When Do You Tell A Specific Story Right? (I wasn't clever enough for a witty title today...)

It's been a while since I've blogged, much less blogged about literature, but I got to thinking today. A while ago, I leant my friend Junot Diaz's latest book This Is How You Lose Her and she called me up to rant about it. This surprised me because she and I love Diaz's work; while Drown is expertly economic and sparse in its writing yet full of raw emotion and intensity, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a beautiful masterpiece, a saga of colonialism, family, intergenerational trauma, nerdism, sexuality, identity and fantasy. Admittedly, when I had read his latest book in the fall, it hadn't spoken to me as strongly as his other two had but I found it superbly written and honest, an exploration of an older Yunior's psyche and views on relationships as a man. My friend didn't disagree but she said while in Drown and The Brief Wondrous his honesty was entwined with a commentary on these views, in This Is How You Lose Her that ironic/meta/critical element was gone. Yes, it is an unspoken (sometimes spoken) trend in Caribbean/Caribbean-American-Canadian/African-American-Canadian communities for black men to go after light-skinned women and see darker women on the side, yes power dynamics and sex can be entwined, but her issue was that the novel seemed to celebrate these issues and themes; This Is How You Lose Her seemed to take what made Drown and The Brief Wondrous stimulating, buzz-worthy, and sexy and run with it, revel in it, instead of stop and dissect it. I don't necessarily agree with this assessment but I found enough merit in it to think about it for a while since the same accusations were made about The Brief Wondrous. 

Many women I know found Diaz's female characters stock in comparison to the lively energetic voice of Yunior and the colourful characterization of Oscar; a lot of [white] women found the female characters unnecessarily harsh and unaffectionate; and other women (of many nationalities/races/ethnicities) felt as if he adheres to the whore/Madonna trope in all of his work. Certainly, the women are more subtly portrayed compared to the male characters in The Brief Wondrous but I never equated flashiness with depth; further, I understood the women in his novel because I grew up with and around these women. Their grit-teeth sternness, their suck-it-up attitude... they're survivors of horrific life experiences and are hardened as such; moreover, support for many Caribbean families isn't about emotion, it's about "getting shit done", about moving your offspring up in the world, providing for them, making sure they won't want for anything when they're older: financial stability, education, work ethic, an instillation of a "no-nonsense-nobody-will-walk-over-me-in-life" attitude and I think Diaz portrayed that unapologetically and wonderfully and my friend agrees with this. My point in bringing this up and explicating my defence of The Brief Wondrous is that it led me to another question (and this is where my post really begins): what does it take for commentary to work? If you're not writing an essay, if your fiction isn't explicitly polemical, if you're just trying to tell a story while at the same time making a comment on the world you grew up in ... how do you it? When and how is it successful? As a writer, I'm very interested in this question. It's almost related to the question about satire: when is irony not ironic anymore? As someone who witnesses "hipster racism" (http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism) daily, the irony/not-irony question is another one that really interests me.

I find myself constantly debating with people about when commentary in a story/movie/TV series works and when it doesn't or when it's nonexistent. For instance, I got in a heated argument with someone over Robert Downey Jr.'s use of blackface in Tropic Thunder. I felt like I understood what Ben Stiller was trying to do with RDJ's character: not only showing that Hollywood would rather "blacken" a white man rather than hire an actual African-American actor but that black characters in Hollywood films are presented as how white people see them and not as they are (the "collard green" scene did that for me). He, however, found that Stiller was using the defence I made as an excuse to get some cheap laughs at the expense of African Americans. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe New Girl. It's one of those shows I watch purely to hate (kind of like Sex and the City) and while a few of my friends have defended the never-ending racial jokes as a commentary on multiracial friendships in contemporary society, I feel like the show is just using racist jokes to make racist jokes under the guise of irony. I especially think this since the jokes or statements have nothing to do with the plots and they don't influence the dynamics in any way; plus New Girl still employs tokenism with Winston and CeCe rejects her cultural ways and for the few episodes that she embraces them, it's clear (to me) that the show is poking fun at the traditions.

There is no real conclusion or solution or realization in this post/to this post, it's really me just spewing out my thoughts and wanting to share them with whoever comes across this blog. I may have mislead you, the reader, into thinking this is about literature but I suppose I'm wondering more about storytelling and the politics/mechanics/influences of it. Spike Lee's Bamboozled does a great job in exploring the questions I've raised, making a commentary on when/how/why satire becomes real and therefore almost, ALMOST slipping into the caricature he condemns in his own film (which is interesting). So this more of a discussion than a definitive post and hopefully I get some [respectful] responses. And with that, I'll end.

The Message of Tyler Perry's "Temptation": Women Should Know Better.

Since Tyler Perry’s first movie I have had fundamental issues with his work firstly as a Black woman and secondly as a person who enjoys good films. In relation to the first part Tyler Perry has tropes and themes that permeate his films that personally offend me. For instance, there is a tendency to villainize the Black middle/upper-class; the men are abusive, controlling and emotionally domineering (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea’s Family Reunion) and the women are manipulative and cruel (Madea Goes To Jail, Why Did I Get Married?) or just simply weak. The women, then, take a romantic chance on the unemployed man or the man with an arrest record because he is hardworking (whereas Black upper-class man aren’t) and has found God and is therefore redeemable. Another trope is the negligent mother who either ignores the molestation of her daughters or who purposely pimps her daughter(s) out to keep a man or who doesn’t have her child’s interest at heart (Madea’s Big Happy Family). However, his latest film Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counsellor has enraged me beyond any of his other films.

Quick plot synopsis: Judith is a therapist working at a matchmaking company. She is married to her childhood sweetheart Brice, a pharmacist, who has become increasingly inattentive to her throughout their marriage. Judith confides in Brice that she wants to start her own marriage counselling business but Brice urges her to put it off for 15 years until they’re more financially stable. Judith then meets Harley, a wealthy Internet entrepreneur who considers investing in the matchmaking company. Harley takes an interest in Judith and begins to seduce her implying that her sex life with her husband is bland and conventional, which prompts Judith to spice up her and Brice’s lovemaking, which is an attempt that falls flat. On a plane ride to New Orleans and back, Harley seduces her and they begin an affair, which eventually leads to Judith becoming addicted to cocaine, to quitting her job to start her own company (in which Harley is a partner), and to her leaving Brice and living with Harley where they engage in a volatile relationship in which he beats her viciously. It is then revealed that Harley is HIV positive, has a history of abusing women and giving them his disease. Brice then “saves” Judith but not before she contracts the virus. The end.

OK. My issue with this movie? Let’s start with the plane “sex” scene, which is actually a rape scene. What happens is Harley starts touching and kissing Judith, sliding his hands between her legs and Judith says “no” and “stop it.” She starts to cry and she starts to push him and hit him and her cries of “stop it!” get louder then he says, “OK stop it, stop it! Now you can tell people you resisted” and starts kissing her again and she stops resisting and the sex ensues. Before this scene was the one in which Judith attempts to spice up her and Brice’s love life by saying, “ATTACK ME, ATTACK ME LIKE AN ANIMAL” (previous to that Harley had told her sex should be “random like animals”). The plane “sex” scene coupled with the  “attack me” scene imply very irresponsibly that rape does not exist because women want it, crave it; we like being physically dominated but it’s “socially unacceptable” so we “pretend” to have real objections, so men just be men and push past the hitting, the crying, and the constant screams of “stop it!” and the woman in question will eventually succumb to her desire. This is how rape culture starts and gets perpetuated, this reinforces the idea of “she wanted it anyway” and so this is absolutely abhorrent.

My other issue is the message: BEWARE OF THE [Black] WOMAN WITH AMBITION. Certainly, Brice was inattentive and certainly Harley seduced Judith with flowers and private jets and (very stilted) sexual banter but he also seduced her with giving her a vote of confidence. He seduced her by telling her she should start her own business, she should be self-sufficient and the movie says, shame on her for believing him! If she had just listened to her husband and waited then she wouldn’t have contracted HIV! This leads me to my other problem with the film. It actually begins with a much older, frumpier-looking Judith counselling a couple. The husband states that he still loves his wife while the wife states that she was a different person when they got married at eighteen, people change and grow. The husband then leaves the session out of sad exasperation and Judith realizes that the woman has met a man who makes her feel exciting and wanted so she tells the story of her life as a cautionary tale while stating that this story is about her “sister”. When the story/flashback sequence finishes, the film moves back to the present and upon learning that Judith contracted HIV, the wife says, “Thank you for telling me this story. I’m going to end my almost-affair and stay with my husband.” So according to Tyler Perry and this movie, it is impossible for a woman to fall out of love with her husband and if she wants to start a new life she’s selfish and if she does, she will become addicted to cocaine, get beaten and contract HIV?

Furthermore, why did Judith have to change her clothes? Fashion and beauty play a big role in this movie. When Judith resisted Harley and remained a loyal wife, she dressed frumpily and then the more Harley seduced her, the more makeup she wore, the more flattering her clothes became and then after the affair, she reverts back to homely clothing. Consequently, good girls can’t wear makeup or flattering clothes because if they do, they’ll go sex-crazy and spiral out of control. The logic of this film and the conclusions it draws are absolutely ridiculous. Also what happens to Harley? Nothing! Brice beats him up and then that’s pretty much it. It’s Judith who has a lesson to learn, it’s Judith who should’ve known better, it’s Judith who should be punished because well, boys will be boys, men screw you over, it’s the way of the world, and she should’ve known! I mean, her religious mother had told her that Harley was Satan!

This film is also terrible on a cinematic level. It is pure melodrama with overacting and dun dun DUN moments with no nuance and no subtlety. First off the sexual banter was painful to listen to and was not at all seductive or appealing or charming or natural. “Sex should be random … like animals” made me cringe. There is also absolutely no chemistry between Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Judith) and Robbie Jones (Harley) and the entire movie was full of awkward stares and painful silences. Further, the whole Harley as Satan motif was pounded into the audience’s head what with his red sports car, the fact that the second time he and Judith have sex, they do so in the steam of the bathtub (so much steam in fact that all you see is steam) surrounded by lit candles, and oh yeah, like I said before, Judith’s mother literally calls him the devil. This movie took two hours of my life I will not get back.

Tyler Perry’s issues with Black women is not a subject that hasn’t already been parsed in the media but I felt compelled to write this post because I found this film irresponsible, deeply misogynistic and personally offensive. I have not been offended like this by a movie in a long, long while and I think the problems with it should be discussed in an open forum.