Very rarely do I find myself confronted with a cinematic work that I feel utterly unwilling to cast a critical eye upon. I justify these instances, which could be counted on one-hand, with a very simple logic: I am absolutely starving for representation in mainstream cinema. Like many, I long for a subject position I don’t have to work overtime to squeeze myself into. When “I” am sympathetically manifested on screen, it is an enticement I feel completely entitled to. And so when, for instance, the head of Sean Penn-as-Harvey Milk looms 3 times the size of my whole body, lisping out the gospel of gay lib, I have no interest in a critical resolve.

Some readers will no doubt argue that it is precisely in these emotional moments of identification that an analytical stance is crucial and, honestly, they would be right. But this proposed rigidity cannot reckon with the seductive voice of Hollywood, sympathetically speaking to (and for) you and the symbolic nature of that experience: a seat at the bargaining table we call “mass culture.” In these instances I have - self-righteously – left the breaking down and tearing apart to my fellow cultural deconstruction workers. Yet, I also believe that by sharing my purposefully naïve vantage point I can contribute to the critical dialogue that is happening around these works.

And so I turn to the sleeper hit of 2009, Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire, a film which polarized critics and the black cognoscenti, but won the hearts of Oprah, Tyler Perry, the Sundance crowd, and yours truly. At its essence, Precious is the intensely melodramatic tale of a shit-upon, poor, fat, black teenage girl’s journey to self-love and agency. Because the titular heroine is the long overdue amalgamation of un(der)represented identities – fat girl, black girl, poor girl - it does not have the liberty to be apolitical, nor, I would argue, unsentimental. The stakes are too high. Accordingly, I am still processing the myriad emotional and political provocations that this film, by its mere existence, elicits. And so this is my offering: a criticality based foremost in emotionality. Within the following set of tenuous notes, I present a “working through” of my evolving personal-political responses to this, for better or worse, pivotal film and it’s cultural reception.