Another Look at Tyler Perry

Yesterday I went to see Tyler Perry's new film, Why Did I Get Married Too?. Of course, I didn't go to see it purely for entertainment's sake. Since he debuted on the major film circuit a few years ago, Perry has tended to elicit one of two responses from black viewers: rabid loyalty or seething hatred. I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. To date, I have seen nearly all of Perry's films, one of his stage plays, and even a few of his filmed stage productions. Granted, Perry's work is not likely to garner an Oscar nod anytime soon, but it's always entertaining. The play that I saw, What Goes On In the Dark, was the best laugh I've had at a live show since Cedric the Entertainer's set during The Kings of Comedy performance in Miami over ten years ago.

I'll pass on the television shows though. I tried to watch The House of Payne, but its oversimplified story lines, clichés, and overacting (reminiscent of the SNL skit, "The Overacting Negro Ensemble") became painful.

Why Did I Get Married Too? is vintage Perry. Once again, he uses his "everything but the kitchen sink" approach - mixing slapstick, romantic comedy, and drama with a few gratuitous hot body shots (even Janet Jackson's cleavage, which was uncharacteristically demure in the original, makes quite a few appearances). The film's many plot lines include divorce, domestic violence, adultery, grief, financial hardship - in sum, nearly every possible catastrophe that could happen. With this film, Perry seems to be taking himself a little too seriously; he went to an epic length of 2-1/2 hours, a good 45 minutes too long.

The overall verdict? It was...entertaining. I laughed, sometimes in spite of myself. And as I walked out of the theatre, I thought, "Maybe I should just leave Tyler Perry alone and not write about this one." Did I mention that Perry inspires a sort of rabid loyalty? Writing anything negative about him causes a knee-jerk reaction among his fans, who immediately accuse the critic of being an intellectual elitist snob who clearly doesn't understand his work and therefore has no business writing about it.

The irony is that I often receive the opposite reaction when I ask students in my undergraduate classes to watch and write about one of his films. More than one student has responded, "You want us to do what?! What are we supposed to learn from that? His movies are stupid." Even those students who secretly enjoy Perry's movies question the idea that there could be anything worth intellectual engagement within them.

The last time that I wrote about Tyler Perry, I critiqued his treatment of women's roles, which have a pretty heavy patriarchal lens. Perry's films are usually part-entertainment and part-morality play. Why Did I Get Married Too? doesn't have the preachiness of his earlier work and it's easy to assume that the film has no message. But it does. And it's an important one.

The essence of both Why Did I Get Married? films remains the same: Black romantic relationships are screwed up because: (1) there are a lot of no-count black men out there (i.e., the abusers, cheaters, etc.); and (2) black women are ball-busting bitches who don't know how to appreciate a good thing when they find it. Now, here's where you need to read carefully before you press the comment link: Perry does not paint all black men and women in this light. In this series, Mike (played by Richard T. Jones) clearly represents the former, while the rest of the men portray the latter. Even Marcus (played by Michael Jai White) seems to have reformed his philandering ways in this one.

The women, on the other hand, almost universally fall in the category of too strong for their own good. Angela, Marcus' wife as played by Tasha Smith, is still a twenty-first century depiction of the Sapphire stereotype - the loud, abrasive black woman who loves to belittle black men. Patricia (portrayed by Jackson) is classic Strong Black Woman - a repressed psychotherapist who spends all of her time fixing other people while her own life is in shambles. As for Diane and Sheila, the characters played by Sharon Leal and Jill Scott, respectively...well, I don't want to give the movie away.

Whether it's the Why Did I Get Married? or Madea films, Tyler Perry's works are a form of social commentary. The question is, what kind of comment is he making? Is Perry simply depicting what is? Or is he pointing to what ought to be? Those of us who critique Perry usually assume that he's doing one or the other, oftentimes both. But I think there's another way to look at Perry. His art (and yes, I believe it is artistic) exposes what many people believe to be true about the state of African American relationships. Simply put, he's just depicting what many African American men and women believe to be true about black relationships - that black men are dogs and black women have too much baggage.

Perry's meteoric rise to success is evidence that he's a genius as a businessman. He knows how to tap into the psyche of his audience and to give them what they want to see. So the question is not why he keeps playing the same tired old story, but why we as African Americans keep believing that story and what impact it has on our lives.