紫色英文影评

The Trouble With The Color Purple

The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) can now be seen as a kind of cinematic watershed. It was a sign of the times but also of things to come: what was still unusual in 1985 would become commonplace by 1990. Since then, movies based on this mentality have become pervasive. Around that time, black men came forward charging that the movie was sexist (for perpetuating negative stereotypes of black men) as well as racist (for pitting black men and women against each other instead of white society). What caused their fury? In a nutshell, it was that every male character, without exception, is either a hopelessly stupid buffoon, a fiendishly evil tyrant, or both. And every female character, without exception, is a purely innocent victim, a quietly enduring hero, or both.

In The Color Purple, this cinematic world - viewers know it only from what they actually see and hear in movie theatres or on television - consists ultimately of a battle between the forces of light represented by women and those of darkness represented by men. Unless viewers supply other information from their own world (and thus contradict what is "said" by the movie itself) or from Walker's novel (and thus add at least some depth of humanity to the male characters), they must reach the conclusion that men are inherently worthless.

What has made the male characters so worthless or evil is never shown; they just are that way. Was it because of the appalling conditions black people endured in the rural South of sixty years ago? Possibly. But if the situation was so destructive, why did only the female characters emerge with their dignity and humanity intact? From what viewers are shown, only one conclusion is possible: something innate in women allows them to rise above degradation, while something innate in men prevents them from doing so.

Four women are triumphant and four men defeated: Harpo, the oaf who keeps falling through the ceiling as if in a rerun of Amos 'n Andy, is taken back at the very end by his long-suffering wife. No discernible change has taken place in him, while she has grown in wisdom and tolerance. Mister, a kind of black Simon Legree, eventually repents of his evil ways. But the last scene showed him so crushed by guilt that he cannot bring himself even to ask for Celie's forgiveness. She, meanwhile, has successfully transcended the past and can thus move on into the future. Even in contrition, then, the men are worthless. At their best, in other words, they are irrelevant anachronisms.

Given the roles presented, the only people who can actually identify themselves with the characters on-screen are women, whether black or white. No healthy man, black or white, could possibly do so, not only because all male characters are so unspeakably vile and so incredibly stupid but also because they are so uncinematically lifeless. Unlike the women, the men are not really people at all. They are wooden caricatures who represent crimes or pathologies, cardboard cutouts that exist in only one dimension, straw men set up to be knocked down - in short, not complex human beings in whom male and female viewers can see some of the good and evil in themselves. But this movie is not addressed to male viewers, not even to racist, white, male viewers. Apparently, the possible reaction of male viewers was considered irrelevant. The movie indicates that men are irrelevant once they stop persecuting women. In the final shot, the camera looks upward at the women, thus conferring visual monumentality and dignity on those who have escaped from their men and gone off to live together. Their pride and independence is thus emphasized in precisely the same way as