Precious is so hot right now. It’s our Obama-era Brokeback Mountain, the mainstream movie of the year that made mainstream audiences feel incredibly informed and liberal. Basically, Precious is Oscar bait. This awards season, the faces of director Lee Daniels and stars Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe (all Oscar nominees for the film) are plastered all over our televisions and Crackberrys. But the accompanying articles seem not to concentrate on the stars’ performances, but rather on their physiques. Specifically, their bellies. And their leg hair. Wait, Mo’Nique doesn’t shave?! Stop the presses!
Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, the film Precious chronicles the life of the sixteen-year-old title character, an African-American girl growing up in 1980s Harlem. Precious can barely read or write. Her father has impregnated her twice. Her mother beats her regularly with a frying pan, forces her to cook pigs’ feet, and openly seethes at her daughter for “stealing” her husband by bearing his children.
Precious’ most miraculous attribute is her ability to craft an identity for herself and persevere despite great adversity. Surprisingly, the focus of this epic tale of human survival is not touted by the media as such. Why not? Because Precious is fat. Okay, Precious might be obese. But from the way the film is publicized, one would think that she explodes at the end or gets fatally trapped on a chair lift while skiing. In the movie, however, Precious’ weight is the least of her worries. Gabourey Sidibe, the actress who plays the titular character, had a brusque response to the media’s obsession with her character’s weight: “It’s like, she’s fat. Well fucking A. She’s already having a hard life. So what, if she was skinny, would this story be any the less heartfelt or daunting? That’s not the story. That’s not the point.”
The media’s focus on Precious’ weight, to the point of excluding the film’s primary themes of racism and sexism in our society, demonstrates its elitism—as if thinness, a characteristic prized by the white intelligentsia, could somehow have saved Precious from her trials. The media implies that obesity is a fate that is completely preventable under her circumstances, somehow implying that being fat is a completely different issue from race or class, and that Precious somehow contributed to her own suffering.
Members of the press often confuse Sidibe for her character. In interviews, reporters have remarked at how astonishingly confident and articulate the 26-year old actress is. You know, in real life. Implied is the assumption that Sidibe wouldn’t have any other personality than that of the rape and domestic abuse victim she portrayed in Precious. Sidibe, a Harlem native and former psychology major at The City College of New York, doesn’t have a lot of patience for this misunderstanding. She asserts, “They try to paint the picture that I was this downtrodden, ugly girl who was unpopular in school and in life, and then I got this role and now I’m awesome. But the truth is that I’ve been awesome, and then I got this role.”
When a makeup artist on a New York Magazine photo shoot gushed that Sidibe looked “totally opposite to [her] character,” Sidibe replied simply, “Thanks. I’m actually…not her.” And it’s true. Sidibe is SO not her. She professes to have multiple boyfriends and occasionally refers to herself in the third person. She’s a total diva. Yeah, newsflash: she’s an actress. Frankly, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows that movies aren’t real and that this woman is, in fact, acting. But does the press assume Sidibe should be inarticulate and meek because of her race? Surely, we’re past that as a country…Obama is Prez! No, it’s because Sidibe is actually Precious’ size. Do we as a society therefore believe that being fat is a shameful sin?
And then there’s Mo’Nique. Already a stand-up icon, the comic actress gave a transcendentally brutal performance as Precious’ abusive mother Mary. The woman could’ve schooled Stanislavski himself on method acting in this role. And yet, all anyone can talk about is Mo’Nique’s love of fried shrimp. And her ballsy demeanor. And the fact that she frequently parades her unshaven legs around red carpets. According to jezebel.com, Mo’Nique said on the View that “her unshaven legs are ‘real legs’ and the rest of us have just bought into some strange social convention that they aren’t attractive or that men won’t desire us if we don’t keep up with the Joneses.”
Mo’Nique’s point is valid and gives the rest of us pause to consider the lengths we go to in order to remove unwanted hair from our bodies. So why is an Oscar nominee discussing her leg hair on The View? Would Barbara Walters ask Tom Cruise if he wears lifts (he does) or Nicholas Cage if he wears hair plugs (he does) on national television? Dubious. Yet Mo’Nique’s leg hair is newsworthy. In fact, the New York Daily News devoted a 363-word article specifically to the topic. Reporters also seem to relish describing what Mo’Nique eats during the course of their interviews. Does the New York Times really need to relay that Mo’Nique requested “three orders of jumbo buffalo shrimp to go” at lunch? We get it. Mo’Nique is fat. But she is also a visionary who doesn’t subscribe to Hollywood by molding her career to satiate its desires. She lives in Atlanta where she films her talk show, “The Mo’Nique Show,” daily. She and her husband manage her career autonomously. She chose to do Precious as a means of raising awareness for victims of domestic abuse, a tragedy she has experienced herself.
Mo’Nique now plans to continue performing primarily stand-up because it makes her happy. And she isn’t planning on pimping herself out on carpets and talk shows this season to campaign for the Oscar. Mo’Nique thinks that her performance should speak for itself, saying, “President Barack Obama had to campaign because he had something to prove: that he could do it. Well, the performance is on the screen. So at what point am I still trying to prove something?” These are the words of a truly confident actress, one who knows that she absolutely deserves the award, and that she’ll probably get it. And she sure as hell won’t be nicking herself in the shower anytime soon.
In Precious, Mary internalizes what she reads as society’s hatred of her—white people oppress her, no one thinks she deserves an education, and her man loses sexual interest in her—and projects this hatred onto her only daughter. This is the great tragedy of the film, that Mary brings about Precious’ suffering because her own is so profound that she sees no hope of alleviating it. Precious is a story of black oppression, but, more universally, it is a story of female oppression.
Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique exude quite clearly that they love their physical beings and themselves, demonstrating that black women and overweight women in America have come to reject society’s prejudices. However, our media is lagging behind them. Yeah, they are saying, we are ready to appreciate racial minorities now. But we still have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves truly liberal in our judgments of individuals who may choose to shave, wax, or go native.
