Precious

In the film Precious, we often see scenes that weave in and out of reality. Precious, the main character, is an impoverished 16 year old Black girl who is living in a violent household where she has been subject to years of sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father, leaving her with one child and another one on the way. In order to escape the violence and cruelty of her home she is often fantasizing about wealth, love, and fame. She understands the reality of her current situation, but she finds peace in dissociating with it. When her mother is verbally harassing her or kids on the street are bullying her, Precious escapes to an imagined scenario where she is glamorously dressed and widely adored. Her circumstances are too intensely awful to face reality every second of every day. To be a pregnant single mother at the age of 16 who cannot read or write well and faces abuse from the two people who were supposed to protect her from the horrors of the world is a way of life that is unimaginable for a lot of people and yet real for many others. In order to cope with it being real for her, the film often showed Precious escaping into her fictional alternate universe where all the pain she was feeling would just slip away and she would be left to bask in her curated joy.

The fact that these departures from the poverty class are displayed in a way that labels them as impossible just by the mere fact that they are fantasies seems to be a commentary on the way class status is seen as a fixed identity. Beverly Skeggs in her piece “Making class: Inscription, exchange, value and perspective” discusses the way ideas of fixity are imposed onto working-class bodies by those with power (4). People of higher classes maintain their placement in the economic hierarchy by perpetuating the subordination of those below them and to do this they legitimize their own superiority by making it seem as though it is something that cannot be altered. Precious, as someone from the poverty class, internalized these ideas that there was no way out of her situation which is why her dreams took the form of extravagant fantasies. It was not seen as remotely possible for her to be the person she was in these dreams.