Bad Feminist: Essays (29 page)

Part of the pleasure of the movies is stepping away from reality. One of Perry’s most significant problems, however, is how he completely reconstructs reality to suit his purposes in ways that are utterly lacking in artistic merit.

Many of the choices he makes in
Temptation
are blatantly contradicted by factual reality. People are marrying later than ever before, so we have to suspend our disbelief as Perry constructs this fairy tale that Judith and Brice would meet as young children, stay in love, marry as teenagers, and go on to complete both undergraduate and graduate educations. In a study of first marriages as part of the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth, researchers found that the median age for a first marriage is 25.8 for women and 28.3 for men. Black women had the lowest probability of being in a first marriage by the age of 25. Women with a bachelor’s degree were also less likely to be in a first marriage by the age of 25. But let’s suspend our disbelief just enough to imagine this young couple married and happily so.

Perry has also set
Temptation
in a world where divorce is the exception rather than the rule. The reality is that marriages end and often. The statistics for marital longevity are not on Judith and Brice’s side, so the idea that Judith is a sinner among sinners for wanting more from her marriage or wanting out of her marriage is absurd.

Then there is this matter of so callously dealing with HIV as if we are still in the 1980s, full of profound ignorance about the disease. Perry shamelessly exploits HIV for the sake of his very narrow and subjective morality when HIV disproportionately affects black women who make up so much of his core audience. The disservice he does to this audience is hard to stomach.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the rate of new HIV infections is twenty times higher for black women than white women. An estimated 1 in 32 black/African American women will be diagnosed with HIV infection in her lifetime, compared with 1 in 106 Hispanic/Latino women and 1 in 526 white women. These are staggering statistics. Dealing with HIV prevention, treatment, and the stigma surrounding HIV are important issues for the black community, issues deserving of both critical and creative attention. That attention should be handled ethically and with human decency—concepts with which Tyler Perry seems to have no familiarity. His oeuvre has given me little confidence that Perry can handle any part of the human experience.

Of course, also according to the Centers for Disease Control, HIV prevalence rates are inversely related to annual household income in urban poverty areas. The likelihood of a woman in Judith and Brice’s demographic contracting HIV is not very. Statistics show that the more educated people are and the more money they make, the less likely they are to contract HIV. As he so often does, Tyler Perry wants to have it every which way but right, and a high cost is being exacted so this man can get exactly what he wants.

I attended a press screening of
Peeples
with a predominantly black crowd. It was the first time I’d seen a Tyler Perry production with his target audience. An hour before the screening, the line snaked all the way out the theater and into the auxiliary parking lot—I’d guess more than a hundred people were turned away (and they were none too pleased, so eager were they to get a sneak peek at Perry’s latest project). Those who did get in were vocally appreciative throughout.

However troubling Perry’s messages, however poorly written, directed, and produced his movies might be, he gives black people a chance to see some version of themselves on the big and small screens. For better or worse, he is the oasis in a cultural desert of black entertainment.

Peeples
was written and directed by a black woman, Tina Gordon Chism, who also wrote the winning
Drumline
, which starred Nick Cannon and Zoe Saldana.
Peeples
has an even better cast, including Craig Robinson, Kerry Washington, David Alan Grier, S. Epatha Merkerson, Diahann Carroll, and Melvin Van Peebles. Robinson plays Wade Walker, an affable man who surprises his live-in lawyer girlfriend, Grace Peeples (Washington), at her family compound in Sag Harbor, only to learn her family doesn’t even know he exists. Hijinks ensue as a family normally hell-bent on keeping up appearances and pleasing the patriarch—Grace’s father, federal judge Virgil Peeples (Grier)—learns to be more honest with one another about who they each really are.

Peeples
is a pretty good movie, even if we’ve all seen it before. (It’s basically
Meet the Parents
.) It is not a great movie, mind you; like many of Perry’s own movies, the talented cast is forced into roles that are written without much substance. But they make the very best of the material and keep us entertained from beginning to end. Chism’s direction is assured. Though she hasn’t written great characters, Chism does make sly jokes that audiences familiar with black culture are sure to enjoy, shrewdly sending up black fraternities, for instance.

I had hoped that
Peeples
would help push Tyler Perry to become an incubator of black talent. The movie made me want to see more from Chism, as both a screenwriter and director. And I still hope this is a beginning of a vibrant career for her—and that Perry provides similar opportunities for other talented black artists.

Sadly,
Peeples
bombed. I had high hopes for this movie, not because it was good but because it was certainly as good as any other movie being released these days. In its opening week, the movie made only $4.6 million while appearing in more than two thousand theaters. The second week was even worse, with the movie bringing in only $2.1 million. Early May 2013 was, perhaps, a bad time for a movie like
Peeples
to be released, what with all the early summer blockbusters like
Iron Man 3
,
The Great Gatsby
, and
Star Trek Into Darkness
being released around the same time. Still, the movie should have done better. At the very least, it should have gotten a boost as counterprogramming to the explosive 3-D and CGI-enhanced pomposity of summer movies. Audiences were not swayed by the imprimatur of “Tyler Perry Presents.” This box office failure implies that moviegoers wanted the high drama and heavy-handed messages Perry normally offers his audience, or they wanted the caricature of Madea to make them laugh.

All of this got me thinking again about what, exactly, Perry is up to—and why he’s so popular. I have to consider the possibility that Tyler Perry movies are successful because of their moralism and their sneering at women, not in spite of them. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. He knows his audience and gives them exactly what they want, and what they have come to expect. When Perry doesn’t give his audience what they want—caricatures of black men and women and broad moral messages—well, the box office doesn’t lie.

This is more complex an issue, though, than most critical discourse about Perry implies. Yes, Tyler Perry is a deeply problematic figure in entertainment, for so many reasons. But. He also gives his audience some of what they so very much need. As Todd Gilchrist notes for Movies.com, “he uncovers, and highlights, real, honest moments of human interaction, in a way that almost no other filmmaker is doing today.” Maybe I continue watching Perry’s films because I too see a glimmer of these “real, honest moments.” Or I am stubbornly clinging to the hope that someday, he might live up to his potential and his responsibility to create good art for black people, however unreasonable that responsibility might be. I am eager to see more diverse experiences represented in modern entertainment. It is bittersweet that something is better than nothing, even if the something we have is hardly anything at all.

Three hours before the advance screening of
Fruitvale Station
I attended in Chicago, a line of eager fans stretched through the Cineplex. Many were dressed up, hair done right, faces beat—that is, their makeup was applied impeccably. Writer and director Ryan Coogler and stars Octavia Spencer and Michael B. Jordan were on hand for a talk-back after the screening. The Reverend Jesse Jackson introduced the actors and the drama, which won the 2013 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, referring to the movie’s subject matter as “Trayvon Martin in real time” and leading a vigorous call-and-response.

Contemporary black film is not nearly as robust as it should be. When movies by a promising black writer-director like Coogler’s
Fruitvale Station
premiere, black audiences wonder if finally they might enjoy a movie that is well written, acted, directed, and produced. Of course, this is the holy grail of all cinema, but it seems particularly unreachable in much of what black cinema has to offer. Broadly speaking, if contemporary black cinema were divided into categories, we’d have raunchy comedies like
Soul Plane
, the feel-good family films frequented by Eddie Murphy and Ice Cube, the awareness-raising films that tackle major race-related issues, and, of course, the work of Tyler Perry. Most black movies, for better or worse, carry a burden of expectation, having to be everything to everyone because we have so little to choose from.

Suffice it to say, a movie about a notorious incident of police brutality like
Fruitvale Station
enters an already fraught conversation. On New Year’s Day in 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle, working at the BART station in Oakland’s heavily Latino Fruitvale district, shot Oscar Grant, a young black man returning to Oakland after celebrating with friends in San Francisco, in the back. Earlier that night, BART police had responded to reports of a fight by removing Grant and several of his friends from the train. Accounts of what happened next differ, but matters escalated quickly.

Bystanders took a number of videos and images of the incident, and soon these artifacts of Grant’s death went viral. Oakland residents held a vigil and rioted, releasing a long-simmering rage over the plight of young black men in the city. Protests, some violent, would continue for more than a year. Four years later, digital traces of Grant’s death linger across the Internet, continuing to bear witness.

Fruitvale Station
begins with Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) and his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), talking about their New Year’s resolutions. Then the film jumps to 2:15 a.m. in the nearly empty station. Oscar and a group of his friends are seated on the ground. Officers surround them, both the young men and the police shouting. The footage, from a cell phone, is shaky and grainy, but there is no ambiguity about what is taking place.

The rest of the movie chronicles the events leading up to that moment. Oscar is shown as a charming young man with a troubled past who is finally on the right path. After two stints in prison for drug dealing, he is working to reconnect with Sophina. He dotingly cares for his daughter, Tatiana, and strives to be a good son to his mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer). A movie about limited options for young inner-city black men,
Fruitvale
also explores the multiple identities many of these men must adopt. Oscar is a master of code-switching—the man he is with his mother is different from the man he is with his girlfriend and child, with his friends, or in prison. As director Coogler, who is from the Bay Area, notes, “Oftentimes you’ve got to be different people just to stay alive.”

When Oscar picks Tatiana up from day care, they race back to the car, their bodies so full of joy it’s like they’re trying to outrun the feeling. Actor Michael B. Jordan, best known as Wallace, the sixteen-year-old dealer from
The Wire
, and Vince, the high school quarterback from
Friday Night Lights
, expresses that joy from his face to the kick of his heels. In scenes with Diaz, Jordan brings out the raw appeal of a young man in his prime—slow drawls, sexy smiles, toned body. He also expresses openness and vulnerability when Oscar confesses to Sophina that he has lost his job and when, in prison, he begs his mother not to leave him alone.

As Wanda, Octavia Spencer is the movie’s moral center. She embodies nurturing, tough love, and the small ways a mother never lets go. She chides Oscar for driving and talking on his cell phone, urging him to take the train home so he doesn’t drink and drive. In a powerful flashback, Wanda visits Oscar in prison. He’s in his uniform, thrilled to see a familiar face. Wanda is loving but weary, trying to hang on to what normalcy she can. During her visit, Oscar gets drawn into a verbal altercation with another inmate, revealing the aggressive, defiant man he can be when pushed. Wanda tries to calm him. But it’s too much, how he has to straddle two worlds, and when he sits back down, his body is coiled with frustration. Wanda tells Oscar she won’t be coming back to see him. Spencer’s handling of the moment, with quiet control and resolve and no hysterics, is heartbreaking.

There are moments of levity, like when Oscar has to buy a birthday card on behalf of his sister. Despite the sister’s express instructions not to, he gets a card with white people on the front. Such moments not only humanize Oscar, they allow the audience to laugh, to exhale. We need that.

Director Coogler had only the length of a movie—ninety minutes, in this case—to give us a sense of who Oscar Grant was, someone to mourn when the end came. He conducted extensive research on Grant’s whereabouts on that final day and overcame the family’s apprehension to work closely with them. In a prophetic scene, Oscar comforts a bleeding dog hit by a car, whispering kind words so the animal won’t die alone. When Oscar is at the grocery store buying crab for his mother, a young woman at the butcher counter wants to fry fish but is unsure how. Oscar gets his grandma Bonnie on the phone to school her. On the streets of San Francisco after midnight, surrounded by revelers, Oscar and his friends convince a store owner closing shop to let their girlfriends, and the pregnant wife of a couple they don’t know, use the restroom. The men enjoy the camaraderie of strangers, and we see Oscar plan for a future he will not be part of.

At times, Coogler’s choices verge on the sentimental, if not manipulative. His investment in Grant’s story is palpable. There are indulgent directorial choices, like the superimposing of text messages and phone numbers on the screen when Oscar is using his cell phone. It is a testament to the movie’s excellence that the flaws are in the details.