 Years a Slave
does a remarkable job of revealing the ways in which white women were complicit in slavery. Sarah Paulson is absolutely chilling as Epps’s wife, Mistress Epps. Epps acts like a jealous lover whenever Patsey is not within his reach and does not bother hiding his feelings from his wife. Mistress Epps resents Patsey for the place the woman holds in her husband’s heart and misses no opportunity to direct cruelty toward Patsey.

Most movies about slavery have a fetish for depicting the mortification of black flesh, and
12 Years a Slave
is no different. There are a number of scenes where slaves are whipped for one infraction or another. When Solomon is first captured, he is “taught his place” with a beating. Slaves are punished for not picking enough cotton. The most harrowing scene is one where Patsey is punished for going to the neighboring plantation for a bar of soap with which to clean herself. Epps is so angry and sick with jealousy, he finally brings himself to whip Patsey, but then he can’t do it. He hands the whip to Solomon, who is reluctant to take part in this brutality but well aware he has no choice. Solomon does his best to mete out his master’s punishment, but in the end, Epps is not satisfied. He takes the whip from Solomon and uses it on Patsey himself. By the end of the scene, she is barely conscious, her back rent open and bloody. The scene is visceral, as it should be, but it also feels gratuitous because the scene is not designed to amplify Patsey’s plight. The scene is designed to amplify Solomon’s plight, as if he is the more tragic figure in this situation.

I do not want to diminish the suffering of anyone during the slave era. Men and women were subjected to unspeakable atrocities. Solomon Northup’s story is particularly troubling because it shows how vulnerable all black people were, free or not. What I resent in
12 Years a Slave
is how the suffering of women is used to further a man’s narrative. There is, for example, a rape scene that carries little narrative relevance. Patsey lies, inert, beneath Epps. It’s a repulsive scene, so in that regard, McQueen has done his job, but it doesn’t seem essential to the movie because the primary story is not Patsey’s. It’s a gratuitous, unnecessary reminder that yes, women were raped during the slave era.

Ultimately, Solomon Northup is freed because he has finally gotten word to his family in New York that he is alive. The moment, like much of the movie, is strangely muted. We’re clearly supposed to feel something, but it’s hard to know quite what to do with that emotion. Before Solomon leaves the Epps plantation, Patsey runs into his arms, and they embrace. We know nothing of what happens to Patsey, beyond what we might imagine, because she has already done the necessary work of staying on the sidelines while Solomon is dispatched unto freedom once more.

My reaction to
12 Years a Slave
is born, largely, of exhaustion. I am worn out by slavery and struggle narratives. I am worn out by broken black bodies and the broken black spirit somehow persevering in the face of overwhelming and impossible circumstance. There seems to be so little room at the Hollywood table for black movies that to earn a seat, black movies have to fit a very specific narrative. Movies like
Love & Basketball
or
The Best Man
and
The Best Man Holiday
are perhaps not Oscar material, but they are certainly movies that also capture the black experience, and somehow, they are often overlooked in conversations about serious movies. Filmmakers take note and keep giving Hollywood exactly what it wants. Hollywood showers these struggle narratives with the highly coveted critical acclaim. It’s a vicious cycle.

There is no one way to tell the story of slavery or to chronicle the black experience. It is not that slavery and struggle narratives shouldn’t be shared but that but these narratives are not enough anymore. Audiences are ready for more from black film—more narrative complexity, more black experiences being represented in contemporary film, more artistic experimentation, more black screenwriters and directors allowed to use their creative talents beyond the struggle narrative. We’re ready for more of everything but the same, singular stories we’ve seen for so long.

Not everyone is ready for this change, however.
12 Years a Slave
received nine Oscar nominations and won the 2013 Oscars for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, Best Writing—Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture.

Tyler Perry loves to tell a good morality tale. Whether his movies or stage plays are offering up what goes for humor in Perry’s universe by way of Perry in drag as Madea, or chronicling a wealthy man learning how to be true to himself and others, or following tight-knit friends as they weather the trials of marriage, there is always a lesson to be learned, one supported by fidelity, fortitude, faith, and a touch of fire and brimstone. Tyler Perry would have us believe that his conception of God is in everything.

He has been writing plays and films since he was twenty-two. Perry’s start was modest, staging his first play at a community theater, and less than a decade later, his plays were a popular mainstay on the chitlin’ circuit. In 2005, he wrote and produced his first movie,
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
. Since then, Perry has been a box office success, his films grossing more than a half billion dollars.

Perry’s rise is noteworthy for many reasons, not the least of which is that he understands real power in Hollywood lies in the complete ownership of creative work. Perry writes, directs, produces, and often stars in his movies. He has several television projects in production and a lucrative distribution deal with Lionsgate films. He owns and runs Tyler Perry Studios, the rare black-owned production studio in the United States. He has collaborated with kingmaker Oprah Winfrey and counts among his coterie of friends any number of influential and “important” people. In many ways, Tyler Perry seems unstoppable, and to see a black man achieve this kind of success in a notoriously exclusive and predominantly white industry is laudable. I cannot bring myself to say more than that, though some might call Perry’s success inspiring.

The problem is that Tyler Perry is building his success on the backs of black women and the working class, by using them, all too often, to teach his lessons, to make his points, or to make them the butts of his jokes. In many of Perry’s movies, women are not to be trusted. Women are regularly punished in these movies, whether by abuse, addiction, or adultery. While there are “good” women in his films, there are so many bad women—women who are unfulfilled by their lives and/or marriages and are then punished when they try to find fulfillment. An unspoken message, all too often, is “You should be grateful for what you’ve got.”

Temptation
features a fairly talented cast including Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Lance Gross, Vanessa Williams, Brandy Norwood, and, perhaps most oddly, Kim Kardashian, who is exactly as terrible in this movie as you would expect. There were high hopes for this film, born of the optimism that finally, after years of writing, directing, and producing plays, screenplays, and television scripts, Perry might finally move beyond the mediocrity so much of his work is mired in.

Certainly,
Temptation
is one of the most polished of Perry’s films, but that is not saying much. The movie is still hampered by uneven acting, strange directorial choices (e.g., Vanessa Williams’s “French” accent), a weak screenplay, and some rather sloppy editing. At one point Lance Gross, as Brice, hoarsely shouts “JUDITH,” over and over. During the screening I attended, every single person began laughing, loudly. It was not meant to be a humorous moment.

It is saying something that these are the least of
Temptation
’s worries.

When the movie opens, a marriage counselor chooses to ignore professional standards and tells a client contemplating infidelity about her own “sister”: Judith fell in love with her husband, Brice, when they were mere children, married very young, and ended up in Washington, DC. She works as a counselor for a high-end dating service while Brice is a pharmacist for a small drugstore. They have a modest apartment and a modest but good relationship.

We’re supposed to believe Judith is dissatisfied, though her dissatisfaction is never really expressed save for when Judith is dismayed by things like her husband forgetting her birthday for the second year in a row or when she balks at Brice suggesting it will be ten or fifteen years before she can start her own counseling practice.

Enter Harley, a handsome billionaire in talks to partner with Janice, Judith’s boss. This is the flimsiest of pretenses, and Perry never bothers to make this plot even a little plausible. Judith and Harley’s attraction is palpable, and thus begins a seduction that Judith rebuffs for quite some time because she is married and a “good girl.” The seduction includes innuendo, flowers, and meaningful staring. This is a morality play, after all.

Eventually, Harley flies Judith to New Orleans for “business” on his private jet, always the gateway to sin, and they enjoy the city, oblivious to her marital obligations. On the return flight, despite Judith openly saying no to Harley’s sexual advances and fighting him off, the couple engages in what looks a lot like rape but is thinly disguised as sex. This is the beginning of Judith’s end. This is the climax of Perry’s morality tale. Woman, thou art fallen.

By the end of
Temptation
, Judith has been punished and severely. She descends into a so-called hell on earth, dressing provocatively, drinking too much, quitting her job, and disrespecting her mother, her marriage, and herself. She is violently beaten by Harley, only to be rescued by Brice—the good man, the steady man. Most egregiously, Judith contracts HIV and ends up single, a broken woman, limping to church while Brice lives happily ever after with a beautiful new wife and young son. He is, of course, still his ex-wife’s pharmacist.

There are so many appalling elements to how this sordid morality tale plays out. There are so many appalling messages about sexuality, consent, the ways men and women interact, ambition, happiness, and HIV.

As with most of Perry’s movies, good black men who are content with their stations are the moral compasses by which we should all set our true north. Perry would have you believe the road to hell is paved with personal and professional happiness. Ambition is dangerous and not to be trusted, especially in a woman.

Perry has a finely honed obsession with fetishizing the working class, which, in and of itself, is not a problem and could almost be admired. It’s that his motives are disingenuous. It’s that Perry denigrates one thing in order to elevate another instead of suggesting that there is pride to be had in being working class but that aspiring toward anything more isn’t inherently evil. That the wealthy are regularly demonized in Perry films is quite the irony given the enormous wealth Perry has amassed from a largely working-class audience.

Time and again Perry’s movies follow a pathological formula where truth, salvation, and humility will be found by returning to working-class roots. In
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
, a wealthy lawyer, Charles, throws Helen, his wife of eighteen years, out on the street. She learns to stand on her own, with the help of her working-class family. She slowly falls in love with Orlando, a working-class man. Because Perry loves to punish his characters to make a point, Charles is shot in the back by an angry client and only has Helen to turn to because his mistress has abandoned him. Through Helen’s kindness and the goodness of God, Charles learns to walk again, and though he wants to reconcile with his wife, she divorces him and runs to Orlando. The working-class man triumphs over all.

In
The Family That Preys
, ambitious Andrea desperately wants more out of life than she has with her construction worker husband. She has an affair with her wealthy boss, William, enjoying all the trappings of both her own success and her infidelity. There are lots of machinations involving a family business and the like. In the end, Andrea ends up poor, alone with her son in an apartment while her now ex-husband thrives. Yet again, the working-class hero rises.

Good Deeds
, one of Perry’s more recent films, follows wealthy Wesley Deeds, who has always done what is right and expected of him. When he meets Lindsey, a down-on-her-luck single mother who cleans his building, he begins to realize he wants more out of life. Instead of relying on the “magical negro” trope seen in many movies (see
The Help
), Perry uses the “magical sassy maid” trope to his advantage. To round things out, Wesley’s wealthy mother is kind of evil and his wealthy brother is a resentful alcoholic, but Wesley is saved from the perils of wealth by quitting his job so he can go find himself, accompanied by Lindsey and her daughter of course, in Africa.

Perry is not only intensely concerned with class. Sexuality should be chaste and contained if you are a woman. Trying new sexual moves with your husband is unbecoming, but if you are a man, you should take whatever it is you want from a woman. Perry would have you believe a just punishment for infidelity and human frailty is HIV. He is gleefully trading on ignorance because he is a small man with a limited imagination.