“Movies are the most powerful medium for change on earth.”
Alice Walker
Which begs the question in 2024…
“Then why use such a powerful medium to try and force people to remain psychologically the same?”
The Color Purple… the movie musical was supposed to fail.
And hard.
From jump.
I was letting this all go, sans response.
…why?
I have lived and breathed as an artist for many moons all over America.
That, and Grievechronic’s subject matter already brought me to the theater in a head that was NOT going to be appreciated inside of it by its hawkers.
Okay, let’s be REAL real. Once said hawkers got my money for the ticket they wouldn’t have cared how I’d felt or fared after it.
…So I passed.
I passed on putting down money that meant something to me…to support something that deified every archetype within the Black community that led to the inciting events of Grievechronic even being possible for real at the end of the last century.
A BIG lie has been told.
It began as the truth, an author speaking that painful truth to Power…but it was co-opted by the Powerful that said truth was spoken against.
& “The Powerful” corrupted it. Intentionally. They took the half truth of it they could use and turned it into an infectious vaccine of sorts, a retrovirus of pornographic poverty and trauma programming that could be used to ensure that targeted crops later down the line would be more pliable and susceptible to life choices in concert with the lie being re-embedded into psyches via the magic of movies.
The lie is if you keep showing the “bad things,” you heal them.
No. & I used to be a card- carrying member of that team with the placards, waving that shit high.
The truth is if you tell the story without the comeuppance or correction being instantaneous as you’re mythologizing it after the fact…you’re in league with the ones who were hypnotized into committing the crimes in the first place.
A child who has been abused, then ritualistically drowned in visions of abuse after abuse until abuse in all of its forms is normalized often loses the ability to be a protector of other innocents. Without a gargantuan amount of exhaustive effort on their part, that child grows up to be an adult either full of hostility [because he had no protector so why should he protect?], numbness- or often, unfortunately grows up to also abuse.
I categorically believe that the cultural priming inherent in the Color Purple remake of 2023/2024 is just that: Ritualistic abuse against the collective inner children of Black people.
Frankly said,
ANY retelling of the Color Purple in 2024 that makes a 21st century Black audience sit, no~ offer up, live through 2 hours of Mister being the same dick in 2023 that the motherfucker was in 1903, 1943 OR 1983 needs to get the fuck out of theaters near you & me.
& I Loved Danny Glover IN Spite of Mister. He actually absently explained what acting was to me as a kid by being able to rep both Mister AND Murtaugh believably.
But in 2024 we do not deserve 2 hours of the tormentor everybody in the vicinity of Knows is a demon…getting to be a fucking demon, mostly unchecked. & we deserve more than the passive feminized acquiescence to his behavior by men and women alike.
We deserve more than a woman singing “I don’t need you to love me” in that Oscar contending way across the trailer …like the media department really expected Black women in the 2020s to hear that fucked lullaby and charge the theaters like deranged lemurs reacting to twisted Palvovian bells they’ve rung, waving their money and squealing “this one’s made for me!”
(…bells solely keyed to how the media hopes and needs all Black women to think about love to keep the institutionalized bullshit engine against them running…but that’s a whole ‘nother essay).
We deserve more than a traumatized character’s subsistence amongst as broken female friends as the good enough. And SHE deserves her crescendo of love to be more than falling into lesbianism in a search for some semblance of love… in the still shining light of a despot the entire community knows needs to die due to his poisoning effect on everything around him. This ain’t Steve Urkerl “did I do that” shit. Mister is written as a soul-killing Son of Sam piece of shit.
It’s 2024. We’re not accepting the *Shrug* “… it’s Patriarchy*” mess of yesteryear.
“If that the Color Purple movie HAS to come back…That motherfucker needs to die. & those female characters need to get to live for more than the last 30 minutes of the film in the shadows of HIM Still getting to be the menacing main character vibration.”
…& we all know it.
So…since they didn’t “give the people what they wanted…”
Because their bottom line is padded by the consumptive choices that populace of yore was willingly triggered into due to opening up their psyches to these powerful archetypal stories with no healing in the retelling of these dark myths…
The movie…flopped.
If you revisit it without healing it, it’s just drinking poison… and being in league with your tormentors against you.
I really wasn’t going to say anything.
Because I understand the motivations of those who thought this WAS a good idea.
And I understood that to do this they hadn’t bothered to check the current zeitgeist on shit like this at all.
The Ancestors are like:
“THANK FN GOD They didn’t pick this mess back up this time, believing the lie that it was honoring us! Thank God(which we are now a part of in earnest) they weren’t thinking it was getting them in tune with our dead asses! We went THROUGH the horrors of that time to get them to This Time they are blessed to be in NOW…where they can focus on and be ANYTHING they want to be. They don’t have to stay in un-escapeable, untenable situations even remotely akin to the scenarios we struggled through to give them a chance beyond those vibrations. Thank God they’re awake enough that it bombed!”
Boomers are like…
“Even WE can’t even trauma bond over this shit anymore. We know God wants more from us than wallowing in what our parents & grandparents fought to escape psychologically for us to even be here refusing to die and hoarding resources.”
GenX is like…
“Not another trauma porn resurgence attempt. Is Herschel Walker going to have a cameo in this to show Whose “Good old days” elegy this movie is?”
Millenials are like…
“I can’t do another slavery adjacent movie and call that allyship any longer. I understand that wanting my brothers and sisters in the cause to latch onto this narrative in 2024 and claim it as theirs is highly toxic and I want no part in it.”
Gen Z is like…
“It’s giving sus~ It’s giving “why does Handpicked seem to equal badly contracted, no rider~”?”
Gen A’s are like…
“Well technically, the last time our soul wave was here we HAD to go through all that, so to be alive when our young elders are like “No retreads” is going to frame a greater world for us…so thanks, Parents!”
But what about Glyph? beyond the generational whathaveyous, what am I like on this topic that has so many folks strangely in their feels in the most un-empathetic ways?
As I said… From jump this movie was doomed.
It was like the money earmarked for this came from coffers of folks who really wish Black folks were still trapped in that realm because in that realm Black folks knew their place. Like some old head went “If you can promise me that this movie can trigger some solidarity in re-submission to the struggle, take my money! Them making peace with going through all that passively and stoically gave Our ancestors space to bask in the equity procured off of them.”
But …now the one publicly listed as calling the shots for all intents and purposes, the one who shoved the original lead out of the spotlight on this to present this under her name on the marquee… in a supremely & strangely ironic turn of events…is Harpo, the chick who went down in the history of the story as standing up to the very beasts we’re actually talking about here… the ONE who fought back against what was wrong until she was stomped into submission down the line.
& Now she’s the one who has done in real time what was done to her character in a spiritual sense, at the beginning of the tale, instead of the end. Harsh take? Nope.
That’s the actual nature of what she did to these young, handpicked actresses. That phraseology? When it came out what they actually went through?
The question is simple: “Handpicked for what? Ritualistic Humiliation?”
…because that is what the producers put them through on this shoot, long before this PR blitz with the movie rollout even began.
The first pushback against fuss about having to fight to be paid correctly… The first press shots fired were countering soundbites from Oprah.
“I only took $33,000 for the role [back then]& was happy.”
She showed her producing stance in that responsive syntax then & there. That is who she was in that producer’s chair. They had a black Billionaire on the producing team (we’ll come back to that) who had the mindset of “I was grateful for the peanuts I fought for to the point of surrender to get & look what I turned it into!”
What was needed instead post George Floyd (yeah, I said it) and the huge revolution of black creatives fighting off the sharks who wanted to prove they were allies by buying Black work but vehemently fought against ANY requests & demands for Equity IN the projects (that would allow a path towards generational wealth accumulation)…
Was a Black billionaire who looked at all the drudgery she knew white actresses didn’t have to schlep through…and decided to get the baseline right for the HANDPICKED Actors slated for her movie. From the simplest place of equality.
Oprah was in a position of power to not make it a “Black Thing,” where they had to go through the humiliation of having to ask[or demand] to be treated fairly, where the division of fairness seemed keyed to skin color.
It could have simply been just a ‘decent Movie Production, underwritten by one of the biggest studios in town.’
Which we cannot forget it was.
Doing baseline right by all the actors and the team in place for this movie could’ve been a professional flex that would’ve drowned out ALL the hesitancy that frothed up across the generations in response to even the idea of them remaking this trauma porn movie.
Then the talk of “Healing” would’ve been able to be a true healing. Because it would’ve addressed all the instances of black creatives feeling dogged in the film industry.
Instead, we got peppered with the clips of the young actresses who still don’t fully recognize what they just moved through, only unscathed due to the self-sacrifice of Taraji on the public altar, poised to be punished like fucking Prometheus for shedding light in the darkness of this shit & making it hard for the Gods to erase the fires of “actors should have food even if it’s not in their riders” from the masses minds.
“it’s oooookay now! It all got fixed! Oprah came in like an angel & fixed it~!”
THAT…right there …is the epitome of the black community deifying the very ones consciously abusing them as easy targets in the first place.
Oprah gets no laurels on this shit. None.
Why not?
Look…I can set aside her having an affinity towards this tale because where she came from was energetically reminiscent of time and place in this tale. I get that. It makes her climb to where she is all the more glorious.
I can even set aside her whole “I surrender all” narrative about how she fought so hard to play Harpo, and was at a fat farm trying to figure out how to give the IDEA of it up. Beautiful story, changed lives. Even my life was changed by the image of her on that fucking treadmill crying to God to take the desire for that part off of her so she could get on with her life.
What I won’t set aside… As an Artist… and ANY True Artist is an advocate for the other artists around them by Default due to how actual arthead affects the psychology… is that Oprah should not have HAD to be called BY Henson in the first fucking place.
Actual artists don’t fuck other artists by default on shit like this.
These aren’t the first “Artists” she’s thrown under the bus. I wish I could forget her talking with Julie Taymor and equating being an artist on National television with being crazy and cutting off your ear. I cringed at that being beamed into households everywhere, no chaser. I cried for the children of the mothers watching that episode who were now going to be giving stupendous side eye to their weird little children who just wanted to go be graphic designers and shit. That was like 2008/2009. I got over it, but… seeing that then makes this incongruency even though she has positioned herself AS an artist not be the shock to me that it is to others.
“Ah yes, but she’s acting as a producer, not an artist!”
…That’s what makes it worse.
Her job as producer entails the production being effectively Produced. By the entire production team. Yes, some producers are more skilled in this, than that. Some producerheads are straight money dudes and chicks, others are logistical geniuses. But this team does NOT get the pass of being out there shaking trees begging for money for this.
Warner Brothers GAVE them 100 million dollars. Easy.
Them-the producing TEAM. & after they and their teams cashed checks~💨
…LOOK- a producer is supposed to do all the things Henson had to Beg Harpo to do. Those 10-odd producers took all that money for them and their “teams” & ran.
So if this producing team just HAPPENED to HANDPICK all the up and coming actresses where NONE of them just happened to have any contract allusions to trailers and Fucking food…
And they didn’t go…”Okay..technically, it’s damned near HPAA to feed and shelter them & Atlanta’s a film hub so it’s not like there’s nothing there…we can just…do minimally right by their humanity, right?”…
Then no!
The Black Billionaire who was an Actress On the first movie doesn’t get a “my name’s on the poster this time” victory lap on that big break. Not when she was on the team of producers who just effectively poisoned the potential “big break experiences” of a slew of young actors BEFORE ACTION was even called 1st day on set.They Handpicked up and comers who they didn’t have to contractually do right by…and not one of them decided to. This was cursed in the producer’s offices. Before they even got to set.
That vibration dovetails with all ages in the black community finally adamantly not wanting to be brainwashed by fucked up old stories our ancestors died trying to escape from while holding our parents and grandparents above water (when they could) and towards shores as they drowned in the psychological warfare of it all.
It syncs with the populace as a whole rejecting the secular reprogramming that incessantly positions black women as the repository of the worst of all ills.
All that mule of the world shit only keeps finding ways to be true in the 21st century because some would rather bleat that trite quote than be the ones who do right By black women so there can be a groundswell of that goodness.
But Instead of only “see, that’s the way your lot has always had it,” there is now this movement to simply not support the motif when it’s brandished.
& It’s making the ones who’ve made bank off of us supporting their misogynistic krill as a disservice to ourselves, by re-inundating our psyches with it whenever we get clean of these societal trap doors & mental pitfalls…lose their fucking minds over losing customers they never thought they’d lose.
The backlash is against bathing a captured black community’s attention in the remembrance of past and current traumas musically.
People finally realize it is so much harder to fight off earworms telling you what “you’ve never been more than” when the shit is set to music …and they’re deciding not to drink that koolaid.
The traumas this movie showcases and revels in for the brunt of its runtime, and the paltry half-lived solutions the characters come up with to eke out an existence in the light of the guy as vicious as the white tormentors no longer legally able to rule over them… with naan a true exploration of WHERE Mister got all his psychopathy from [Make THAT movie, if you have the balls!]… speak to the passive racist philosophy behind just letting institutionalized, falsely loaded “survival of the fittest(most vicious)” bullshit continue to wreak havoc.
Traumas that our ancestors fought so hard out of that they forcibly changed the laws of this nation should not be something to regale their victorious offspring with down the line, calling that shit shunshine.
They were expecting black people to run towards more black trauma porn and put their money down, hard earned or not.
As a show of solidarity, planning to make their mint off of “If you don’t show up for Black movies, they’ll make fewer” being misread by society trying to show support for all the weird lil arty black kids who were really good at playing pretend.
US saying “FUCK SUPPORTING ANY SING-SONGY RENDITION OF THAT “to be Black is hell” SHIT anymore!”
… IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I’VE SEEN IN A LONG TIME.
And as for Henson being chastised on the grounds of wrong time and place…
The reason black community’s standing is where it is in American culture is partly due to this “not the right time or place” bs when it comes to us addressing no longer wanting to be being abused.
MLK got killed because he got fed up doing all that waiting for the proverbial “Right Time and Place” to beg the beasts raping us to stop. And there were a whole bunch of people who hated him -& some were Black- because they felt he’d picked “the wrong time and the wrong place” (for them & their schedules) to broach the things of freedom, equity & equality.
Yes, I took it to Martin Luther King.
‘The community’ has been programmed to accept violence against itself for so long that it enables those being victimized to be shushed by those within the community devouring them. & It’s the same shit that happens with child sexual abuse in the Black community very often.
I’m correlating this “little 100 million dollar movie” to those topics because Those are its fn topics, shrouded in song and dance, dammit.
Oprah as a producer and all the other producers looked at all these young actresses who haven’t Learned to put it in their contracts/rider TO make sure they had a trailer with green m&m’s or food, even during rehearsals…and instead of TEACHING them TO put those riders in, FUCKED them.
Raped them like little lambs.
So again, they deserved the movie THEY “Produced” to fn FLOP.
Time will tell? Nah, time told.
How you gone win when you aint right within?
Lauryn Hill
And Yall who are sitting here making this about “HOLLYWOOD” having issues with Henson as you’re braying this right time/right place shit…can have several seats.
That awkward check in your spirit?
That’s saying you would’ve shut up and been abused to make your money off of your neighbor buying into the pornography of people like you being abused.
In the press?
Well, I spoke on how the first shots fired were from Oprah regarding what SHE accepted.
Since that didn’t work the second shots were from Gayle willfully trying to make a spectacle of Henson’s pain. LISTEN… to how her timbre shifts when she says the word audacity when asking about hearing “on the streets” about Henson thinking of quitting acting after her bad experience on her BFF’s movie.
What streets are Gayle toolng around in? Is she in her Bentley slowing down to the …lol What’s the tea, girlfriends~ing?
No! I’m being so serious!
Every Alt-Black genx & milenial chick has that Aunty always trying to keep everybody on the toxic teat of yesteryear, that one who does her best to counter the audacity of us popping middle fingers at the folks societally above us saying we couldn’t be ourselves if ourselves weren’t cut from the same cloth as them… because she was making her money off pandering to their old crazy asses.
& Everyone’s glazing over her snarling “STOP TALKING” in the same sentence she asked the question. The literal same breath.
… Like something behind her query screeched it from the pits of hell.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxWIYIqbz8LLqKBZkn92HUG11oj_TgmJF4?si=7_Ev72g2PH-N5vzq
There was no care or concern for the artist Henson has spent 20+ years fighting to be.
She was stringing her up, daring her in that covert narc way to “keep it up,” covertly nail pinching her in a crowded room to stop her from telling on her elders for being dicks.
And… To her credit as a human being… Henson broke in the most sincere, vulnerable way possible and showed the situation all the more for what it was. ANYWAY.
Gayle came for her cloyingly & in doing so she fucked her BFF more than anything else IN THIS PRIOR TO her had done.
Which is WHY the spin became what it did.
She was trying to throw Henson under the bus for her friend for her audacity. & instead…she helped the movie jump the shark.
The rest of the “Hollywood is mad press” is coming from pissed off black people in the industry running with this narrative to show they’re willing to play the game as it’s been played. Pre the Katt Williams 2024 season opener.
ANYTHING that stands against the norm they’ve willingly subjected themselves to in order to get where they’ve gotten or go where they aim to go, any integrity higher than the pricepoint where they were “bought” to is going to have shots fired at it.
Oh. & They never take it on After the fact.
The right time nor place never comes. Ever.
If the time and place to be treated with equanimity and respect as a fellow artist wasn’t as a Black A-list actress on a WB- bankrolled 100 million dollar extravaganza with ONE of many producers being a friggin Black Billionaire…
When the fuck do yall think the right time and place is? In the by and by?
Fuck this fake Pentacostal, Baptist “let me abuse you til you die early so you can enjoy heaven with God while your pain helps build my earthly paradise” shit.
There’s never going to be a right time and it’s always going to be seen as you not knowing your place until you show them that THEY were the ones who had misread the times as well as latitudes and longitudes. That’s across the board.
Ask the women of all shades fighting for equitable pay in Hollywood the last ten years. You know~ the ones who have been having to dime folks out who were running the bullshit TO see any change in their tales too. Ask about how the biggest changes have come when one of the male actors making the right kind of coin has demanded his co-stars be done right by. & ONLY due to his doing it.
[Which could bring it back to what Oprah as an actress should’ve been wired to do for the betterment of those coming under her umbrella by default, but those points have been made clear enough…] I can tell you this much though-
They~
(the actual “industry machine” yall think are going to blackball Henson for speaking out, from a place of whiteness vs blackness) are EXPECTING one thing…
Consumer wise? They’re expecting ALL THE OLDER BLACK FOLKS still enamored with the old programming to be like “fOR SHAME!” BECAUSE the boomers and genx Were raised to play by latter day jim crow shit when it comes to what people baseline deserve. They’ve been brainwashed to function in that role of drowning the kid who steps out of line, long Before Mass even gets there.
BUT Taraji DID what a genxer is supposed to do.
She showed yall the true shit afoot.
BY the very ones yall swear up and down love “us, for Us.”… who instead are living off of what they can get away with doing to us or offering us in a subpar way for absent massa.
& Henson’s a virgo.
She’s fn tried to do it yall’s way.
Virgo’s will work the system with perfection if it is merited & possible to do, soul intact. But she got tired of the cold shit she’s still being served, even listed as an A-plus actor.
And… a grown assed, fed up Virgo will set the fucking cart on fire and watch it burn to free all you motherfuckers from the yokes you’re willing to subject yourself to as artists if thAt is the only way She gets free because yalls asses are hemming her in.
It’s “If I hafta to free all you fuckers to free me, since yall are too enamored to Not take this bullshit…yall all ’bout to be free.”
Enough with this “ooh massa gone be mad because you done made a fuss in front of the plantation for the white people to see!” shit.
Massa[your white tormentor] been dead. The plantation- where you pour out your heart in exchange [barely]for subpar conditions, if you’re lucky-is being run by motherfucking brothers and sisters now.
The call is coming from inside the house.
I can only imagine all these folks talking time & place mess having their jaws drop if Taraji ever came out and talked about HOW many OTHER times and places she’d tried to broach this but was told it was not the right time & place.
She was probably crying on camera because crying on each other’s shoulders backstage hadn’t changed shit. & Gayle overheard it backstage, lowkey referring to the intel pejoratively as the streets.
She may have just potentially sacrificed her career doing this on live camera because the only hope these days of sensationalizing every damned thing is for the shit turning into viral moments… One of the only hopes people have now is THAT shining a public light on foul shit Will produce a public uproar & force these motherfuckers to change.
These right place, right time talks …yall don’t understand they haven’t moved for 20+ years in the creative arts industries when it comes to treating people of color at least equally.
Yall don’t get that Denzel flipping it from a noose to a gas chamber was surely not officially the “right time.” …and since they were offering him 600,000.00 to take it, aka to stay in His place and sell the narratives they wanted assigned to us, to a lot of folks him saying no where he did wasn’t “the right place”either.
“Ooh Henson gone get it because she called the one in the business long enough who she knew KNEW that even during rehearsals they should’ve had fn trailers and food-“
Come again? Why is she gone get it? Because she called the chick who didn’t do her literal job description AS a fn producer after her and her team got THEIR check- when SHE , of allll folks, should’ve been fucking ATTUNED to HOW much they’re willing to write dogging black actresses into the fn contract Because she’s BEEN an fn black actress?
Babies, i understand sommayall dont know…but THAT is GOOD TROUBLE. tHAT IS “2024 GOOD MOTHERFN TROUBLE” for artists to FINaLLY have the BAlls to get into.
Winfrey has no fn excuse on any layer of reality. She fought to put her name on it, all “Oprah presents-” & they paid her for that. We get it. Great story…since she was in the first. BUT she didn’t move anything upward in the direction of how black actresses are treated one iota in all the preproduction shit producers as a team are supposed to do BEFORE everyone gets to set?
Look up the job description of Producer. Look up what pre-production means if your panties are in a bunch for the status quo that Ms. Oprah has chosen to represent… when she could be doing anything but.
Understand they got them flights to and hotels in Atlanta…but tried to scrimp with rental cars to drive themselves. & if they’d had any accident driving in crazy-assed atlanta the studio’s insurance would’ve been invalid and the artist would have been liable. But…Don’t talk about that part, right?
So…They rented hotels… but knowing they didn’t want to rent trailers on site …they didn’t rent the ballrooms IN the hotels[that they would’ve been able to easily broker a deal for) and just have the On site rehearsals so the actors could take breaks up in the rooms they’d already paid for, with call-times and breaks effectively staggered to make that shit work? Even knowing how actors have to get in mode to be fn shamans to sell their stories?
So… nobody had in their rider they needed to be fed, or some sort of per diem at least so they could handle food on the daily if they weren’t going to handle food…and the producing team was 100% with letting the chaingang mentality in the wilds of Georgia fly?
This is not a low budget production making these calls, working with a tight assed budget so the people ON the movie give their all to the movie to get the best movie. They literally did things to humiliate the actors when it came to basic necessities of their weird craft that they all knew about going in. Was it psychological warfare to try to get them attuned with the time period of the movie?
Maybe in a few years when they look back on it and try to reframe it as such, Sure!
And these aren’t even colorized calls, per se.
These are basic production calls that were willful technical fouls against their own team.
What makes it a color thing is the tonality with which the pushback was addressed when it came out.
It reeks of you should be thankful miasma that…we’ve { artists} just had enough of hearing from folks sitting in ivory towers who are enraged we’re not interested in the mental gymnastics it takes to be okay with their crumbs.
Yall better recognize that what Taraji P. Henson sincerely said IS THE SAME KIND OF TRUTH TELLING KATT WILLIAMS DID.
Everything BOTH told you about the industry & how it works is TRUE.
& then…if you’re still feeling some kinda way on the heels of That realization… look at your responses to the two events.
You’re tutting Henson, & maybe the only reason you didn’t tut Katt as loudly is you quickly noticed the groundswell cheering on the truth, so you kept your clucking to yourself.
She done set fire to the fn plantation. If you’re still there… baby, it’s time to leave.
& Lastly…
The whole “She should’ve shushed & made her coin and the movie’s coin First, THEN discussed the trauma…” thing?
She should’ve made her coin… off of your ass?
…Let me clean that up for ya: You mean you’d be fine with “Shut up & Make a lil more money for massa before he kills you off for being an uppity nigga who don’t know their “Place.”
(there’s that word again. PLACE… this time utilized the way it’s actually always meant, for those who don’t know).
AKA:
“Taraji should have shut up & made money OFFA US…
Taraji should’ve gotten everybody out to the theaters on the LIE that putting down our “coin,” thinking WE were supporting “a healing project” was important to the community”…
only for US to find out later we were actually supporting the abusive gauntlet she & the others went through IN 2023 …
under a production team led by a black billionaire
(…whose childhood was similar to the horrors of the tale 70 yrs ago, which is why she fucks with the arc so hard and so sentimentally)
that bristled (knowing the full scope of the insurance liabilities they’d tried to get away with rental car-wise) and said “If we get a car & driver for one of them we have to do it for all of them
[… like we do on our other movies. Like an actor is an actor or something. But they’re Black! Don’t we get to not do right by them?!]”
“Lie to the community and talk about the “healing” in a film production that severely hurt you so much that you were like “fuck this career”
…so the community can throw its hardcore cash at you, affirming a narrative that was always fucked up since it’s leap from the page because even the first movie skimmed the prisoner of war/ in captivity to slave master shit that made a Mister… just like today’s news coverage glosses over the system in place to make jailbirds out of so many Black men.
“Help them reload “all black men are demons & the black women are meant to just take it & find workarounds ” back into the cultural zeitgeist”?
The story is healing to Alice Walker and all those moved by the book.
But even she had choice words about the original movie, initially. She mellowed with time as the author. But she said what she said. She also said this in 2015, when asked what the Color Purple was really about.
“It’s about helping our people understand the God they’ve inherited is not necessarily the God they need,” Walker said. “Nature is God and nature is everywhere you need. I wanted to show how you free yourself from the restrictive ideology you’ve inherited from your family. To connect with everything around you, you have to rebel against the restrictiveness. Rebellion is close to Godliness.”
Alice Walker
Frankly? The only people who want black people to be thinking from the mindset showcased in the Color Purple today, operating out in the world like that or viewing the world from that psychology….were willing to vote for Herschel Walker to get back to those good old days ~ that were shit for our ancestors.
It’s not just us. There’s not even the unconscious disruptive backlash against the subject matter anymore. No parades , protests or marches needed.
It’s just a simple “…I’ll pass.” A no.
An “I don’t have to subject myself to this.”
Shirking off the staid psychoses of siding with the energies set to oppress your seed… eventually, after alot of work… simply becomes, or comes up to a decision. That we each get to make.
And that… is something the ancestors possibly could get behind.
I’m not mad at Oprah or Gayle.
In that weird familial way Black folks get with those celebrities that look like them… I’m actually happy for them.
Especially Oprah.
Because God doesn’t want that any of us weirdos should perish.
This was theoretically to be Oprah’s victory lap… but it instead showed weaknesses she has that bewildered all.
She can take this as a failure that mars her record, letting her career end here…
Or…she can take it as a check… more important than the one she cashed…revealing a way forward.
She’s going to have to work on learning how to do right by the artists Here that could be helped by her truly giving a heartfuck for artists, one that she doesn’t naturally have yet.
She can make more schools in Africa… or, now glaringly knowing her severe blindspot on this..she can cut new teeth & produce more movies here in America…where she’d learn how to activate the muscles needed to really make sure all those who came & wanted to one day come to her Legacy Balls could be proud of her in a completely different way.
Maybe this can galvanize her to be the kind of producer the entire industry actually needs. Maybe that’s her 4th career. That’d be fucking cool.
& Seeing that…how she could be the change everyone’s been clamoring for BEFORE THEY EVEN GET TO SET…
Is why I can’t not say what I’ve said.
Why I wouldn’t not say all of it.
To her face.
She could change shit just by honoring the professional artists out here on both sides of the camera by how she as a producer set the terrordome they’ll enter to create magic up beforehand.
That’s the true production bar to be raised.
How you produce is colorblind. It just showcases the shitty human being you are willing to be to your fellow creative, just because you can.
& If you wildly, wilfully choose to not do right by the team you’ve amassed to do right by your vision… the seed of destruction on bloom in the end is all yours.