Why white critics’ fear of engaging Tyler Perry is stifling honest debate
At the end of March, Temptation: Confessions Of A Marriage Counselor hit theaters, bringing the number of films written and directed by Tyler Perry to 13 in just over seven years. Like Perry’s films always do, Temptation dropped into theaters without being screened in advance for critics, then barreled to a box-office triumph despite savage reviews.
But Temptation isn’t just another inept, inelegant Tyler Perry film. In fact, years from now, we may look back on Temptation as the loose thread that catalyzed the unraveling of Perry’s prominence. That could be wishful thinking, but the critical response to Temptation suggests a genuine sea change in how Perry’s work is perceived. For the first time, white critics are taking earnest swings at the Perry piñata.
In the days following Temptation’s release, a few white writers on prominent online platforms took Perry to task for the nauseating subtext of his film’s “twist” ending. (By this time, I imagine most of the people who wanted to see Temptation have seen it, but anyone averse to spoilage should stop reading here.) Temptation concludes with a troubling epilogue in which Judith (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) is seen in a pharmacy owned by her ex-husband Brice (Lance Gross). She’s there picking up her HIV medication, which she must now take after cheating on Brice with a man who infected her. Brice has since remarried a more virtuous Christian woman who loves him for his goodness—which apparently includes offering deep discounts on his ex-wife’s HIV meds, because I can’t imagine why else Judith would subject herself to this indignity rather than Googling the nearest Walgreens.
Mike Ryan of The Huffington Post was the first to seize on the film’s awful implication: HIV is a disease that infects the immoral, and Judith deserves her infection because she cheated on her husband. Ryan writes, “Either Perry believes that if you cheat on your partner, you deserve a terrible disease or he believes that the people he hopes will pay money to see Tyler Perry’s Temptation believe that if you cheat on your spouse, you deserve a terrible disease. I can’t decide which is worse.” Louis Peitzman of BuzzFeed wrote his own takedown, which acknowledges Ryan’s piece and builds on it by dissecting Perry’s prior use of HIV as a narrative weapon in 2010’s For Colored Girls: “By offering a version of reality in which people are either Good or Evil, Tyler Perry’s soapbox may do more harm than good.” Lindy West of Jezebel contributed another outraged missive shortly thereafter: “I’m starting to believe that Tyler Perry isn’t just artless—he’s reprehensible.”
It isn’t unusual for a critical hive mind to form, but the way this particular pile-on came together is noteworthy, and suggests a deeper hostility to Perry’s work that extends far beyond Temptation. Online content thrives on uniqueness, and there’s a premium on the irresistible clickiness of providing the most original, counterintuitive, or contrarian take on a subject. So it’s not every day that a writer from a platform like BuzzFeed essentially says “Here’s this thing a guy from HuffPo wrote, and here’s me saying the exact same thing a few days later.” Differentiating the content didn’t matter here, because these essays about Temptation’s ending aren’t meant to say something new or different about Perry’s work. They’re meant to say something old and established about Perry’s work that, prior to Temptation, white critics have been careful not to say: Tyler Perry’s movies aren’t just bad, they’re insidious.
Perry’s films have been scrutinized plenty, but the white writers who dominate film criticism have offered analyses that, while largely negative, skip across the surface and ignore the depth. It’s difficult to imagine a review of, say, Spring Breakers that doesn’t at least flick at the movie’s underlying messages and cultural ramifications. But even as Perry’s films have had criticism heaped on them, he’s had the luxury of being bashed solely for his films’ hamfisted writing, paint-by-numbers plotting, and visual blandness. Never before Temptation have this many white critics taken care to blast the troublesome, underlying message of a Perry film, completely independent of its artistic or technical shortcomings.
Temptation isn’t the first of Perry’s films with a jaw-droppingly offensive subtext, it just has a specific jaw-droppingly offensive subtext that makes white critics feel like they’re on solid enough ground to read Perry the riot act. Perry’s movies have always been offensive in their vicious portrayals of black men, showing black life through a misandric lens that implicitly attributes the broader ills of black America to the moral failings of black men. Perry’s first film, Diary Of A Mad Black Woman (which he wrote, but didn’t direct) wasn’t bashful about setting the Perry agenda early on: Madea (Perry) and Helen (Kimberly Elise) attempt to destroy the home of Helen’s cartoonishly cruel ex-husband. Madea, wielding a chainsaw, exclaims, “This is for every black woman who’s ever had a problem with a black man!” But Perry’s films often hold black women in as much contempt as black men. Diary has an anti-feminist message, as another man shows up to teach Helen that she was right about needing a man to complete her, she just chose the wrong one. To complete his problematic trinity, Perry tosses in his most famous character, the mammy-echoing Madea, as a black female grotesque.
It’s fascinating to read criticism of that film now, because the reviews show that many prominent white critics took issue early on; they weren’t just disapproving of bad, individual filmmaking choices, they seemed uncomfortable with the Perry gestalt. But such sentiments are glossed over for more immediate technical concerns. For instance, the Diary review written by Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly makes no effort to hide his uneasiness with the premise, which finds Helen’s husband Charles (Steve Harris) heartlessly evicting her from the home they share so he can move in his mistress, who is far lighter-skinned than Helen (a detail Gleiberman notes in his review). He writes:
“At least one thing is wrong with this picture: If Charles is supposed to be such a poshly pretentious, imperiously self-interested customer, it seems highly unlikely that he’d go out of his way to make a scene in which he behaves like a low-dog pimp. Yet that’s all part of the shameless trash-fantasy broadness that gives Diary Of A Mad Black Woman its crudely rousing tent-show juice.”