This article is part of Spielberg Week, Slate’s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.
There is a moment in The Color Purple—Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel detailing decades of a young Black woman’s harrowing life in the Jim Crow South—that has always felt like magic to me. It is the moment when Shug Avery (actress Margaret Avery) reveals that she wrote a song for the protagonist, Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), titled “Miss Celie’s Blues.” Before Shug can even get any words out, Celie covers her mouth with the back of her hand to hide a pure, bashful smile. The refrain in the story up until this point, echoed by a series of men who have abused Celie in myriad ways, is that Celie is ugly. Her beauty, however, can be seen clearly in Goldberg’s eyes, which remain both observant and, in moments of surprise, as wide as the endless expanses her character would traverse to reunite with her long-lost sister, Nettie. Every time I watch the film, this strikes me as the first time the viewer witnesses a real smile from adult Celie—an indication she will blossom by the time the end credits roll.
Spike Lee declared that all of the Black men in the film were “just one-dimensional animals.”
This feat should be no surprise, given that wonder and enchantment are Spielberg’s stock-in-trade. But when The Color Purple was originally released, the discussion around it wasn’t one of appreciating the film’s Spielbergian magic. Instead, The Color Purple sparked a firestorm, prompting boycotts and a backlash that questioned many things: Walker’s talents, whether or not white creators should be able to tell Black stories, and, above all, what constitutes appropriate Black media representation. The film and its surrounding controversy became one of the few stains on Spielberg’s largely sparkling half-century career. Yet, in the 40-plus years since The Color Purple inspired picket lines, it has become a Black classic—a position it should undoubtedly continue to occupy. Rather than being a blemish on Spielberg’s résumé, The Color Purple deserves to be remembered as one of his most intriguing, and daring, success stories.
Upon its release, The Color Purple was lambasted, protested, and cast off by many Black men. Organizations such as the Coalition Against Black Exploitation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decried the film for what they believed was an uncharacteristic and harmful one-note depiction of Black men as needlessly and endlessly violent, as embodied above all by Danny Glover’s character Mister. Columnist and television host Tony Brown went on The Phil Donahue Show and called the film “the most racist depiction of Black men since The Birth of a Nation and the most anti-Black family film of the modern film era.” Spike Lee declared that all of the Black men in the film were “just one-dimensional animals,” stating: “Within recent years, the quickest way for a Black playwright, novelist, or poet to get published has been to say that Black men are shit.” Walker’s work was raked over the coals by many, including poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who had a long-standing feud with Walker and other members of what he defined to the New Yorker as Gloria Steinem’s “Black feminist auxiliary.” During a televised debate, Reed said of the film: “When I saw The Color Purple advertised as ‘Come join a celebration,’ I thought I was being invited to a lynching,” adding, “and I was.” In a New York Times article headlined “Blacks in Heated Debate Over ‘The Color Purple,’ ” Chuck Sutton, a radio host, was quoted as saying on his show that “no media vehicle since Roots [which premiered eight years earlier] has caused this kind of dialogue.”
Many Black women had a different response. Their reaction to this pushback is perhaps best summarized by something Oprah Winfrey—whose Oscar-nominated debut in the film as Sofia helped catapult her from being a local Chicago television host to the titan of Black entertainment she is today—said at the time: “This movie is not trying to represent the history of Black people in this country any more than The Godfather was trying to represent the history of Italian-Americans. In this case, it’s one woman’s story.” Or as one Chicago woman, whose relatives were abused, told the Times, “Black women should not be sacrificed for black men’s pride. Let the film roll.”
It wasn’t just the content of the movie itself that had many Black people raising fists and picket signs, but its backstory. The fact that the film was adapted for the screen by two white men—Spielberg and the Dutch-born screenwriter Menno Meyjes—was also criticized. And it wasn’t just Spielberg’s race but his background, which included nothing like this kind of material. Though we know Spielberg today as the director of not just popcorn entertainment but such serious, adult, and historically-minded movies as Schindler’s List, Munich, and Lincoln, he hadn’t yet done anything nearly so weighty, and was known instead as simply the whiz kid behind movies like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and the Indiana Jones movies (the most recent of which, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, wasn’t exactly known for its racial sensitivity). Everyone was questioning the director’s decision to adapt the story, even hypothesizing that he was merely scheming for his first Oscar by choosing to adapt some loftier source material (the novel made Walker the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). But Spielberg loved the book, and as he told the New York Times, “I really wanted to challenge myself with something that was not stereotypically a Spielberg movie.” Moreover, Spielberg’s unprecedented string of hits had given him the ability to get the movie made on a scale that would not otherwise be possible. As actress Margaret Avery later put it, “there were no Black directors at that time that the studios would give that power to.” (Even Spike Lee had yet to release his first, low-budget feature, which came out the following year.)
These criticisms of the film were, in many ways, narrow-minded. Some pondered why white supremacy wasn’t the villain in the story (it is one of them, evidenced by Sofia’s imprisonment and subsequent judicial order to become the maid to the mayor’s wife), while those who took up the #NotAllBlackMen–esque stance were inadvertently brushing off the tales of domestic abuse many Black women attested to having lived. Among Black Americans, it was a true battle of the sexes playing out on the global stage.
And yet, today, the war has died down. The Color Purple is now so integral to the Black film canon, its reach has gone far beyond the screen. As someone born in the ’90s, I had it introduced to me as a definitive favorite synonymous with cable channel surfing, where it took up permanent residence. Its 11 Academy Award nominations are touted as achievements (though, it infamously won none of them), and it wound up a box-office success, the highest-grossing movie of the year behind only Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Rocky IV. It has since been turned into a Tony-winning musical, the revival of which launched the career of Cynthia Erivo and received its own 2023 film adaptation. And, in a lighthearted sign of its endurance, one of the 1985 version’s most famous moments—Winfrey’s “All my life I had to fight” speech—has become a sort of meme, prominently and winkingly referenced by everyone from Tyler Perry to Kendrick Lamar.
The reason why the film was initially held up to such a searing light is simple: At a time when there were almost no other mainstream, big-budget, historical movies built around Black casts, and especially Black female casts, The Color Purple was saddled with the expectation of representing an entire people. This is what the historian Kobena Mercer called “the burden of representation,” the way that works about marginalized groups are asked to stand in for a community’s wide-ranging experiences. As Maya Cade, the creator of the Black Film Archive, wrote in a recent article, The Color Purple was “Hollywood’s first attempt at the Black woman’s picture,” and “the dearth of widely recognized messages that spoke the emotional language of Black women” meant that the movie became a “prime battleground for heated discussion on all sides.” As Inkoo Kang wrote in Slate of a similar backlash, the one that plagued the reception of the trailblazing Asian American film The Joy Luck Club, “If you want to see a community turn against an artwork that depicts them, make it the only one. If that artwork is by a woman, about women, and openly feminist, half the job’s already done.” But in recent years, that dearth Cade speaks of has been hacked away, as many more movies and shows about Black people have reached screens, relieving The Color Purple of being the only mainstream Black film an entire demographic has to represent itself.
Spielberg’s adaptation is not above criticism. (And, for the record, neither is Walker, who is now also well known for her support of an antisemitic work.) Walker herself has publicly critiqued the way the film “reduced” Mister, who was modeled after Walker’s grandfather, to “one layer” of “brutality.” In addition, she’s spoken about how the film glosses over Celie’s molestation by her father early on in the story, which is explicitly mentioned but never seen in the film, as well as the romance between Shug and Celie. On screen, they merely share a kiss while the camera pans away to some nearby wind chimes. These concerns are valid, even if the reasons for some of the changes are, perhaps, understandable: The fact that the movie included a lesbian kiss at all was shocking to many, prompting hate mail and yet more threats of boycotts, with Spielberg also worrying he couldn’t show more without losing the movie’s PG-13 rating. (Goldberg has been more plain: “That’s 1984. Nobody was gonna let me and Shug make out.”)
And yet, despite its faults, I am indebted to the film as a Black cultural touchstone. Quincy Jones’ score, which mixes together traditional Black genres like jazz and gospel, is timeless. Many have written about the beauty of Allen Daviau’s cinematography. Above all, it’s hard to not fall in love with the young actors in the film (which includes a small role for Laurence Fishburne, back when he was going by “Larry”). It may sound unbelievable to find the movie comforting, but I am often reassured by depictions of strong Black women, by Winfrey’s steadfastness and Avery’s grace and Goldberg’s virtue. If a director’s job is to elicit great performances and create a unified, harmonious piece of work that makes you feel something, I simply can’t say that Spielberg failed.
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