New Color Purple Same as the Old Color Purple

When The Color Purple uses the songs from the musical it works very well. The best sequences are easily “Miss Celie’s Pants”, “Push da Button”, and “Hell No”. Which makes one wonder why they didn’t use more of this music. So much of Blitz Bazawule’s movie musical is not musical! Why? I just don’t get it. The whole thing just works so much better when the performers are singing. 

The real kicker for me, though, was that this film reused so much of Spielberg’s movie (the dumb food-burning humor when Shug arrives, the invented subplot about Shug having a minister father, the near complete erasure of Shug and Celie’s love affair) instead of the far-superior (and closer to the novel) libretto from the musical. Ugh. Well, I’ve written a whole book chapter on this in Love Is Love Is Love, and this version of The Color Purple is much more like Spielberg’s version than Walker’s version or the stage show. And that’s too bad.

Here's a little section from Love Is Love Is Love, so you know what I mean when I tell you how annoyed I was at this movie:

* * *

The concept of god [is] central to The Color Purple. Celie still begins her letters “Dear God,” and the Bible and Heaven make regular appearances. The shift for Celie begins in letter 73, more than halfway through the novel, after she has discovered that Nettie is still alive, that her father was lynched, and that the man she thought was her father is her stepfather. Celie and Shug talk about God, but they have very different ideas about it. Their conversation is far reaching and fascinating. Celie says that “the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown,” but Shug argues that Celie’s god is not only a male god but specifically white and male:

If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she say, that’s who is bound to show up, cause that’s where he live. […] Cause that’s the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it.

How come he look just like them, then? she say. […] How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed?

I never thought bout that. 

It is important to note here that Shug’s critique is one that marks this god as specifically racialized, gendered, and aged by the white people who created him in their image. 

Shug’s personal theory about god is the one that Celie finally adopts, although it takes her a long time to arrive at this position – she struggles with it through several letters. In letter 73, though, Shug tells Celie that “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. […] God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. […] I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.”  It is in this same letter that Shug says the memorable phrase from which the book’s title is taken, that “it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” 

Even more, Shug’s theory of god is one deeply inflected by an ethos of sexual freedom and an emphasis on sexual pleasure. Shug understands desire and sex to be invented by her god, and she says that “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.”  Shug’s sexual ethic here emphasizes a free sexual choice that, significantly, doesn’t emphasize a specific sexuality as much as it insists on sexual freedom and sexual pleasure – “go with everything that’s going,” Shug says, and “lik[e] what you like.”

At the same time as her long talk with Shug, Celie stops writing letters to her god, writing instead to her sister Nettie, from whom she has been separated for the many years of the novel. Nettie has gone to Africa as a Christian missionary to a fictional ethnic group called the Olinka, but after their time in Africa, she and her husband Samuel come to see God in the same way that Celie does, as a spirit not tied to a particular image. Celie writes to Nettie until the moving final letter of novel. By this time, Nettie and Celie’s children have returned to Georgia and they have all been reunited, and so instead of writing to her sister, Celie addresses her final letter in this way: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God. / Thank you for bringing my sister Nettie and our children home.”  Celie has come to believe in a god that is everywhere and everything rather than a white patriarch who punishes sexual pleasure and demands obedience, and she is grateful.

* * *

This is as gay as this new movie gets.

All of this – and to my mind these are the central themes of the novel – is cut in Spielberg's film. I go on in the book to detail the changes made for the film and for the musical. Celie and Shug don't even have this conversation about god in the 1985 movie. What's so wonderful about the musical is that it restores this conversation and does so musically with Shug's gorgeous song "The Color Purple". The musical also restores the beautiful sexual relationship that the women have, another thing that was cut for Spielberg's movie.

Well the new Blitz Bazawule movie cuts the conversation yet again (cutting Shug's song, of course), and it cuts the sexual relationship too, for good measure. The musical version did so much work to get back to the themes of the novel from the botched 1985 movie adaptation. The new movie adaptation takes us right back to 1985.