Susan Swartz

With awards season upon us there are so many movies I vowed to
see and they didn’t include “Precious.” I had all the usual excuses
for not going to a film about an illiterate, pregnant abused
teenage girl. I knew from reading reviews that it would be raw and
relentless. And isn’t the news hard enough to endure without adding
in extra cinematic suffering?
We all have our limits on what we pay money to see. I avoid
movies that involve torture, rape and sexual violence. I hate
watching bodies being blown up and I don’t like war movies or films
about sadistic killers. I can’t stand to see people abusing
children.
Same with books. If a book starts out with the body of a
murdered woman or a kidnapped child I usually stop right there. I
even have a hard time with those nature movies where the grizzly
bear stalks the baby buffalo and eats it, even though I know this
is the natural way.
I would pass on “Precious,” I said. I didn’t want to spend time
with that poor hopeless kid.
Then I sucked it up and went, mostly because I had two movie
companions who know about the cruelty heaped on children – a friend
who survived her own violent childhood and another woman I know
professionally who directs a parenting program and works with
abused kids.
If they could handle real life, I could handle a movie.
No one wants to watch abuse and suffering. In one of the more
shocking scenes in “Precious” I threw my coat over my head. But
maybe we need to see these things because if they don’t happen to
us, they happen to others. It’s the same reason to see one more
movie about the Holocaust, to not simply sit there and groan “how
can people do this to each other,” but to bear witness so maybe
those horrors won’t happen again.
Maybe after you watch a movie about a teenager who has every
reason to scrawl “Why me?” on a piece of paper, you end up donating
money to a safe house. Or you become a Big Brother or Big Sister.
But you don’t leave untouched.
Let me back up to what I said about Precious being this poor
hopeless kid. She isn’t hopeless.
I saw the movie when the Haiti earthquake disaster was in its
second week. When a pediatrician cried on the radio for the
children she watched die. But also when a man found his wife under
a building, alive after days without water, food or daylight. And
when rescue workers crawled from the rubble with a 15-day old
baby.
There’s hope in Haiti and there is more than a spark of life in
Precious, even in that fierce face, scrunched up against a world
which seems to deliver only misery.
Tough important movies are as hard to look at as graphic news
photos after an earthquake of a baby lying on her dead mother. But
how else will we know the pain if we don’t stare at it?
A movie like “Precious” is best watched in a matinee which gives
you time to shut down the awful images before you sleep. We saw the
movie on a stormy afternoon and then went for tea because we all
needed to talk.
We talked about unloved children and the importance of
intervention. We talked about the unlikely places people find
friends. And praised the determination of kind, overworked
teachers. We talked about the need to keep art museums open and
children writing. No surprise, the woman who runs the parenting
program said stories about children like Precious are hardly unique
to Harlem. They happen right here in beautiful Wine Country.
Susan Swartz is an author and local journalist. You can also
read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear
her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is


su***@ju***********.com











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