THE COLOR PURPLE

[m.r.leeper]

Comments Sparked by Seeing THE COLOR PURPLE
An article by Mark R. Leeper

THE COLOR PURPLE is a film about pride and dignity and all the misery
they can cause as well as some of the good they can do. The film is a
compendium of examples of people who feel pride from things they had no
control over. It is an old adage that everybody has to feel superior to
somebody and, for the most part, the people in THE COLOR PURPLE show
incredible callousness toward the people they consider their inferiors.
Celie is someone who suffers from this system many times over. She is
black, a woman, and--at least she has allowed herself to be convinced--ugly.
In the course of the film we see her persecuted because she is a woman,
because she is not as attractive as others and indirectly--she herself has
little contact with whites--because she is black (and friends of hers are
more directly persecuted). This places her so far down on the pecking order
that she is as much a slave for most of the film as any black in this
country has ever been. But her persecutors are not whites; they are just
people higher up in the pecking order. Most are blacks who are themselves
victims of the pecking order system, who should sympathize with Celie, but
who have too much pride and dignity to give up a callous superiority to her.

The most direct persecutor is Albert, Celie's husband. He is black
like Celie and poor like Celie but he is a man and he believes himself to be
good-looking, and his pride in these differences and his need for dignity,
to feel he is the master of his house with rights and privileges, allows him
to enslave Celie and literally to steal her family from her. His
patrimonial rights--and anyone denied part of their rights will cling
fervently to those that remain--include the right to rape any woman on HIS
LAND and later the right to have openly a mistress (Shug) and bring her home
in front of Celie. Like Celie, Shug is black and a woman. And what are
Shug's first words on seeing Celie? "She shore is ug-LY!" As if to say,
"In this house, she will be a step below me in the pecking order. I could
have been below her--she is the legitimate wife--but not while I have some
say."

There have been protests against this film. It has been claimed to be
unfair to black men. The implication is that blacks are all in it together.
They feel they are the victims of whites. It would be unthinkable that one
black might victimize another. They think that Steven Spielberg--a white
Jew--is taking what they see as dissension in the black ranks and is blowing
it out of proportion. The real struggle is blacks against whites. The
people who think that are wrong. There are many real struggles. It is
struggles of groups against groups, but each group has only one or two
people in it. In any group of three people, I am told, either one will take
dominance or one will be an outsider. Any other solidarity among people
will just be alliances among groups with similar aims. Most higher species
seem to have a pecking order system. It has the genetic advantage of
matching up the best genes with the best genes. But it is also a very
painful system.

As for the film itself, most people reading this will have seen it
before I did, which is the reason I have not given it my usual review. I
liked it and would give it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.

Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper