Precious: A Difficult Feeling

Last night's episode of Glee was one of the best of the season. The music of the episode wasn't the best, no, but the story was brilliant. I love Glee, but sometimes things are too much of a mash-up when I just want it all to move like a real story.


Maybe it's just me, but I really wasn't that in love with Coraline. I liked it, I wanted to really like it, but I just couldn't. It was a great film visually, but the story felt too thin at times that I just couldn't love it the way some of my critics seem to.


But onto more convoluted and lengthily-written sentiments...

I saw Precious this past Thanksgiving weekend (last Saturday, to be exact). I was almost ashamed that I didn't actually cry during it. I teared up, for sure, the same moment Mariah Carey's character was kind of blubbering on screen, and the whole film just left me in this state of mind that I just wasn't allowed to talk about it. Which is so interesting from the perspective we're taking from reading Maus in my literature class this past week. The idea that the Holocaust cannot be retold, but rather that Maus acts as a substitution, never daring to presume that it is a retelling or a recreation - it simply is what it is.

But something tugs at me and tells me that Precious is supposed to be real and that is what makes me clam up about it. Not that it's based directly off of a true story - although Oprah and Tyler Perry find themselves taking it and applying it to real tales around them, and I can't blame them for doing that in the least - but that it isn't trying to substitute for anything, it's trying to take the place of that reality, trying to show us it. I'm not sure how I feel about that, about seeing this depressing-as-hell story told to me. I can't really talk about the film, about the elements of it. I feel as if I'd be betraying what the movie is showing. I don't dare to put the film into a frame like we're asked to when we're asked how we feel about a movie or how it is. And some movies, most movies that I see actually, I can do that. I can talk and talk about the narrative structure, about what I liked and didn't like, about the portrayals and this and that and on and so forth. But some movies, like Precious, just leave me with the sense that I'm not allowed to say anything about it. I can't even know how I feel about it. I can pick out little things, talk about the skillful acting, about the interesting structure and bleakness of it all, but I can't even dare to seriously summarize or react to it.

This is something I don't want to have. I'd rather have the courage to be able to do what Art Spiegelman does and take the frikkin Holocaust and find some way to express myself without betraying the original event, without betraying Precious and her story, but still managing to express what that experience brings. I haven't read the novel the movie is based off of, and maybe the movie does that for the novel. Successfully substitutes the sufferings of the novel with the sufferings in the movie. There is something that so nicely converts a story sometimes when it is translated from a textual to a visual medium. But I'm rambling, and I don't even make sense to myself by this point.

My point is that this class, Narratives of Suffering, has changed the way I look at everything around me, no joke. I also saw A Serious Man and thanks to Narratives of Suffering, despite really enjoying the movie and thinking it was good, I have some serious beef with it that I am still trying to articulate in my mind to make into an eventual post. But A Serious Man is still something of a comedic movie, something quirky, by the Coens' brothers. Not like Precious, not like this brutally honest thing that I just don't want to confront but is haunting me everyday that I don't try to face it down and accept what it was trying to tell me. It's simple really: the horrors people can put on those they supposedly love, the hurt that "love" provides, and real love that can be found, a way to escape and a hope for something more. But there's still such a trauma there.

It's funny how everything pieces together so smoothly in life. Not only did I see these two movies all about suffering in the midst of trying to understand it through the lens of this class and the fifteen books we've read for it (The Road is last and coincidentally enough, the movie version just came out!), but one of my friends just did a presentation on trauma this evening, the last portion of which I attended. It was a pretty straightforward synopsis of trauma, providing the important information about it, and presenting it mostly within the idea of sexual abuse and on college campuses. But after having just finished rereading Maus, trauma seems so much bigger than that, so much more complicated. But basically my life is surrounding me with these narratives of suffering and asking me, begging me, in fact, to confront and understand them. The song I'm doing for my jazz final is even called "I Want To Be Happy!" I mean, what the hell, life?

It always circles back around to that class lately. And not without good reason. I'm glad that a class I'm taking has had such an effect on my life. Not like my film classes which, although awesome, have provided more of a technical and aesthetic appreciation and skill, but something that has truly made me think more profoundly and to look around me at the world with more thought. A year ago, I would have simply accepted Precious and A Serious Man as amazing films, and when Precious would have scared me from trying to talk about it, I wouldn't have bothered to try to think about why and have simply accepted that it's a difficult story.

And it is a difficult story, and a very difficult movie. But I want to try to talk about it without feeling the eyes on me, asking why I, such a privileged person whose worst worries are about getting her homework all done in time and adequately, should ever dare to think about such pain. Who am I to think about such pain? But it's not about looking at it apart, seeing it as myself. I want to look at this movie and not get lost in the pain and suffering but see it analytically as well, understandingly, but without losing my humanity in the process. Yes, I feel for Precious, I watch her in the movie and my heart tries to leap out of my chest to be closer to her, to join souls with her, but I don't want that to cloud my ability to see the movie as a narrative. It's easy to let that happen as I've felt with several of the narratives we've read in my class. And it's easy to step back and forget how to feel. I want to do both and it's a struggle, but a worthwhile one, because in feeling but understanding, like Art Spiegelman seems to succeed at in Maus, I can lay myself next to the story, and love it.

BTWs... about Heroes... + Why FlashForward Is Better Than You Give It Credit For

Pretty sure I changed my mind from before; I haven't bothered watching Heroes since like the third episode and probably won't bother to continue. I just hope it dies soon. NBC seems to be fizzling out all its other dramas too, so why not this tired and never-going-to-improve one?

My ulterior motivation in doing this is to eventually remake the series better. I doubt I would ever actually do that because there are other things I'd rather do, but I would totally blow up New York and hire some better writers.

And... House. I feel bad because I actually do want to keep watching House, but there are just so many other shows I'd rather be watching these days so I am not up to date on that show either. I'll try to catch up one day... but not now.

Oh and Dexter too. I still haven't finished the third season. Oops! >.>


On another note, although most people don't seem to be in love with FlashForward, I have a couple things to say in its favor. The reason I think that I personally am getting so invested in this show has to do with a literature class I am taking right now called Narratives of Suffering. In fact, FlashForward and my class overlap in ways enough that I wrote it into the conclusion of my midterm paper for the class (my professor actually quite liked it and thanked me for bringing the show to his attention; I had a paper conference with him earlier this week, just after (**SPOILERS**) Al offed himself and I told him about that and how interesting it was).

My paper was about the idea of suffering and human agency in regards to it. In many ways, we do not have control over the suffering that is given to us. Depending on who you ask or your source material, it might be that suffering is randomly assigned to people who undergo tragic experiences that plague them or cause suffering due to a complete removal or one from one's comfortable life. We've talked about this in class in relation to an identity within a frame that we create for ourselves. And then something comes along and while we suffer, we are removed from our frames and all that we felt we could control before is taken away from us and we are left in the infinite space of the universe, the wall we built up around ourselves as a symbol of who we are is suddenly taken away from us and we are lost. It could also be said that this natural, part of being human (something that can be taken away in particular from the poetry of Emily Dickinson or that seems to be implied in Samuel Beckett's play, Endgame). Or a condition of our being in a certain state (the focus of my paper was primarily on Harriet Jacobs' narrative of her life in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl). Either way, when we suffer and we are removed from our place, there is a sense of nothing we can do, that we have to give into our eventual fate and let suffering take us where it will.

Or, we can make a choice. Even if there is nothing physically that we can do to overcome our suffering, we can make a mental choice that we want to survive. In Owen Chase's narrative Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale, although he and his companions are starving on a boat far away from land, unable to even move at points because they have been so physically reduced, it really it the mental state that each man takes on that controls whether or not they will survive. Chase writes, "all was dark [Isaac Cole] said in his mind, not a single ray of hope was left for him to dwell upon; and it was folly and madness to be struggling against what appeared so palpably to be our fixed and settled destiny. I remonstrated with him as effectually as the weakness both of my body and understanding would allow of" (pg. 67). Although Chase fails to convince Cole that his destiny was not fixed as a dead man, here is the beautiful demonstration of human agency even when it seems we have none left. So many of the characters that we explore in this class make a conscious choice that, despite their state, they will fight it somehow. Mary Rowlandson in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God stands by her bible even while in the hands of the Indians, keeping her faith strong as she suffers, choosing to believe that God will deliver her from it, and he does. Chase eventually survives to tell the tale (although it is rumoured that he went crazy from the cannibalism they had to employ to survive and the long-term starvation and suffering each survivor endured). Jacobs manages to escape to the north after several years in a tiny space where she hid before she could leave the south.

But then, at the same time, none of the characters truly finds happiness in the end. As I said, Chase goes crazy, and when Jacobs goes up to the north, she finds that the world up there isn't a whole lot better to black women than the south was. We also watched a couple films in the class, The Sweet Hereafter and Leaving Las Vegas (which is why I was more than a little pissed off when Owen Gleiberman describes Nicolas Cage's character as someone who is "full of longing and regret" neither of which ever seems to cross the character from the perspective I watched the film). But I want to focus on the former film. In the closing narration, Nicole, the only child who survives the tragic bus accident, comments that in the process of moving past the grief and coming out of suffering that the town didn't exactly return to happiness, rather, they were now in a "strange and new" world, as she describes it. One of Dickinson's poems goes as follows:

"I shall know why-when Time is over-
And I have ceased to wonder why-
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky-

He will tell me what “Peter” promised-
And I-for wonder at his woe-
I shall forget the drop of Anguish
That scalds me now-that scalds me now!"

No matter what comes later, anguish will leave its mark. Suffering will leave its mark. There is a chance of removing yourself from suffering, but you will never reenter the world you had before it came.

And here is where FlashForward comes in. FlashForward has characters who see firsthand the suffering they will go through, or their flashforwards cause suffering upon their sight. Olivia is terrified of her eventual adultery. Mark is scared of returning to his alcoholism and losing his family. Nicole is frightened of a world where she finds herself deserving of being drowned to death. Demetri is, unsurprisingly, unpleased by the prospect of being murdered. Aaron is fraught by all kinds of despair when he sees his supposedly dead daughter alive. And Al, poor Al, wants to stop himself from being the cause of death for a single mother.

Yet, the agency that these characters employ? It's pitiful! The show seems to endorse the nonsensical concept of determinism, which Lloyd calls Simon out for using in yesterday's episode. But there are little things that characters do. Mark burns the friendship bracelet his daughter makes for him... all while constructing the board he sees in his future. Olivia throws away the lingerie she sees in her flashforward. Nicole tries to be the best person in the world, one who hardly deserves her death. And Al... kills himself.

I give Al two gigantic thumbs up, as well as the writers of FlashForward, for that game-changing decision. I cried, not only because it was so sad, but also because it was a much-needed remonstration of how the future is not set in stone (didn't we learn this lesson in Terminator all those years ago?). I had been waiting since the beginning for someone to jump off a building or take a gun to their head. It seems such a depression alternative, but in this case, it is a form of agency, better than the efforts the other characters have been making. They obsess over their futures rather than trying to live their lives as if their futures are still within their control. They are thrown out of whack, out of their comfortable little frames of lives, and forget that they have any control whatsoever. They are acting like Chase's companions and admitting defeat, that there's nothing to be done, the destiny has already been prescribed, there's no way out.

But there is, and that is what is so interesting and frustrating and beautiful about FlashForward. It provides us with this amazing study of how we all can react to a loss of control. It's not the same as being lost on a tropical island, not about finding that you have super powers, not about supernatural beings and powers. But all of these scenarios, they show new potential by being removed. But this... FlashForward, is so unique. It's not a change of what's already happened that leads this people to make their new choices and to arrange their new lives. There was a big dramatic event, the blackout, yes, but that's not all. Not only is there that bookend with the deaths of millions and the destruction of many places, but there's a future seen too. The potential is lost when people see the future and find themselves bound to a destiny, lost from their control, not just from the life they've already had, but the life they wanted or planned to have.

FlashForward isn't perfect. But I am so tired of hearing it labeled as a Lost knock-off, as too slow-moving or whatever else people find bad about it. FlashForward raises some of the most interesting questions and observations about human nature in regards to this loss of control, in regards to suffering, both of which I believe to be so important and central to human life, than I have seen in a while.

I will close this lengthy argument with the closing paragraph of the paper I wrote for my class. It was written before the latest two episodes of FlashForward were aired and therefore before Al's suicide. It may be repetitive of what I've already said, it may not be as articulate or clear or as in favor of the show as I am trying to be here. But it is an example of how truly fascinating this is:



"As an extension of this particular concept of human defiance versus submission to the fate’s commandment of suffering, there has been something tugging at my brain for some time now. This subject consistently reminds me of a new television series by the name of FlashForward. In the series, each of the characters is privy to a two minute and seventeen second “flashforward” (a vision with the clarity of a memory but of something that hasn’t yet happened) to a point approximately six months in the future. What people see brings them to do many things they may not have done had they not seen their future, especially those who see negative things in their flashforward (reverting to alcoholism after seven years of sobriety, having been murdered prior to that date, being in an extramarital affair with an unknown man, etc.) But what really surprises me is how some of the characters follow the strings, allow themselves to be drawn into the web of destiny or fate or whatever leads them to that place in the future, to that place where they would rather not go. Of course, the solution is not to simply kill oneself, although that would surely defy what is seen in the future. But when the woman avoids the man she will supposedly have an affair with, when the girl who sees herself as being “deservedly” murdered resolves to do absolutely no wrong in her life that would allow her such a fate, it reminds me of the strength of humanity to fight against what is to come. Here’s to hoping that some of them are actually capable of defying fate. Otherwise, the argument for humanity’s ability to use our small portion of agency to fight back will have been smacked down as completely false. If we can’t even stop the things we have been forewarned of, what hope is there when we don’t get that opportunity to see where the road goes?"



...the only thing I'm worried about? I'm only worried that FlashForward won't realize how smart it is (Heroes style... but I think FlashForward is already a lot stronger than Heroes was in the beginning) and ruin the beautiful study is has presented to us. Maybe I can even hope some of the dudes involved read this and realize what I'm getting out of it! ...but I doubt that. So the end.