The Abject and the Grotesque: Broken Bodies, Broken Dreams, and the Lost Promise of Harlem

. . . what happens to a dream deferred?

—Langston Hughes

. . . have you heard the story of the rose that grew from concrete?

—Tupac Shakur

Precious is a difficult film to watch, not only because it deals with uneasy topics such as incest, poverty, illiteracy, and the disease of HIV/AIDS, but also because of its unflinching focus on the irrepressible and corpulent body of one Claireece "Precious" Jones. Hers is a body born out of a life of trauma, yet this body powerfully disrupts the visual and aural boundaries typically experienced by a viewing audience—so much so that critics Daniel Engber and David Edelstein resort to vicious and dehumanizing language to describe their encounter with the film. As Engber bewails, "the film's most arresting figure of urban poverty is the one that lumbers through nearly every frame: The 300-pound Gabby Sidibe." New York's David Edelstein echoes these same sentiments, "[Precious's] head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin . . . her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. That's part of the movie's XXXtreme social realism, no doubt."¹

No doubt? Besides overlooking the powerful association between the figurative and the literal, the seen and the imagined, Engber's and Edelstein's viewing practices focus the film through rigid lenses. More than benign illustrations, artistic images potently exemplify the nature and meaning of American values and beliefs. Engber's and Edelstein's inept and offensive attempts at defining the grueling and heartbreaking struggles of black folks in the concrete jungles of America clearly demonstrate their value system, and their use of demeaning metaphors that characterize the black body as ugly, abnormal, and inferior points to the challenges of operating in systems of representations that stereotype black people. Specifically, the film Precious adeptly troubles these psychic realms of excess, interrogating the crude flagrancies of racial and gender codings that make the black subject uninhabitable for cogent counterdiscourse. Thus, the ghastly and horrific experience of a young and undereducated African American woman speaks to the inability of society to process—acknowledge—the black body as a redeemable being. Precious is fashioned as abject—in a constant state of misery and degradation.

Nonetheless, this character simultaneously produces meaning and critique. To be sure, Precious's portly body represents and then absorbs America's social ills, deflecting back upon viewers their own (dis)ease with difference. The film's use of excess intimacies—that is, the way food, foul language, and abusive sex are deployed in the film—helps to provide artistic space to articulate the inexplicable, the grotesque, the private gesturing of belonging, hope, and promise. These gestures also extend to the viewer an opportunity to envisage the real progress (or lack thereof) of the black community, the further fragmentation of the family unit, the disintegration of individual personhood, and the costly effects of lost childhood.

In some respects, one may well argue that Precious is our modern-day horror story of urban neglect and decay. The film's opening scene—a panoramic view of Harlem's subway trusses, concrete buildings, and street lights—is framed by the faint reminder of promise that is embodied in the image of a long red scarf that hangs from a tall street light. The vibrancy of this color provides a stark backdrop to urban blight. Extending this image is the undecipherable scrawling that appears sporadically throughout the first few scenes of the film. These linguistic gestures, remnants of illiteracy, are startling. Their positioning in the scrolling credits forces the viewer to deprivilege traditional forms of communication. Thus, the undecipherable symbols of the speaker appear on the first line, and these images are translated into recognizable language for the viewer parenthetically underneath that line. These introductory notes set the overall tone for the film as the watcher is forced to reevaluate not only how images/languages are processed and ordered, but also how we must make sense of these fragments within the overall structure of the film to discover the whole story of Precious.

Placing Precious's story...