I always find it a tad annoying when a film critic complains about being 'manipulated' by a film. Manipulation is the means by which the artist elicits an emotional response from his/her audience, be it a viewer, listener or reader. That artist uses rhetoric to achieve this goal. Did you feel fearful and instinctively protective when watching the scene in which Precious returns to her mother with her new born child? ("I don't like when children are used as decoys to lure a movie audience into a trap.") If you do then the the filmmaker, Mr. Lee, has achieved his aim with regard to the scene. Whether or not you approve of his methods is irrelevant.

I disagree. Successful rhetoric imparts a sense of agency to the viewer or reader--it presents a set of facts or a scenario that is so persuasive or compelling that the artist is able to allow the viewer to make up her own mind about it.

The kind of hamfisted manipulation used in Precious is problematic not just because it's bad rhetoric, but because it dehumanizes the characters. I think the review was spot on in calling it pornography.

Hmmm, dehumanizes the characters... the way their life has dehumanized them? I think you inadvertently supporting the other argument.

Not at all. To be in an awful situation is, alas, deeply human. The story of this unjust, brutal situation was unartfully told. That's a damn shame, because stories like this are important and necessary. The director and screenwriter do this story a rhetorical injustice. And worse, this rhetorical injustice

(poor young black unmarried mothers in Harlem absolutely deserve to have their stories told compellingly, with deft force and not manipulative pandering)

is being turned into an injustice based on race and class. That's so lame. We all lose when some people's stories are told to a different standard than other people's stories. And the only way out of it is to admit, as Stevens has done, that the telling of this story was lacking.

Yes to be in an awful situation is Human, but that situation does 1 of 2 things: it makes you a better human being or it dehumanizes you. In this case the characters are dehumanized thus what you see on the screen: Dehumanized characters that act in such a way as to repulse you and make you question the integrity of the characters and the people who made such a story because you cannot comprehend how low a person can get. THAT IS THE POINT. You cannot expect a story to be told in the way you want to understand poverty or abuse and have it fit your definition of what they are or how they should be told, and that is what the reviewer wants, A story told in a way that makes her choose how she should feel, if thats the case then this movie is definitely not for her, or people who want the same. You are not supposed to be given a choice through out the movie because the character does not have a choice, it is what it is, you are forced into the same situation the character is in, forced to endure what you consider dehumanization, which is the aim of the movie. In the review Dana complains of the Director not letting the audience come up with their own conclusions when she talks about the director cutting from the main characters father rapping her then cutting off to a piece of pork meat on the stove suggesting her father looks at her as a piece of meat, her complaint is that the Director makes up the Viewers mind. Then she complains about the directors use of fantasy images to cut into rap scenes of the main character because she doesn't understand what they are supposed to represent sense it is never clearly told or suggested by the director. So on one hand complain because the director tells you what you should think, then again complain because the director doesn't tell you what to think? what kind of sense is that. To say the story was unartfully told makes no sense either because the story is based on a book which is way more graphic, way more harsh, way more dehumanizing then the movie was, which means no matter how the story was told it will never be artfully told in your mind. It is unarfull to you because of the subject matter, which can never ever be toned down, or apologetic or shown in a different light then what was in the book, or the movie, and yes it is based on race and class because thats what the book was. As someone suggested earlier "it is black peoples Juno." Is that story based on race and class? of course it is, and yes juno was lame to people who understand a different reality then middle class white people who live in places like minnesota because they can never understand that situation sense, like I said, they know a different reality.

Putting Stevens' inability to access or understand Precious back on Stevens' race and class is a lose-lose copout.

Art is an empathy delivery system: its finest, highest purpose is to take situations like Precious' and make them available to others, people who have never been raped by their father, people who have never been pregnant with their father's child, or abused so terribly by their mother, who are not black, and so on. Art has been making horrific, grueling, grinding stories relatable for a long time now. That's its power.

According to your argument, the directors made a purposely bad movie that can only speak to the choir in order to perpetrate a division. Either you get the dehumanization because you've lived that specific brand of poverty or you don't and are never going to. That's one way to make art, I guess, but it's not a particularly powerful way to make art. Art is so good at building bridges of empathy between people who have vastly different experiences. Why stop at eliciting reflexive guilt out of some middle-class white folks and leaving others (the savvier ones who are probably the best possible audience if the goal is to really start understanding one another) scratching their heads? Rubbing white people's noses in racism is predictably satisfying. But why stop there, with this serious subject matter, when so much more is possible?

Racism and poverty hurt way too many people to play infantile power games with it. And the list of black artists who know this and have reached out with long arms, generating substantial, powerful, healing empathy is too long for me to buy your argument that Precious' failure to reach Stevens is Stevens' fault.