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The Color Purple was stifled because the culture wanted to protect black men.

inasundress

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Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. The film remains a cultural touchstone for African American women, due in large part to its depiction of female relationships as a form of sanctuary, in a patriarchal world filled with violence. When it was released, it shattered the widespread cultural resistance to talking openly about domestic abuse.
“The Color Purple” draws from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, which spans 40 years in the turbulent life of Celie, a young black woman in the early 20th-century American South. The film chronicles her abuse at the hands of her stepfather and equally cruel husband, her struggles with poverty, racism, and xesual savagery, and her perseverance as she forges intimate relationships with other women. And despite controversy around its depictions of the black family, especially black men, and criticism that Spielberg turned Walker’s complex novel into simplified broad entertainment, “The Color Purple” continues to reverberate within the black community, and is still frequently referenced today.

To explore this complicated legacy, IndieWire moderated a discussion with seven African American woman scholars and creatives: Terri Francis, who teaches courses in film and directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University; Tanya Steele, an award-winning director and screenwriter; Kristen J. Warner, Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama; Samantha N. Sheppard, Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University; Jessica Lynne, a writer and art critic and founding editor of ARTS.BLACK; Racquel Gates, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the College of Staten Island, CUNY; and Miriam J. Petty, Associate Professor, Department of Radio/Television/Film Northwestern University.

The conversation spanned a range of topics, including Tyler Perry’s role in helping to keep the film’s legacy alive, why it continues to resonate among African American women, and how to parse the controversy as it has evolved through the years. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

INDIEWIRE: When “The Color Purple” was released, Tony Brown called it a Nazi conspiracy — the most racist depiction of black men since “The Birth of a Nation.” Courtland Milloy said, “I got tired, a long time ago, of white men publishing books by Black women about how screwed up Black men are.” We were all rather young back then, so we maybe weren’t able to parse these reactions. But what do you all think of them now?

RACQUEL:
I do wonder how much it was a response to a dearth of black male representation in the early-to-mid eighties. I also do think some of that was just straight-up sexism about the text, authored by a black woman in the ways that perhaps her own personal biography as a black woman once married to a white man starts filtering into what critics read as her intentions.





MIRIAM: There’s no question that there is a way that straight up sexism and misogyny were a big part of what colored the specifically black male response. And I think it’s helpful to put it into context the period, when there was a kind of hyper-visibility of black women’s voices, in contrast to the usual invisibility, that was led and bodied forth by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis and others. And there is a way in which those voices were engendering a lot of pushback, resistance and anger from a lot of black men.

The response from black women was mixed, wasn’t it? While the film seemed to resonate more with black women, there was a faction who were critical of it.

KRISTEN:
No one actually interviewed black women back then to get their thoughts on the film. Except for the “I’m trying to protect the black man” women. But Jackie Bobo dedicated a chapter to this [in her 1995 book “Black Women as Cultural Readers”], where she held focus groups with black women, asking them questions about what they thought of the movie. Some sample questions were: what did you get out of the movie? Did you feel like you were being manipulated? Etc. And it was overwhelmingly the opposite to what black men thought of the film. So what was so important was that she gave black women the opportunity to express their thoughts on the movie in a space that nobody else had. She helped stretch the conversation around the film, giving us insight into how complex and diverse in thought black women are.

I’ve never really given much consideration to the idea that the work of Tyler Perry is helping to keep “The Color Purple’s” legacy alive, until Miriam brought it up.

MIRIAM:
Perry is keeping it alive for me in ways that honestly don’t require me to watch it, as he recycles and upcycles characteristics of the film, and connects to generations, that wouldn’t necessarily have been thinking about it. There are so many things to say about that, and so that’s the reason it continues to be really legible for me in lots of interesting and important ways.

RACQUEL: I think it’s also important to think of it as a genre film, like a melodrama, and there’s something about high melodrama that connects with black audiences. That’s partly why you see it resonating in the Tyler Perry universe.

SAMANTHA: It has become inflected into various other cultural arenas because of the work of Tyler Perry, and because of the memification as well, but particularly because of the ways in which the cultural figure of Madea is linked to the powerful cultural figure of Oprah Winfrey, who played Sophia. When they made OWN into a network and he brought his work there, what did they do to introduce it? They created this video in which Madea meets Sofia and there’s a conversation between these two characters. So, the resonance is well beyond the text, but of course always retracts back to the text.



TANYA: There’s a dearth of images that address the African American woman’s experience on an emotional level. And so I think that’s what it is with Tyler Perry, and that’s what it is with “The Color Purple.” We get some of our journey through these documents, we get some sort of emotional validation from them. But as a content creator, the execution is paramount. And I don’t think “The Color Purple” is very well executed.

RAQUEL: But it’s impossible to divorce “The Color Purple” from the experience of viewing “The Color Purple.” Thinking especially about the labor of the black audience, because the stuff that reverberates with them, is not the Spielberg stuff. Like the racist idea of Harpo as a bumbling buffoon, that’s not a thing that sticks with black audiences. That’s the work that black audiences have edited out. In the stuff that we circulate and that reverberate, it’s the gems, the “black moments,” regardless of how we feel about them. In Tyler Perry’s work, it’s the stuff that connected initially.

And when you say “the black moments” in the film, what exactly do you mean?

RACQUEL:
The blackness that we appreciate comes in the performances. The characters. The blackness is in the aspects of Alice Walker’s novel that could not be completely scrubbed out of the film, even if Spielberg tried. The blackness is in the labor that black women audiences do to sort of reimport that black feminine perspective. lt gets read back into the text.

SAMANTHA: Spielberg wanted to take this on as a career deviation, as a way to legitimize himself as a certain kind of director, a director with range. It’s a really interesting kind of work because he wants to suffuse a kind of colorblindness, of color muteness, so there’s a universality to it that says, “This is for all of us.” He is trying to make it culturally legible, just not for black audiences. The acting labor adds lovely ripples to this very flaccid lake, and Spielberg is just like, “Water is wet.” And so it tells us something about a kind of white, male auteurism that says, “I can handle anything and everything.”

So why does it still seem to resonate so much 35 years later, especially among black women?

TANYA:
I think that “The Color Purple” resonates because of Alice Walker. That is the only reason. It’s not Spielberg, It’s not the white writer, Menno Meyjes, who adapted the book. It’s Alice Walker telling a story that was earnest, thoughtful and heartfelt. She opened herself up in a way that we as black women were not getting in the culture on a larger level. A lot of black women have experienced trauma, so the trauma experienced by Celie, Nettie, Sofia sort of flies off the page onto the screen. It was a story where we were believed. It was probably the best we could get at that time.





JESSICA: I’ve had several incidents of viewing the film with other queer black women, and even though the film is not perfect, it has become a kind of touchstone, across generations of queer black women in my experience, as a way of kind of reading a queerist document.

TERRI: I really felt Sofia’s rage. I just really understood that type of rage dealing with white lady nonsense and black men who were really just being like white slave owners. Despite the pantomimes and caricatures, there’s a poignancy to some of the situations in this movie. When Celie asks God to give her a sign letting her know what is happening to her and why, I understand that sense of isolation. And when Sofia says, “I sat in that jail, I sat in that jail til I felt like I’m about to rot to death,” metaphorically describing what her life had been like, it’s about more than the physical toll; it’s about the emotional labor.

Alice Walker’s reaction to the film has been consistent over the years. She didn’t really care for it, but she’s resigned herself to the idea that the novel is the novel, and the film is the film.

JESSICA:
I think what keeps me coming back to “The Color Purple” in all of its imperfections is that spiritual journey of self-actualization, which I do find a value in. There is a part of me that really finds a particular sense of refuge in Walker’s ultimate intentions, even if they aren’t necessarily perfectly translated to the film as a document. So, I agree somewhat with Walker’s sentiment, but I do think that the film in its imperfection can point people back to its original story, the novel. Yet there is a larger kind of question that I think Walker is navigating about how you find yourself in the most kind of magnificent of ways. That still feels really pertinent to me, both as someone who deeply cared for her novel and also enjoyed the film, but perhaps is very much aware that it’s never going to be the perfect thing that I want it to be.

MIRIAM: The efforts to make “The Color Purple” into a mainstream film involves a kind of racism that white audiences are able to see black people through. That lens has to be inserted in order to make it a mass distributed product. One can appreciate for the refusal to do that kind of translation with HBO’s “Watchmen” series, which doesn’t explain itself for white audiences. It’s the same kind of thing with Tyler Perry. His films are more often than not directly addressing a black audience. So if you don’t know who Johnny Gill is, that’s your problem. If you don’t get that joke that Mr. Brown makes, that’s your problem, because he’s not actually talking to you.

I was at times confused by some of the film’s tonal shifts, like the scene in which Mister is trying to impress Shug, and he’s bumbling around in the kitchen, trying to make breakfast for her. There’s Celie just sitting back, watching and laughing at him — this man who has been raping her since she was a teen, and who routinely beats her. Or when Sofia is first introduced and she’s aggressively marching up the hill to Mister’s house in this kind of comical way, so much that Harpo can barely keep up.





MIRIAM:
The marching thing is really interesting. But what happens in the fullness of that scene is that basically Mister tries to shame Sofia, and she won’t be shamed. And so we get a sort of exaggerated sense of Sofia’s toughness and resilience, even as it is bodied in this moment of humor. Nevertheless, it’s the thing that we admire, love and respect about her. There are times when I need to see Sofia marching to war. There are times when I need to draw upon that image of strength. There are times when I need to imagine myself marching into a faculty meeting in the precise way that Sofia marched up that hill.

KRISTEN: “All my life I had to fight! All my life I had to fight.” That’s a real life statement. That’s Sofia’s mantra; evidence of the resilience of a black woman on screen that you rarely heard said that way. That’s what you see in that scene when she’s marching to Mister’s house.

TERRI: But it’s like the women are in a pretty serious black film, dealing with really deep and important issues, which is what brings tears to my eyes. For example, when they’re connecting and talking about what’s happening around and to them. When Shug brings Celie that letter. But then it just seems to me that Mister and the other men are doing some kind of weird pantomime of a sort of pretend blackness. It was like this kind of physical comedy and then these accents, and then the brutality that comes out of fµck!ng nowhere. He’s essentially Simon Legree [the cruel slave owner in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”]. So I don’t know if it’s always a black story. But there are moments where I did find myself very moved and feeling that as a black woman now, not a 12 or 13 year old girl, I recognized the spaces where these confrontations with white people nonsense happens.

RACQUEL: When you have somebody like Oprah Winfrey — a larger, dark-skinned black woman playing a certain type of character — some of our interpretations are also about the specter of past black representation. Spielberg directs that character in line with the past, and so Sofia is burdened by past representations of the “*****” in cinema. Additionally, the music that he chose to accompany her when she’s marching up to Mister’s house adds to its comicality. And so we ask, why is black feminine anger undercut by this comedic tone? But as black women, we see it. We spot the game Spielberg played, and we discard it, and have our own interpretation of it.

So, given all that you’ve all said so far about Spielberg’s version, how do we feel about a 21st century adaptation of “The Color Purple”?

TANYA:
We have to have black women telling black women’s stories. I’m tired of black men, white men, and white women telling black women’s stories. That’s how Spike Lee got his career started. That’s how Lee Daniels got his career started. Enough! Very few novels get to live in the American imagination in the way that “The Color Purple” has. But I would rather see adaptations of other work by Alice Walker, like “The Temple of My Familiar,” for example. There are other stories that can be told.





SAMANTHA: I want to echo that. Let’s not do the thing where we must continue to recreate these very interesting wheels, as opposed to conceive of self driving cars. We can move on from the wheel and see how other artists inflect, and pay homage to this work. But there’s also other texts out there that are just as worthy to be considered, not just reconsidered.

How does the film’s legacy sit with you today?

MIRIAM:
The characters of Celie, Shug and Sofia have become iconic. Erykah Badu’s “On and On” video is basically like a mashup of “The Color Purple” and “Cinderella” and “Gone With the Wind,” but the best parts of each one. It’s just such a beautiful reimagining of these characters, and an extension of an imagined world in which things are both the same and different. So I just think that there’s a way the legacy of the film is that kind of filtration. It sparks people’s imagination in ways that speak to the problems that the book and the film are trying to address, but also goes beyond what they were able to imagine.



TANYA: Walker’s novel resonated on so many different levels. It led to conversations about representation, about what it is to be a dark-skinned black woman, in ways that weren’t happening. So the novel did what it needed to do. The film did what it needed to do. And all of these different things sprung from that one novel. It was on Broadway for example. It had a massive impact.

RACQUEL: I think that the appeal of “The Color Purple” and the reason that it has this long, lasting legacy is because it’s never been about the film unto itself. It’s always been about the relationship between the film and the audience. There is value in what it meant for audiences, how it’s now part of the popular lexicon that we use in our everyday conversations with each other. That’s the thing I’d like to see drawn out, whether in art projects or video installations, or what have you. And so to me, that’s the real legacy of the film, not necessarily the film itself.

SAMANTHA: I like that this work is imperfect and yet it is also still an interesting artifact of labor practices, of a representational politics, of an intra-racial gender divide. And so I think the legacy is that this is a part of black film history, part of American film history and as it continues to be talked about and used in reference in the vast wasteland of film and television and visual content that is forgotten. This work is remembered.
 

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inasundress

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During my sophomore year of college, my mom drove up to New York to take me to see The Color Purple on Broadway. We were not then and are not now a Broadway family: It remains the only musical I have ever seen in person. Still more, we bought merch! It all felt wildly out of character, but this was The Color Purple, the favorite movie of every Black woman in my family—how could we not at least take home a branded refrigerator magnet? At one point in the show, the characters Shug and Celie, whose relationship broke ground in terms of Black lesbian representation in literature (and later on screen), were being affectionate with one another. A woman in the row ahead of us started sucking her teeth in disgust and otherwise making her sentiments loudly known. It was deeply uncomfortable, and it seemed like she was going to go on forever until, suddenly, my mother piped up and said, for everyone to hear, “This is what happens when people don’t read the book.”

The film version of The Color Purple (1985) largely excised the lesbian relationship at the center of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer prize–winning novel. Steven Spielberg, who directed the film (with Quincy Jones producing), explained the choice to have the two women kiss just once, and briefly. Had there been more, he said, “there would have just been too much on that one taboo.” Too much of what, and from whom? During production, the film was the subject of coordinated attacks, largely from Black male critics and certain community leaders who thought the novel—which explored unsparingly the subjects of incest, childhood rape, and domestic violence within the context of a single family in the rural South of the 1920s—furthered an image of Black men as violent and xesually aggressive. While the movie was still in production, an organization called the Coalition Against Black Male Exploitation sent out a bulletin claiming the relationship between Shug and Celie was an attack on Black male sexuality: “One must suspect this affectionate feminine display will be contrasted with an unfulfilling exchange between a black man and a black woman.”

In her new book, In Search of The Color Purple, the feminist scholar and writer Salamishah Tillet, writes that while “Jones and Spielberg insisted that these threats bore no impact on the movie itself,” there is little doubt that it sank the movie’s Oscar chances. The film, nominated for 11 Academy Awards, went home empty-handed, losing the top prize to Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), a film based on the Isak Dinesen novel that, Tillet says, “basked in colonial fantasies of African primitivism and black inferiority.” Tillet, who is a professor of African-American studies and creative writing at Rutgers University and a contributing critic at The New York Times, offers up a history of The Color Purple, from novel to film to Broadway musical, with an emphasis on how sexism within the Black community—and the white establishment’s preference to frame racial injustice in terms of concerns facing Black men—stood between The Color Purple and recognition as “an American masterpiece.”


The Color Purple (1982) is an epistolary novel set in the interwar period of the early twentieth century. It begins with a 14-year-old girl named Celie writing to God about the xesual abuse she is suffering at the hands of the man she believes to be her father. He impregnates her twice, and takes the children away each time (for a while, she thinks he has killed them). Eventually, she is married off to a man she calls Mr.______, who abuses her emotionally, xesually, and physically. The only person in the world she feels loved by, her sister Nettie, runs off for fear of being raped by their father now that Celie is out of the home. For Tillet, Walker’s novel strikes a personal chord. A rape survivor herself, in 1997, she and her sister Scheherazade created “A Long Walk Home: Story of a Rape Survivor,” a multimedia project that documented Tillet’s process of healing. Tillet, who read The Color Purple the year before starting college, credits the novel with helping her come forward: “I broke my silence because of The Color Purple,” she writes.
In the chapter on the Broadway adaptation, Tillet interviews Oprah Winfrey (who was a co-producer on the musical, along with Harvey Weinstein and others), who played Sofia, Celie’s brash and outspoken daughter-in-law who meets a tragic fate, in the film. Winfrey, too, is a survivor: As a child, she was repeatedly raped by family members and older men, at one point falling pregnant with her uncle’s child. Winfrey tells Tillet how much The Color Purple meant for her, how it helped her feel less alone: “I opened the page and saw Dear God, fourteen years old, what’s happening to me? Being a girl who was fourteen years old who had a baby, I was like, ‘There’s another human being with my story.’”

It was that very willingness to call out xesual violence within the Black community that made The Color Purple, the book, but particularly the film, the target of vitriol. When Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine put Walker on the cover in advance of the novel’s publication, the Black writer and satirist Ishmael Reed claimed Walker was Steinem’s “pawn.” In an interview for an Australian newspaper, from which Tillet quotes, Reed says, “There’s the kamikaze feminist and the Gloria Steinem Axis, and the Black Feminist Auxiliary. I think Alice Walker is part of this group, which characterizes Black men as rapists.” Steinem told Tillet, “The idea that anyone could ever control Alice. It’s so ridiculous, it’s like controlling the ocean!” The Hollywood–Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP picketed the film, holding signs that read, “Are White Producers Trying to Destroy Black Men?” In 1986, the journalist Tony Brown devoted an entire episode of his show, a popular independent Black news program called Tony Brown’s Journal, to the controversy and dubbed it “Purple Rage.” He later went on The Phil Donahue Show, where he called the film “the most racist depiction of black men since The Birth of a Nation.” The director Spike Lee, then promoting his film She’s Gotta Have It, told interviewers, “The difference between this film and The Color Purple is that even though there are some dog Black men in this film, you can tell there is a difference. The film was not done with hate.”

For Tillet, the uproar surrounding The Color Purple is just one instance of a perennial problem for Black women doing creative and political work at the intersection of gender and racial politics. “The controversy also took such a firm hold,” she says, “because it drew upon a stereotype that at the time was well-known among African Americans but far less familiar to white people: the black woman as race traitor.” Tillet sees echoes of this in critiques of the #MeToo movement, particularly in responses to allegations involving high-profile Black men like the rapper R. Kelly and the hip-hop and fashion mogul Russell Simmons.

Reading Tillet, I was reminded of an essay by Jemele Hill, “R. Kelly and the Cost of Black Protectionism.” Written in response to Surviving R. Kelly, the Lifetime documentary that featured firsthand testimony from his accusers and enablers, Hill highlighted the way high-profile Black men (and their lawyers) have compared the women accusing them of xesual assault to lynch mobs. Following the premiere of the documentary and the subsequent proliferation of the hashtag #MuteRKelly, Kelly’s legal team released a statement promising, “Since America was born, black men and women have been lynched for having xes or for being accused of it. We will vigorously resist this attempted public lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture.” Similar language was invoked by Clarence Thomas in his statement to Congress during the Anita Hill hearing, which he called a “high-tech lynching,” and by Bill Cosby’s wife when the rape allegations against Cosby first came to light. For Hill, the use of the word lynching is meant to signal to Black women and girls that racial oppression must remain their primary concern, and as a result many refuse to come forward with their allegations against Black men, “because they don’t want to become another vehicle that contributes to their destruction.”

Likewise, Tillet powerfully puts forward the Color Purple controversy as an example of how Black women have been asked to silence their own pain to supposedly serve the greater cause of racial uplift. Threaded throughout these attacks on The Color Purple is the idea that the danger of reinforcing stereotypes about Black male sexuality is too great to allow room for Black women to have justice.
 

Baby Briella

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I've never seen this film, nor was I aware that the premise angered pick mes and black men who like to dodge accountability.

I guess I should give it a watch then?
 

Baby Briella

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definitely an amazing movie, but very emotional

I'll have to watch when I'm in the right mood.

I usually stay away from movies like these because I don't care much for struggle movies, but I will still check this out for educational purposes.
 

Amanirenas

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I can't really say this movie was stifled. It's regarded as a modern day classic. Most people ignore the kiss between Celie and Shug, or conveniently forget it ever happened until they watch it again. I would like to see a 21st century film adaptation, but I'm afraid it will go overboard and be super explicit to compensate for the original movie.
 

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TCP is my favorite movie and book. It could be a healing story if some of our men could take a real look at the characters and be honest about the parallels in their own lives. None of the women characters were perfect either.
 

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I'll have to watch when I'm in the right mood.

I usually stay away from movies like these because I don't care much for struggle movies, but I will still check this out for educational purposes.

It’s a one and done movie. Good but you watch it once cause it’s depressing at times
 

pettylamarr

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I can't really say this movie was stifled. It's regarded as a modern day classic. Most people ignore the kiss between Celie and Shug, or conveniently forget it ever happened until they watch it again. I would like to see a 21st century film adaptation, but I'm afraid it will go overboard and be super explicit to compensate for the original movie.
It wasn't until I read the book that I realized what the relationship between Celie and Shug actually was. So if they did remake it, it'd be nice if they adapted more from the source material but like you said, I fear they might do a little too much with it.
 

Carielle

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The color purple is one of my favorite movies that i never get tired of watching. I hope that one day we get a remake of it.
 

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By DELORES S. WILLIAMS
MARCH 15, 1986 12 AM PT
Delores S. Williams is a black feminist theologian who has taught women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School and is now a lecturer in the religion department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa.

Alice Walker’s book “The Color Purple” gives us a powerful feminist theology. Steven Spielberg’s movie “The Color Purple” separates feminist issues from religion and gives us a theology of old-time black religion.

Yet in both book and movie, the subject of the theology is the same: salvation. And, in both instances, Shug Avery’s actions,
ideas and relationships are essential for determining who will be saved and the terms of salvation.

It is precisely at the point of the characterization of Shug that the book and the movie part ways in delivering their messages about redemption. Walker, in the book, presents a self-sufficient, bisexual, economically independent, liberated Shug Avery. She is the catalyst for Celie’s redemption from low self-esteem, economic dependency and domestic violence. Fully in control of her life and subservient to no man, Shug helps Celie (the central character) realize that redeeming oneself involves changing one’s consciousness.

Thus Celie, through conversations with Shug, changes her understanding of God, man and church. God becomes spirit and is in everything. Church is not the place where one finds God. Rather, one brings God into church. With regard to man, Celie says, “It is like Shug say. You have to git man off your eyeball before you can see anything a’tall.” This observation also applies to the man-god and does indeed cast aspersions upon the source of Christian knowledge about the man-god, the Bible. For as Shug says to Celie: “Ain’t no way to read the Bible and not think God white. . . . When I found out I thought God was white and a man, I lost interest.”

The characterization of the liberating relation between Shug and Celie leads to Walker’s larger message about the terms of redemption. That message is that women’s liberation also leads to men’s redemption. Celie’s new self-affirming independence causes the redemption of her husband, Mr---- who, in the past, brutalized Celie. He thought that “wives are like children.” They had to be beaten in order for men to keep the upper hand. Through the friendly conversations between Mr---- and Celie near the end of the book, Walker shows that his salvation has also necessitated a change in his consciousness. In a positive sense, he has changed his mind about male-female relationships, about love and sexuality.

As feminist theology, the god-talk in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” affirms feminist belief that women’s liberation is the key to the redemption of our society. This social redemption depends upon us changing our consciousness about the maleness of God, about divine validation of heterosexuality and about authority as it relates to the masculine and feminine dimensions of culture.

The movie “The Color Purple” tells quite a different story about salvation in the context of religion. Though Shug Avery is the vehicle for communicating the film’s messages about redemption, she lacks the moral autonomy and the liberated consciousness about God that Shug Avery in the book had in abundance. Thus the movie portrays Shug Avery as a half-vamp blues singer vying for the affection of her stern preacher-father, whose old-time black religion identifies her life style as sin. It is therefore Shug, herself, who needs to be saved.

Near the end of the movie in a church scene electrified by gospel music, Shug humbles herself before male authority (her father) and male-centered black religion as she admits she is a sinner. At intervals throughout the movie Shug tries to convince her father she is adopting a “more respectable” life style. Without cosmetics and in appropriate dress, she visits her father when he is alone in his church. He ignores her. On another occasion she holds up her ringed finger and says to him: “I’m married now!” Again he ignores her.

When Shug bursts into the church singing a gospel song, begging for acceptance, her father finally responds positively. These scenes communicate clearly the terms for woman’s salvation in this religion. She must relinquish her moral freedom before the harsh authority of the judgmental male god her father represents in this world. Contrary to the feminist theology yielded by the book “The Color Purple,” the theology of old-time religion projected by the movie affirms women’s obedience to a male god.

Since these scenes (with Shug seeking her father’s approval) do not appear in Walker’s book, we wonder why they appear in the movie. They do not add significant detail to the major concern of the movie, which is Celie’s salvation from sexist oppression and domestic violence. However, the scenes do reinforce negative stereotypical views that claim that black women--regardless of the degree of liberation they’ve achieved--want black males to have authority over some area of their lives.

These scenes also give religious validation to the heterosexual bias obvious throughout the movie. Thus we do not see clearly in the movie one of the major themes Walker makes clear in the book. That theme is women saving themselves from male domination by bonding with other women. The book gives divine validation to bisexuality when Shug tells Celie that God loves all their xesual feelings. When Celie asks if God thinks these feelings are dirty, Shug responds, “Naw . . . God made it. . . . God loves everything we love.”

The difference in the treatment of redemption by Walker’s book and Spielberg’s movie results from the different method each uses to bring contemporary feminist issues into relation with black culture. Walker subjects black culture to the authority of feminist issues. Spielberg’s movie subjects feminist issues to the authority of black culture.

The movie’s story line runs through rural, black Georgia during a specific time--from 1909 to approximately 1940. Therefore, Shug Avery, the other characters, their actions, interactions and religion must be realistic according to the cultural idioms in rural, black Georgia at the time. In the book, Walker does not establish a definite time span. Her characters have the full sweep of history, but the feminist issues and the consciousness of Shug suggest a time contemporaneous with our own. Thus it is not difficult to imagine the book’s Shug Avery circulating in rural, black Georgia sharing her emancipated ideas about God and sexuality with another woman.

Ultimately this method in Spielberg’s movie determines the criteria we use to evaluate it. We must ask such questions as these: Has the film’s writer successfully captured the black cultural idioms of the designated time span and place? The gospel music, the hell-fire preaching in the small, rural church, the juke joint are black cultural idioms amenable to the expression of a limited number of contemporary feminist issues. When the film’s writer chose to deal primarily with domestic violence, racism and female bonding did he choose those feminist issues that could most realistically be brought into relation with black culture of the designated time? Has the film’s director done the kind of casting that brings the black cultural idioms and the feminist issues to life in such a way that one does not cancel out the other?

Regardless of the way we answer these questions, Spielberg has given us a movie we will not soon forget. It challenges us to go inside the film’s story and let it speak to us rather than we to it. It presents a beautiful picture of black women bonding with each other in spite of pain and abuse. Quincy Jones’ classic song “Sister” reinforces this bonding. Whether we agree with all the movie’s ways of presenting the story, we black feminists leave the cinema knowing we have seen something painfully significant about ourselves, men, God and redemption.
 

chantelle

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The Color Purple is one of my favorite movies, next to the tv series The Women Of Brewster Place. I've always been absorbed in the stories of Black women (being one myself) and how a lot of times our stories have to be slightly altered a bit in order not to vilify the Black man or upset others. And even if it is shown in its raw and unapologetic form, it becomes a joke to many of us (both Black men and women.) Examples like What's Love Got To Do With It and Surviving Compton come to mind. So even though a lot of people are upset with the Amazon Prime show Them (running with the crowd of claiming it as "trauma pδrn"), it actually brings to life those situations that Black women (and girls) have to remain quiet about their pain at the perils of their own psychological health.

@fortheloveoftea What's the point of the thumbs down?
 
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TaryNico

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What's weird is I never saw this as a criticism of black men in particular, but all men. Go anywhere in the world, across centuries, men have been oppressing and terrorizing women for years. This is no more "anti-black male" than a movie set in the same time period showing men actively against letting women vote or oppressing their women is "anti- white male".
 
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freedreamz

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My grandma always tell me the story of when the color purple came out in theaters and she took her mother to see it bc she grew up in the rural south herself. She said it moved my great gma to tears bc of the accuracy and the portrayal of her ppl being represented in a movie that wasn’t about slaves.

When they walked out of the theater and she asked me great grandma what she thought she said. “Just breathtaking but I just don’t understand how they found all of those ugly people”
 

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