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Bad Fandom: Tyler Perry Fans Play The Race CardBy Josh Tyler: 2008-09-14 20:19:31
Tyler Perry’s latest, The Family that Preys, hit theaters this past weekend and as is the norm with his work, it wasn’t screened for critics. As a result most reviewers ignored it, but the few who paid to see it over the weekend savaged it. It went on to make millions of dollars anyway. What’s going on? Most unbiased sources seem to agree that Perry’s movies miss the mark, so where is all the ticket purchasing power coming from?
Tyler Perry believes that he doesn’t need critics and for that matter, doesn’t need normal, mainstream movie audiences. He also doesn’t need to make good movies because he’s backed by fans who will blindly purchase anything he points them at, a group of followers who will literally eat whatever shit he puts on their plate, and then thank him for it. What the hell is going on? What in the world has Tyler Perry done to earn such a blindly devoted fandom? Simple. He’s black and he’s not 50 Cent. Perry is one of the few black filmmakers out there who operates somewhere within the realm of normality. He’s not angry like Spike Lee, screaming at and against racism both real and imagined. At the same time, he doesn’t portray African Americans as ghetto thugs and gangsters. His characters aren’t rappers or drug dealers or killers. They’re mostly normal people, except with an overtly religious bent. Still, an obsession with Jesus is probably a preferable portrayal to the usual dumb basketball player stereotypes we’re most often stuck with whenever a black man shows up in front of Hollywood’s cameras. That willingness to make African Americans seem, well, normal on film has earned Perry a wildly devoted following. Unfortunately, they’ve become so wildly devoted that they do not care if his movies are any good. As long as Perry puts a rich black banker in his script, fans trumpet him as a genius. Worse, any attempt to critique his picture in an even somewhat unbiased fashion results in cries of racism from those same fans. Ironic when you consider how hard Perry has worked at eliminating race as an issue in his movies. Perry’s fans have deluded themselves into thinking he’s a great filmmaker, when in fact he’s just Oprah with a bigger camera. The Family that Preys has been widely panned, and anyone who wasn’t already a member of his cult walked out wondering why they just wasted ten dollars on a glorified soap opera. His fans however, see none of that. They simply scream his greatness and accuse the world of conspiring against him. Explains one commenter at Metromix.com: “White men won't like this movie because it shows a black man doing the right thing for a change.” Yes, because white people like being scared every time they drive down Martin Luther King Boulevard. Right? That makes perfect sense. Comments left by Perry’s fanboy followers on the many many negative Family that Preys reviews all over the internet this past weekend range from the paranoid: “Hollywood doesn’t like anything or anybody that it can not control. It's long ignored the black community and now that black writers, directors, producers, actors are going out on their own to make films on the things that we have experience the movie critics want to belittle their achievements.” To the deluded: “Best movie I've seen in a long time.” To the personal attacks on critics themselves: “Maybe you should reread your commentary on Tyler Perry and really examine the failures in your life.” To the folks who seem to think they were playing a videogame: “All TP movies are interactive experiences and this was no exception.” Bear in mind here that this is a movie about the way the children of a rich white woman and her poor black friend cheat on their spouses. It plays out exactly like a particularly bad episode of General Hospital. Apparently, this is a brilliant message, at least according to a commenter named “Universalwriter” who says, “the messages in this movie hit home. Tyler Perry is a genius at his craft. YOU BETTA ASK SOMEBODY!” That’s Tyler Perry, a guy best known for running around in a dress and pretending to be an old woman. Here’s the frustrating thing. These blinded Perry fanboys aren’t doing Tyler any favors. As I said in my Family that Preys review earlier in the weekend, I think the guy has some genuine talent. Unfortunately, it’s hidden behind awful, self-indulgent filmmaking. He needs to explore new avenues, find better ways to express himself, maybe work with someone else who can help him get his head out of the clouds or at the least, teach him how to make a legitimate film. Unfortunately, he has no reason to do so since he refuses to accept real criticism and instead listens to the thousands of sycophants who comprise his fans and fill his head with wild conspiracy theories in which he’s the finest filmmaker on the planet. Tyler, it’s not The Man keeping you down, it’s the Yes Men. Note to crazy Tyler Perry fans: Critics aren’t out to get him. The world isn’t out to get him. We want to see a good movie from him. When that happens, maybe he’ll get the attention you crave for him. Until it does, consider, if even for a moment, that perhaps you aren’t approaching his work from a particularly unbiased perspective. When Tyler Perry shoehorned Robin Givens into The Family that Preys for the sole purpose of having a successful black female somewhere in his script, it may have made you feel all warm, tingly, and inspired, but it had little to do with his story and did nothing to move the plot along. A better filmmaker could have still given you that same empowerment glow, but without torpedoing his own writing with extraneous, irrelevant, poorly written characters. Tyler Perry will never gain wide acceptance, he’ll never have any real impact on Hollywood, as long as you, his fans, keep telling him he’s already genius. Tyler Perry isn’t a genius. He’s raw talent working in a vacuum, and until he gets out of his critique-proof bubble he’ll continue to churn out low-rent soap operas and call them films. Cinema Blend writers fight back against out of control fanboys in our ongoing series of editorials, Bad Fandom! For more Bad Fandom click here.
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