The Color Purple
You don't know how much it pains me to have to
write "Color" instead of "Colour". It *kills* me.
dir: Blitz Bazawule
2023
Musicals. I try to be enthusiastic about them, but honestly, like most people (who aren’t Americans), I genuinely try to avoid them like, well, using the phrase “like the plague” seems tasteless after Covid killed so many millions of people.
So let’s just say I avoid them like the Cats musical they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world several years ago. Case in point, I have tried to sit through Cats multiple times, and I’ve never, ever been able to get through it, even during the worst of the lockdowns.
That was not a problem here. I knew it was a musical going in, and though I’ve never heard any of the songs before, I wasn’t overly dreading the experience.
I am old enough to remember the film when it came out in the 80s, directed by that most famous of African-American directors, Steven Spielberg, and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, and the Empress of the Americas, being Oprah Winfrey, played Sofia.
I… have memories of that movie. I remember my school taking us along to the cinema to see it, which means I was in early high school. I remember being horrified by the scenes of what these days we call ‘intimate partner violence’, which used to be called ‘domestic violence’, which boils down to ‘a piece of shit guy physically abusing a woman’, which makes me sick to my stomach to even type. I have always looked askance at Danny Glover since then, having loathed him (unfairly) for how well he played the role of Mister.
My other memory of watching the original film involves watching it on the telly with my mother, who painfully, wrenchingly related to the scenes of domestic violence, and could transcend her usual racist tendencies to sympathise with the plights of the many African-American women in the story, but drew the line at Celie’s sapphic tendencies, declaring them a bridge too far, condemning everyone involved to hell itself.
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