The book and the film of The Color Purple

The book and the film of The Color Purple have very different emphases and show different attitudes on the part of their respective creators. The subject matter is essentially the same--the mistreatment of black women by their men--but the movie directed by Steven Spielberg is much more poetic in tone, so that for all its criticism of this aspect of black life, it comes off as a nostalgic film. The book has a much harder edge because it takes place in the mind of one victim of this kind of life, expressed by her through letters that fairly cry out for help and for a different life. This is lost in the film first because the letters are at a distance from the viewer and second because the entire story is somehow sugar-coated in some peculiar fashion, with numerous film cliches substituted for a real analysis of the issues or the characters.

In the novel, Alice Walker writes about people she has known, people who lived in the part of the country where she grew up, and she understands these people and the reasons for their behavior. The novel is about abuse, the abuse of one human being by another, and the main character of Celie has been abused throughout her life. The story Walker tells is based on the conditions faced by people like Celie and evokes the values they held in high regard from their place within the larger context of American society. The people of this part of the South constitute a subculture shaped by particular economic and social forces, and those f

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ilm. Instead, her life on film is more like a historical evocation of a better time and place, with the exception of those moments when she is being brutalized by the towering Mister. Even these scenes have a beauty that cuts against the behavior depicted, and in between are scenes that seem more like picture postcards, with beautiful flowers, distant vistas, and colorful people laughing and happy even in their pain. From the opening of the film, the lines are clearly drawn between male and female so that there is little to do but work out the stereotype of the brutal black male and to build up the image of the suffering black woman ultimately successful because she endures. Celie gives birth in a scene that evokes the courage of all women, while the hulking male figure, shot in a way that emphasizes his size and furtiveness, enters and snatches Celie's baby from her. This is equivalent to the old movie cliche of identifying the villain by having him kick a dog--like the other cliche, it leaves no room for doubt as to who is good and who is not. The black female is seen as utterly good, while the black male is seen as utterly evil. Even Shug, the seductress who might be considered less savory, emerges as another sister exp

Category: Film - T