Precious Touched Many Chords

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/05reed.html?th&emc=th

When I saw Precious the things that were touching and absorbing about the main character and those around her were not the fact that she was African-American. She was not a stand-in for all people who were the same race or the same specific skin color. She stood for a girl, or a person (it could have been a boy) who was facing incredible odds. She was good at math, and did not have to study it to do well at it, per her teacher in the film. That could describe a student of any socioeconomic standing or racial or ethnic background. She was an incest survivor, for years. Again, the point was not that she was African-American but that she was suffering at the hands of a person who did not care about her wellbeing, even though he was her father. That transcends race.

Precious stood for pain, not just the pain of a specific class and race. She stood for a stereotype of victimization and blame, to those who were outraged. Yet I saw a girl whose struggles were at once unique to her and transcendent. I saw an icon of struggle. It's not fair to say that extreme difficulty, poverty and victimization -- which she transcended by finding a caring teacher, and other caring adults in her life, her children, and friends -- belong only to a hated, stereotypical portrayal of a mythologized class.

Part of the negative response to Precious was the idea, "Don't show (me) as dying, hurt, less than literate, less than able to cope, and then call me triumphant for small mercies. Show me as glorious, able to create beautifully, able to triumph at the highest levels of my achievement." We need more of those uplifting movies, too, with characters who are African-American (or more widely descended from Africa) and other ethnicities, too. I just would not demonize the movie Precious for showing a girl who dreamed of more than she had, whose biggest love was her children, and whose worst nightmare, dying, was not enough to stop her from trying to be a good person.

On a personal note, I had stopped myself from seeing movies where I had a similar, visceral reaction to the apparent portrayal of an Asian American person. It is hard not to take personally, or react to, an image that I do not want to see. I still worry that others will see "people like me" reflected through that alternate vision, and have a stereotyped, warped view. It matters how closely the apparent portrayal touches one's sense of identity.

Two movies that did touch a positive chord, that I was proud to see as an Asian-American, were Dragon and The Joy Luck Club. Regarding those who did not like the image of Precious, I wonder which movies did fill them with a sense of uplift or shared understanding, which were appropriate and meaningful to them. Please share your thoughts.