Tyler Perry's doing Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls whether we "elitists" like it or not. And that should scare everyone...

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By Christopher Chambers

The blogpost thread’s on fire, and the subject is Tyler Perry. “Escapist entertainment!“  declares a commenter. “That’s all. You boogies [sic, bourgeois] and haters never understand him [Perry], because his characters are real and speak to us, not you.”

Someone in the thread shoots back: “Wait, you said it was just ‘escapist entertainment’ in one sentence then you turn around and claim these stereotypes and buffoonery are somehow ‘real’ and ’speak to you’ in the next. Makes no damn sense.“

The commenter retorts. “See? You’re hating. You got no right!“

The commenter’s correct. Perhaps it’s not supposed to make any damn sense. Indeed, the Internet Movie Database has yet to list a cast for Tyler Perry’s adaptation of playwright, poet and feminist scribe Ntozake Shange’s dazzling and disturbing 1975 play For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Rumors soar, however: Halle Berry, Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce Knowles, etc. Perry remarked that producing Shange’s complex work was a “dream come true.”

And yet a source close to the African American “House of Payne” writers he fired in 2008 for attempting to join a union reveals that Perry hadn’t even heard of the play until recently, or had a clue of what it’s about. In that, Tyler Perry shares something with many in his core audience.  

Well, given the outrage, teeth gnashing and bloviating one would think the film is not only ready to premier, but is also the second coming of Birth of a Nation. For example, writer Thembi Ford labeled Perry the “King of Coonery.”  Some feminist scholars in print, blogs or even NPR have blown the war conch and are sharpening their verbal machetes. Even black conservatives, usually more fearful of the “coon” moniker themselves, have spoken. John McWhorter, in his recent piece in The New Republic, dismisses Perry’s body of work as “chitlin’ circuit” trope. Interestingly, McWhorter praises Perry’s easy-to-digest lessons in the wingnut trope of personal responsibility. It’s as if Perry represents the evolution of the morality “stage-plays” of medieval Europe, performed for illiterate serfs who had no access to the Bible or written fables. In McWhorter’s opinion, that’s a friendlier and thus more effective alternative to Bill Cosby’s irascibility and quasi-elitist “Come On People” charge against the culture of poor, less educated African Americans. Imagine that-”Madea” as instrument of Michael Steele? Not likely, but maybe McWhorter proffers a hint as Perry’s allure. Easy-to-digest stories for average blackfolk.

Tyler himself may have to appear in his version of For Colored Girls…in drag and rubber boobs as “Madea,” adding a touch of Greek chorus narration or sermonizing, just to help his audience along. Shange’s work was less a staged drama than a series of poems, each allegorical, each intense, explicit, and each tacked to a specific character pouring out what it meant to be a black woman in America. In the Seventies, too: the waning of Civil Rights, the tail of the Black Arts Movement and Panthers, the waxing tide of urban decay and rural poverty, roiling beneath the glitz.

For Colored Girls isn’t escapist entertainment. It’s a cannon blast, backwards. Aimed at characters like “Miz Lucy” – the caricature of black womanhood first staged in minstrel shows with the male “Zip Coon” as early as the 1840s.  Lucy even predates the wise ole “Mammy” type-who, like Madea, was once played by a black man in drag. In a time of utter oppression and slavery in the South, and legislative apartheid and disenfranchisement in the North, Lucy’s comic affectations and melodramatic travails made black people-not just white audiences- laugh. Caricature was good business.

It still is. Tyler Perry’s latest Lionsgates-backed film, I Can Do Bad All By Myself grossed almost $45 million in three weeks. Supporters and fans crow that money equals respect, credibility and clout. Stop being a hater, stop being the hackneyed crab in the barrel. One commenter to Thembi Ford’s Root piece proselytized that maybe God himself (or herself, if you’re fan of Shange’s) called Perry to success. Less heavenly sources opine that Perry rightly should displace Spike Lee as king of black film, given the interpretation that many of Spike’s characters and themes are cloying, grandiose, self-indulgent or mawkish. Hardly “real,” like Perry’s work. Moreover, as film historian Donald Bogle explains, the pioneering (and moneymaking) “race films” of Oscar Micheaux during the 1930s and 40s presented elementary plots and well-minted stereotypes far outpacing Perry’s, and yet Michaeux’s considered an icon. Likewise many of the “Blaxoploitation” era’s pivotal movies were downright cartoonish, despite the patina of empowerment.

But anyone who understands what critical thinking entails also understands that getting paid doesn’t equal credibility. The measure is dedication to art, to craft. Dave Chappelle walked away from $50 million rather than “sell out” and water down, well, lampooning material like Perry’s. Similarly, Aaron McGruder’s “Boondocks” showed an edge and irony too sharp for many black folks to fathom. McGruder refused to blunt that edge for cash, and now he and his characters are cult heroes. As reflected in many Blaxploitation films, the loner pimp or repentant drug dealer was the allegory for success. Chalk that up to centuries of oppression-or mere ignorance. And as for Spike Lee’s films, they more idiosyncratic than caricature. Idiosyncrasy is an indication of art, of personal comment and cultural criticism. Perry would do well to compare his sitcoms to what’s afoot in Spike’s Bamboozled. Bamboozled was a box office flop. But it was still spawned in a stream of art. Something transcendent, like Etta James belting out pain, not Beyonce as a caricature of Etta James.

For Colored Girls is one of the highest expressions of transcendent art. Perhaps it shouldn’t on film. Film, as Orson Wells said once said after Citizen Kane’s premier (and well in advance of network television), “is usually the pig trough of least common denominator commerce.” Have August Wilson’s plays done well on film? Or Shakespeare’s?  

Shange’s work isn’t meant to be easy. Digesting it is work, and that’s counter-intuitive to entertainment, escapist or otherwise. Pathos and comedy-humans are hard-wired for it, and Perry understands this very well. Intelligent black women-some who’d build a statue to Shange if they could-also cackle over Ne Ne’s latest antics on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, just as their mothers debated vixens and virgins in their favorite soap operas. Or our forbearers laughed heartily at Zip Coon and Miz Lucy, recall.

Tyler Perry’s job is to entertain, not transcend, with cartoon characters, simple morality points, and thus make money for his white corporate backers. Likewise for Blaxploitation flicks of another generation, as Donald Bogle and even actor Fred Williamson have pointed out. Black people saved white Hollywood’s wallet in the Seventies, and now. Yet one black man (rather than his writers apparently) gets paid and Perry’s fans declare Jubilee. Look at the stratospheric black talent mustering for him, they say. Jill Scott, Halle Berry, James Earl Jones-they know it’s not Zip Coon and Miz Lucy, otherwise they wouldn’t sign on, correct? Again, segregation-of audiences, that is-is good business. They sign-on because of the money. And, like laid-off CEOs at a job fair, they know Hollywood doesn’t value their skill and training. Not unless they are former rappers or Beyonce, who, interestingly, feed a white, not black, demographic. Appearing in a made-for-BET low budget melodrama or a straight to DVD stinker is often their only job offer.

Finally, fueling the escapist jones of the Zip Coon and Miz Lucy in all of us doesn’t mean cross-over success. I Can Do Bad All By Myself may have scored big numbers, but its $45 million box office take was easily bested by the animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ($60 Million in three weeks) and the remake of Fame-reminding elitist haters, at least, that there are far more powerful niche audiences out there than busloads of adoring churchfolk. As author Steven Barnes has posited, any oppressed ethnic group will embrace a piece of entertainment that puts them at the center, no matter the coarseness of the stereotypes. Consequently black audiences may think they know “real” people like Madea, or Brown, in their families, but in reality they aren’t there. That’s a paradox for critical thinkers. It’s “hateration” to maniacal Perry fans. Like Rush Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” or Glenn Beck’s racist Tea Partiers, it’s not about paradox or making sense. It’s about belief. Ntzoke Shange is merely fodder.

But might Perry do Shange’s work justice? After all, Steven Spielberg took a complex, nuanced Alice Walker novel, The Color Purple-itself a collection of letters akin to Shange’s poems-and Disneyfied it. It became simple sistagurl melodrama. Pushed the uplifting buttons, pressed the villain and redemption buttons. It was the “Cliff’s Notes,” easy to digest version of a classic.  It wasn’t art, but in wrecking Walker’s vision, Spielberg exposed Walker’s work to audiences which never would have dreamed of buying the book. And this, ironically, enshrined Walker’s legacy with such “regular folks.” Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Julie Dash, Debbie Allen and Nzinga Stewart would stay true to the art, to Shange’s vision. And no one would go see it. They want Miz Lucy, mewling or beating her chest in classic melodrama, followed by a little comedy.

No, it’s not supposed to make sense. A century ago W.E.B. DuBois surrendered in his effort to critique African American entertainment, and to make it a tool of political change. That’s a frightening realization-that not even DuBois could make sense of it. The stakes then, as now, are chilling. When all there are is Real Housewives, silly ghetto novels, hypersexual empty Hip Hop and insipid divas…and Tyler Perry…from where will the art come? No money in it. No incentive to produce or write it. Critical thinking derives from the measure of things such as art. Thus critical and creative thinking skills erode over time. We become more susceptible, therefore, to the legal, political, cultural and economic wounds from which we in turn seek escape in entertainment. Full circle. That means more cash for Tyler Perry and Lionsgate. Ntzoke Shange would appreciate that irony, at least.

 Christopher Chambers is a bestselling author and a professor of Journalism at Georgetown University.

This story is filed under: Arts & Culture

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