I made some recordings during and after one of the last screenings of the movie at the Bridge cinema de lux in Philadelphia. And Amina Robinson, who played Jermaine (pictured above), was kind enough to answer a few questions as well.

To first offer some minimal background for those who haven’t seen or otherwise heard much about the movie, Precious is an adaptation of a 1996 novel chronicling the harrowing difficulties of a 16-year-old girl growing up in deep poverty in Harlem. We see Precious, the title character, abused in just about every way imaginable, and the story piles her troubles on thick. The ending is hopeful, if not quite happy. Stylistically, extended sequences of grim realism are broken up by vignettes of playful, ironic fantasy, as well as some fleeting moments that border on normal adolescence. (More detailed plot summaries are widely available elsewhere.)

Critics were knocked backwards and sideways by this movie, to its immense credit. I’m not sure I read a single great review, but I certainly read plenty of painful ones. Somehow, Precious brought many critics to an irresponsibly simplistic conception of how race operates. Although the movie never claimed to speak for “black experience,” and in fact alluded to the fiction of any such singular experience (black characters spanned the socioeconomic spectrum), many writers missed this point entirely, and built entire arguments around a premise that existed only in their own nervous imaginations. And this was the case equally for those who loved and hated it.

Reading the reviews in aggregate offers a breathtaking picture of how inadequate our vocabulary for discussing race can be. The archaic presumptions left unquestioned by critics include, but are not limited to: that definitions of race are rigidly fixed; that race is only about black people and white people; that all black people are poor; that all black people see the world the same way; and that all white people are plagued by guilt. And not at all unconnected to the desperate poverty of wise commentary about race among film critics has been a persistent emphasis on race as an exclusively visual concept.

Listening to audiences watch Precious speaks to race and racial anxiety in ways that vision cannot. Unfortunately, almost all ethical questions raised about the movie in print so far have been about watching the main character. Is it therapeutic? Pornographic? How does the way YOU look affect your right to see her? But in truth, audiences do a lot more than watch during films. They listen, to the characters and to each other, and respond to both. In doing so, they open gaps that suggest nothing if not race’s perplexing contours.

At Precious, a culture of audience participation met awkwardly with a story whose villains and laugh lines were often ambiguous. On one hand (0 – :29 seconds), the movie had a wry sense of humor, even at serious moments. On the other hand (:29 – :58), the mother character, played by Mo’ Nique, was obviously a villain. But viewers disagreed as to whether her villainy was dead serious, a target for verbal outrage, or even a source of comic relief. I spoke to a young couple (:58 – 1:41) who had watched in a theater with an older woman who was so enraged by Mo’ Nique’s character that she yelled at the screen. Meanwhile, the couple found some moments, including a self-deprecating line about Precious’ weight (1:43 – 1:54), funny. Finally, a woman about my age outside the theater (1:55 – 2:55) was “appalled” by laughter at moments that she felt were inappropriate. She attributed such laughter to people being nervous about confronting the seriousness of the content.

I asked Amina Robinson about these kinds of reactions:

I actually had this conversation with one of my White co-workers. He asked why the African-Americans in the theater were laughing while it seemed the White people were appalled. I certainly have noticed that as well. When I’ve seen Precious with a lot of Black folks in the audience it is actually more funny throughout, just as when there has been mostly White people there is a lot of silence.

I find both very interesting. I can’t speak for all African-Americans, but some of us know the characters in this movie. When we see them and are confronted with this particular brand of pathology we identify with it and laugh. It feels good to know that you are not alone in what you’ve experienced. There is a certain justification. While other African-Americans see it, identify with it, and feel the strong push to deal with and heal it.

In reverse, many White people watching this movie seem to be being introduced to a part of life that they were ignorant to. So they get sucked into the world and are captivated and speechless. That is not to say that White people don’t deal with the issues in the film, because they do, but Precious is simply the Black version. It takes place in a world they may be unfamiliar with.

Personally, I laughed some and cried some. And I find any reaction to the film valid and worthy of discussion.

The disparity in reactions, ostensibly along racial lines, has led some viewers to extreme conclusions. A viewer in a forum on Oprah.com, writes:

I tried to talk about the film, process the themes and examine the extraordinary performances. I tried, but I could not escape the whole of the experience. I walked in a white woman and walked out a racist. Disgust with the audience became disgust in my heart, disappointment with myself and fear that my work as a teacher in the inner city was tainted by unclaimed/unacknowledged racism. I can escape neither my disgust with the audience nor my own sense of shame and loss. Is this the power of “Precious”, I wonder?

But, to put it bluntly, not every African-American laughed, and not every white person didn’t. However, for those unaccustomed to hearing interpretations vocalized during the movie, half of the audience, or even a handful of people, could easily stand in for everyone, or at least be a pesky distraction. Robinson describes the importance of responding authentically, regardless of one’s reasons:

We are human beings. We all have different experiences of life that affect how we view the world. We are as different as we are the same, and I think it does humanity and art an injustice to try to dictate how someone should respond to an artistic work.

I say laugh if you must, cry if you must. I do draw a line at talking in the theater though, because then you are ruining the movie for others. Other than that let the movie affect you as it does.

For Robinson, all viewers may relate to dramatic material differently. In an environment where loud response is normal, such relationships are not necessarily more fractured, just more public. This has benefits as well as drawbacks:

I can only speak from my experience when I say that I feel African-Americans like to connect to art in a very visceral way. We like to live our art, feel it, and breathe it. So when we are moved by something we become a part of it and enjoy communicating with it and adding our input. We do come from a tradition of call and response and I think that it can be a beautiful thing.

Aside from possibly that, I don’t think it is a racial issue. I think it is one of experience and identification. We as people connect in different ways to different things based on what they mean to us. Precious is a universal story of triumph over the odds, but it is still about a Black girl.

Clearly, listening to audiences watch Precious does not signal the end of racial difference. What it suggests, rather, is the danger of taking race at face value. Critics have been so quick to divide white and black viewers that they’ve missed the enormous interpretive divisions that the film has created among viewers of all racial self-identifications. This fact is much more audible than it is visible. But our audition has to be thorough. Just because we hear someone in a theater – or experience their silence – doesn’t mean we understand them, or even know what their reaction means.

Most of the interview snippets concern race, obliquely or head-on. If you ask New Yorkers open-ended questions about anything, the conversation will almost always end up there sooner or later. The movie anthropomorphizes common New York objects in a generally random fashion (with the exception of the Italian luggage, I didn’t read any associations between thing and identity), but the matter of race remains, both explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly, when the red emergency services box speaks about her pride as a black woman, when the big and little newspaper boxes discuss their Cherokee ancestry, etc., and implicitly when accents and other vocal details suggest individual histories – the smoker’s cough of the Bronx-born free-used-car-info box seemed, to me, particularly suggestive. Also notable was the Asian (?) pay phone’s awkward reference to “some black people” blasting music from their car, although the remark was obviously well-meaning.

Thanks to TM for the original link.

Next week: the ethics of recording involuntary outbursts, and the sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia.

WV: Hey guys, sorry to bother you, I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions for a project I’m doing.

Sure.

WV: Cool, thank you. Do you know what this is? Have you ever seen one of these before?

Uh, no.

WV: Can you guess based on …

It looks like a microphone.

WV: Yeah, it has a microphone. Can you guess what that’s reading right there?

Hz or something?

WV: Yeah, it’s the Hz of the sound, actually. It’s a decibel-level meter. This is what police and people from the Department of Environmental Protection in New York use to read sound, like to respond to noise complaints in the city.

Oh, that’s cool. Like how high it goes over?

WV: Yeah, exactly, yeah. Have you ever worried about getting arrested for having your headphones on too loud or anything like that?

Not yet!

WV: Oh, ok. Did you know that there’s laws about that?

Well, yeah. I didn’t know they … People go around with the little thing … people have those, like, secret …

WV: Well, they come out if somebody makes a complaint.

Oh, oh, ok.

WV: Have you had problems with noise in New York?

Yeah! There’s this annoying car outside my apartment, oh my god. Loud-ass brown music, just like … yeah.

WV: Loud-ass what?

Brown music.

WV: What do you mean?

Like, my culture. Non-American music. Yeah. Random languages.

WV: Do you ever complain?

No. I don’t know, I would feel like a herb if I complained.

WV: Feel like a what?

Like, I don’t know, like one of those people who get annoyed for no reason. Yeah.

WV: But you know you could call 311, try to get somebody to come out or something like that.

I guess.

WV (Speaking to other interviewee) What do you think about noise?

Sometimes there’s like … I dunno, my neighborhood’s pretty like suburban like kind of quiet and everything, so it’s like sometimes maybe like one or two neighbors will have like a party or something, but normally …

WV: Do you know that … so this is at like, (pointing to noise meter) it’s kind of pushing 80 right now, the decibels. You know sustained exposure to 80 decibels can damage your hearing?

Really? Really? What’s the standard level that’s like healthy?

WV: Well, there’s nor really a standard, but most reasonably quiet places in New York it would be like 40, maybe 50. But on the train there’s so much noise.

So it’s like, that’s bad, right? What is it on now …

WV: Well, it’s a high level, yeah.

Do you have your iPod on you (to friend)? Let’s see how many decibels it gets.

WV: Try it out, yeah. What do you think could be done about noise? Or can anything be done?

Well, random trains always are gonna make noise. But how about other places of the city, like how much would they be?

WV: Well, it depends, but it can get pretty loud. If you’re standing on the platform while the train’s coming in it can get over 100. It’s already up in the mid-80s now.

What about those trains that are like, covered or whatever? I don’t think those make as much noise. The new E Train. No noise man!

WV: The E train is loud?

The new E train that they made, that one doesn’t have that much noise as before. This one’s pretty loud though.

WV: Any other …

We have to shout over each other just to hear each other.

WV: Any other random thoughts about noise you want to share?

Uh, no.

WV: Thanks for your time, and sorry to interrupt you guys.

It’s OK. Thanks for enlightening us.

For context, G.F. and I moved last month to an apartment on the cusp of Kensington and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Our neighborhood is Hasidic/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Polish/Albanian/Mexican/Caribbean, among others. We have, in the course of our sensory adjustment to the new neighborhood, gotten acclimated to the muezzin issuing five calls to prayer every day over a loudspeaker, to lots of children running around the building, and to the daily delivery of goat carcasses by the truckful to the butcher down the block. But some things are still unclear, even if we have guesses. e.g., Why do so many men congregate outside the closed-looking dentist’s office across the street? What’s in the jungle that comprises our (inaccessible) backyard? What and why does a chorus of women sometimes chant, as above, around dinner time?

Our new neighborhood, 1903

I’ve been researching sonic conflict in urban space for a few years now, and Brooklyn is a great place to do it. As much time as Brooklynites spend around people of different habits, cultural variation is so dense and dynamic here that even longtime residents tend to find themselves perplexed by sounds they can’t quite place. For some, what can’t be identified is heard as evidence of a special diversity. For others, or for the same people under different circumstances, weird sounds are rude, inappropriate, extraneous, heretical, and/or invasive. (I’ve heard people mention each of these.) We seem to have something of an itch to locate sound, not only in terms of where it’s coming from but in terms of what it means. We want a reference, often desperately. Why?

So, the second order of business: why do you think unidentified sound is so disturbing?

And the third: what mysterious sounds (recordings or descriptions, from wherever) would you like to share?

Movie theater culture varies dramatically, but in most places audiences respond out loud in ways that are normative and even, in a sense, ethical. These modes of response are a very important part of how people are expected to relate to artwork. For instance, Film Forum has sustained, respectful silence with dashes of old-man snore, followed by a hearty concluding round of applause to recognize auteurship. The UA on Court Street has text-pages and outdoor voices. You might be interested to know that Jaipur, India has crying, whistling, and viewers generally wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

Although none of us knew a word of Hindi, the plot of “Rab Ne Bana De Jodi” (“God Made This Couple”) was pretty transparent. We were riveted for more than three hours (plus an intermission) by a twisting love story in which two of India’s most glamorous models played an ordinary working couple struggling through an arranged marriage. In a device I found Shakespearian, especially for its implausibility, the male lead did double-duty as a working schmo and a hubristic fop, changing only his shirt, glasses, and mustache in the transformation.

You get the idea from the trailer:

Anyway, the crowd in the gigantic one-screen theater with the ice cream paint job treated the movie like an event from the opening shot. Particularly in the first and the last half-hour, every scene was accompanied by shouts of delight and expressions of concern. By the end, the crowd was worked up, and the babies were at their crankiest. As the protagonists (fop now revealed as schmo) were named the winners of the climactic dance contest, and the central motif began playing for the last time (1:45), there was a grand finale of appreciative clapping and whistling.

During our stay, we ended up talking to her and her husband for quite a long time. (In the recording, they talk about their next-door neighbor, a musician who’s planning to lift a piano to the top of his grain silo to play when he retires.) His family immigrated from Belgium and hers from Ireland, both in the mid 19th century. Both families have been in and around Door County ever since. The b&b house itself is about that old as well. It’s built on a farm where the couple used to raise cattle, and where they now grow corn, hay, and soy beans, They run their b&b, I think, mainly for company.

In the previous post, I took for granted that “Thai” and “American” ears were absolutely distinct, but our experience in Door County should cast at least some doubt on the assumption that national citizenship can be uncritically mobilized as an anthropological category. While we obviously spoke the same language, the couple’s accents were for us a pretty profound marker of difference. As soon as we first heard the hostess’ voice on the phone, we had the sense that our trip would take us pretty far out of our normal environment. And when we sat down and talked, our differences were a primary subject of conversation. America, like Thailand, and probably like any nation in the world, is a place of significant internal difference rather than homogeneity. It is also a place whose contours have been shaped by patterns of migration and exchange. Spend a couple hours in Bangkok, and you’ll hear embodied residues of the same sorts of migratory histories – Chinese immigrants, farang (foreign) ex-pats, migrant laborers from Isaan, etc.

In language classes, we might well notice that native Thais tend to speak English with particular intonations, or that Americans tend to do the same with Thai. But at least in anthropology, these surface-level observations can’t substitute for an awareness of the ways that nations – all nations – are internally fragmented. Accent can be a useful clue to this fragmentation, as it was for us when we made our reservations.