The Color Purple

My mother didn't go to the movies very much. She was blessed, or cursed, depending on your  perspective, with a house full of boys who lived and died with the movies. Anything we could get our hands on we watched, especially after we were lucky enough to get a VCR. Being a particularly religious household, anything rated R was off the menu and being not especially wealthy we lived in the 99 cent area of the video store or more often, what was available at the library. In hindsight that meant a steady diet of Disney Movies and classic Hollywood pictures like Casablanca or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

For whatever reason, when the Color Purple was released in 1985, my mother went to see it. Now my mother never went to a movie of her own volition in the entire 28 years I had her. She saw plenty of movies with us kids (especially me). She sat threw multiple iterations of Superman and Star Wars because that's what we wanted to go see. But I have no memory of her deciding to go to a movie that she wanted to see for herself. Except this once.

Not only did she see it, she went back and saw it, in the theatre, multiple times. If you didn't know my mother, believe this. This was an extraordinary circumstance.

In the years after, she would tell me how much the movie reminded her of her own life. Without sharing stories that aren't mine to share, my mothers childhood was filled with experiences that most people would think of as a horror show. She shared with me only a fraction of her experiences and it was enough to convince me of the cruelty and outright evil that some people are capable of.

My mother's experience of the Color Purple was more than just cathartic. She, quite literally, fell into the movie and became for the time she was watching it. She adored this movie in a way that I as a lifelong movie nut, could never fully appreciate. It mattered to her on a deeply cellular level.

So when I got home today and my sister was watching it, I sat down and caught the last bit. Right about from when Ms. Sofia has just been put in jail, through the end. I hadn't seen it in a while, and it really holds up as a film. But beyond that . . .

I saw the pain on Celie's face when being subjected to a lifetime of servitude to a man who can easily be defined as the personification of misogynistic evil. I felt the catharsis of watching Celie discover the connection with the only person in the world who loved her through decades of letters. And I felt the joy of Celie reuniting with a family that she never thought she'd see again in her lifetime.

And it mattered to me. On a deeply cellular level.