Is Effie The New Miss Celie?

Found this on Black Perspective:

Is Dream Girls This Generations Color Purple?

By: D. Yobachi Boswell

With contributions from Freelance Writer Tressie McMillian and Black Literature Professor Stacie McCormick

The natural inclination is to compare Dreamgirls to Sparkle, the 1976 black film classic about a singing group of three sisters in Harlem. Both are about young girl groups struggling to make it. They even take place in the same time period since Dreamgirls is a retrospective back to the 60’s and 70’s Motown flavor and era. Certainly the two can legitimately be compared, and have many lines of similarity that can be delved into; but the question I ask here has to do more with cultural significance rather than surface plot traits.

The film The Color Purple, adapted from the Novel of the same name by distinguished African American author Alice Walker, explores the inner emotions and purview of a series of women, and their battles to capture their humanity foremost, and further to capture the love of their husbands, fathers; and also their trials in trying to do right by their children and reconcile their families. It demonstrates their strivings to become whole persons, to succeed as mothers, to succeed professionally in a world that professional work was scarcely a woman’s place, to succeed as women; and finally to find their place in the world and to be secure in themselves and their surroundings.

For the ladies of The Color Purple some of their dreams were largely simple; including some things we take for granted in modern society, but in other ways their dreams surround overcoming pathologies that are still pungent and that women must deal with still today. Dreamgirls starts off as a dream for glamour and glory, success and fame in the entertainment industry; but evolves into a story about girls growing into their woman-hood, and then as women fighting for empowerment, fighting relationship love-fallacies, and attempting to overcome abuse of the heart; albeit not the brutal physical abuse and all encompassing demeaning mental abuse Color Purple’s women endured. Yet, it all follows the same general area of exploration.

Of course the Dreamgirls haven’t had life quite as hard as did the ladies in The Color Purple. Though both films touch on some similar issues of black-female disempowerment; the dream girls don’t suffer the same level of indignity; nor was their climb to enfranchisement as steep, but again, the same basic elements are present.

These movies do though take place a couple of generations apart; and almost by default rural woman of the most maligned race in the south during the early 20th century had a more arduous life to confront than would city girls of the 60s. Yet certainly being a brown girl in the racially segregated 60s still posed great challenges. This is 50 years later - this is like the lives of the granddaughters of Celie, Nettie and Shug.

Don’t misunderstand my position. I’m not even comparing the quality or veracity of the two films. I harbor no inclination that Dreamgirls is as good as The Color Purple which is practically a master piece. Dreamgirls is a confection, a confection with some good underlining substance, but a confection and a spectacle nonetheless; whereas The Color purple was deeper, with it’s story and characters more developed, and their feelings and psychologies more intensely explored. Again, here the thing is how similarly Dreamgirls might effect the cultural landscape for this generation in like fashion as did The Color Purple the last.

How I come to begin to see this parallel cultural affect starts with the directors. The parallels of these two stories, based on black women and exploring their empowerment to their varying degrees, starts with them both being directed by previously successful white filmmakers: Color Purple director Steven Spielberg having been outrageously successful with Indiana Jones and ET; and Bill Condon being the Screenwriter and director of Dreamgirls, having been the Screenwriter for the very successful silver screen version of the musical Chicago.

From there we see an unusual situation for black film, especially black film that is anything other than silly (and often bamboozling) slapstick type comedy – the white media has given great attention to these movies. Not only pre-release attention, but prominent awards nominations as well. The Color Purple won 1 out of 5 Golden Globe nominations and garnished 11 Oscar awards nominations, though snubbed by the Academy; nonetheless, this level of recognition through even nominations is pretty much unparalleled for a film about black people. Dreamgirls received 5 Golden Globe Nominations and 3 wins, and with 8 nods, Dreamgirls leads the Oscar nominations just as The Color Purple did in ’86 – again other than The Color Purple, this is pretty well unprecedented for black film; which has me thinking that black stories only become even semi-relevant to white people if a white man plays a strong hand in creating the story for the screen, but I digress.

A national newspaper story I read the day after the Golden Globes were given out said something to the affect that Dreamgirls did not quite make a splash at the box office, but 67 million dollars after one week of full release for a non-cliché (ie black people bucking their eyes and flipping over couches) story about black people is a big number. All things are relative. The Color Purple performed similarly for its time.

It’s hard to determine yet, but the real test will be how do blacks in general, and young black women in specific relate to the Dreamgirl characters and to the movie overtime. We’ll have to wait awhile to see if it’s still holding strong at DVD release time, and then wait five years to see if catch-phrases, characters and parts from the movie become cultural reference. You can simply blurt out a phrase from The Color Purple in a room full of black folks, and with no explanation, almost everyone will know what you’re referring to.

I was at a Wendy’s here in Nashville about a week ago, at 28th and Jefferson by Tennessee State, and witness three black boys about the age of 10 with a female teenager. The three boys were clowning around and one begins to blurt out “and you, and you and you”. I did not realize he was imitating a portion of the And I’m Telling You song from Dreamgirls, that is belted out by the Effie character, until he got to the “you’re going to love me” part. And though I had faintly heard some music playing over the restaurant speakers, I did not notice that And I’m Telling You was playing at that moment, being his [reason] for imitating it. He then said, “my momma watches that movie every day” (bootleg obviously being that it is still in the theatres and is months from DVD/video release).

Hearing this young chocolate skinned black boy speak of his mother watching that film everyday reminded me of this black boy at that same age having a momma who watched The Color Purple literally EVERY – SINGLE –DAY; or at least almost thereabout. And no, we didn’t bootleg it, we taped it off of HBO.

This antidote further illuminates what I was already beginning to see with the cultural reaction to Dreamgirls.

In response to my ideal that The Color Purple and Dreamgirls follow linear themes, writer Tressie McMillian wrote in response “If viewed as a segmented epic, I can see these girls living out the dreams and fears of their grandmothers. I imagine them to be the children of that generation that migrated North, taking the country with them - as seen in the value assigned to “having a man”; because in the end that seems to be the black woman’s story in America - our wanting to be recognized. If it can’t be garnered from the world, we’ll transfer that desire to a man, ANY man when we don’t know better, and thus the reason we feel heartbreak so much deeper; and the reason Effie had a song to sing. Our hearts break more profoundly because we need to be loved most desperately.”

It’s interesting to note that Dreamgirls started as a Broadway play debuting in 1981 and was release as a movie in December 2006; while conversely The Color Purple was first seen as a movie in 1985 and then release on Broadway as a play a year to the month before the Theatrical release of Dreamgirls.

Though Dreamgirls is not new, it is new to the broader culture, as not nearly most people see Broadway plays. Further, it’s being brought back to life for a new generation. This cross convergence of these two stories along with others such as the aforementioned Sparkle, Lady Sings the Blues and others that depict the striving and dreams of black woman are an elevation from the long standing and still typical character pigeonholing of black women as the whore or the black mammies (see Eddie Murphy’s Norbit for the latter).

There are many more detailed theme and character comparisons between The Color Purple and Dreamgirls, not the least of: Effie to Sophia; with overlaps of Celie, Deena to Celie, Curtis to Albert/Mister, Lorrell to Squeaky, and so on; but keeping with the focus of the piece I’d like to draw to a conclusion with the focus of eyeing the social significance that Dreamgirls may or may not come to hold over the coming years. If I can walk into a room full of black people 10 years from now and say “Jimmy wanna rib, Jimmy wanna steak” and without explanation have everybody respond “Jimmy want some of yo chocolate cake”, I’ll take it that The Color Purple torch has been passed.

Edit: Note that this piece was written and originally published in the Nashville Pride before the Oscars aired.

Congratulations to Dreamgirls for winning for Sound Mixing and Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Hudson). Not that I begin to think this shows that racial respect has fully arrived; but at least the mainstream culture has responded better 20 years late than it did to The Color Purple.

And Dreamgirls still got snubbed on the best song award – GET OUTTA HERE!!!