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.
