SOURCE: Dole, Carol. “The Return of the Father in Spielberg's The Color Purple.” Literature/Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (January 1996): 12-15.

When Steven Spielberg set out to film Alice Walker's The Color Purple, he was faced with a problem that confronts most directors who choose to adapt novels into film: length. Walker's tersely written three hundred-page novel, covering fifty years and two continents, contained enough material for a mini-series. Even with numerous American episodes removed and the African section reduced to a fraction of its length in the novel, the film ran more than two and a half hours. Nonetheless, Spielberg chose to add a time-consuming and seemingly unnecessary subplot: the story of Shug's estrangement from, and final reconciliation with, her father. Given the time constraints Spielberg faced, what made this subplot important enough to add to an already daunting body of material? I will argue that this subplot is exemplary of the film's modification of strong ideological elements of the novel, in particular its feminism and its religious heterodoxy.

Such modification might have been expected in any film designed for a mainstream audience. Walker's 1982 novel may have attained the literary imprimatur of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but its celebration of a lesbian relationship, its unorthodox religious views, and its portrayal of whites routinely abusing blacks and men routinely abusing women were hardly calculated to recommend it to a popular readership. Even before Spielberg's The Color Purple appeared late in 1985, many people were prepared to dislike the film—some because they disliked the politics of Walker's novel, and some because they thought Spielberg did not share Walker's ideology. The mainstream press readied its attacks for the director: David Ansen (writing in the pre-Schindler's List era) began his review by suggesting that the idea of Spielberg directing The Color Purple seemed as improbable as that of Antonioni directing a James Bond movie. “What could be stranger,” Ansen asked, “than America's popular practitioner of boy's adventure—a man who some leftist critics have assailed for his white-male-supremacist fantasies—adapting Alice Walker's feminist, matriarchal novel about the Southern rural black experience?” When they saw the film, most reviewers complained that the level of sentimentality in Spielberg's rendering diluted the effect of the novel's strong statements about relationships between the sexes and between the races. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby said that although the film is faithful to the events of Walker's “grim, rudely funny, black feminist” novel, “it sees those events through lavender-color glasses that transform them into fiction of an entirely different order” (H17). Many critics agreed with John Simon that the book's “feminist and lesbian coloration” is “lost in a mise en scène doing its damnedest to look like a cartoon film.”

While the film establishment was waiting to take on Spielberg, another group was waiting to attack the film on the basis of its objections to Walker's novel. A number of prominent African-American men criticized both book and novel for their negative portrayal of black males.¹ Writing in the Antioch Review, for instance, Gerald Early derided the film for selecting as its villain “the black male, the convenient and mutable antihero of the white American psyche for the past 150 years” (269). Filmmaker Spike Lee stated in Film Comment that “the quickest way for a Black playwright, novelist, or poet to get published has been to say that Black men are shit” (Glicksman 48). Many other black male reviewers likewise attacked Walker's novel on the score of its scathing portrayals of its principal male characters: Mister, Celie's brutal husband; “Pa,” the father who rapes Celie and disposes of her two children; and Celie's stepson Harpo, who ruins a loving marriage by taking his family's advice to beat his wife.

In a climate of such opposition, it would be surprising if a mainstream filmmaker such as Spielberg did not respond by trying to avoid potential criticism of his work.² On the one hand were the film critics waiting for him to betray Walker's feminism for the sake of popular appeal; on the other were male commentators insisting that African-American men were represented unfairly in the novel and would be in the film as well. The film Spielberg created walks the line between these poles, softening both Walker's celebration of female culture and her harsh portrayal of male culture. These changes, crystallized in the added subplot featuring Shug's father, are also evident in numerous other elements of the film.

The film uses several tactics to make its principal male characters more appealing and thus less offensive to audiences. Mister remains brutal to Celie, but only his threats appear on screen, not actual assaults. Moreover, he is given a likable comic side, most evident when he is scrambling to please his true love, Shug Avery. One of the film's funniest sequences is Mister's bumbling attempt to cook up a hearty breakfast for his darling, an attempt that ends with the explosion of the stove. Although Mister's dignity is undercut by Celie's subsequent success where he had failed, the scene gives him the appeal of a childlike earnestness. The casting of the amiable-looking Danny Glover as Mister helps offset the domineering presence underscored by the many low-angle shots of Celie's husband.

The film's softening of Mister is, moreover, furthered by the expansion of the role of his father. In Walker's novel Mister's father appears only once, in the memorable scene where Celie takes revenge by mixing some spit into his drink. Otherwise, he is referred to only because he refused to allow his son to marry Shug, who was already the mother of Mister's children. In Spielberg's version, the influence of this character is magnified. The film emphasizes the near-castrating power of Mister's father by its staging of the scene from the novel: the father slams his foot onto a bench between the spread legs of his seated son. Moreover, the film adds two scenes that underscore the father's negative influence on Mister. In the more obvious of these, the dinner table scene in which Celie finally lambastes her husband for his treatment of her over the years, Mister's father objects, “You can't talk to my boy that way!” and Sophia retorts, “Your boy? Seem like if he hadn't been your boy he might of made somebody a halfway decent man.” The film's vilification of Mister's father thus removes part of Mister's responsibility for his mistreatment of his wife.

Not only is the role of his father expanded in the film, but Mister's own role is expanded as well. When Celie leaves her husband in the novel, the narrative follows her to Memphis, where she cements her love relationship with Shug and achieves economic independence by establishing a business designing pants. Only after she returns does she hear of her husband's breakdown following her departure. In the film, on the other hand, the narrative remains entirely with Mister during Celie's absence. Celie's own transformation is indicated only by her new style of dress when she returns and her opening of a shop. Mister's disintegration, in contrast, is closely detailed in scenes of his drunkenness and his disorderly house. Spielberg's attention to Mister was such that Alice Walker, who was closely involved with the making of the film, worried that, since Danny Glover was in almost every scene, “it was going to become his story—Mister's story, not Celie's” (qtd. in Dworkin 95).

Although Harpo's role is not significantly expanded in the film version, he undergoes a transformation similar to his father's. The fact that Harpo beats his wife, Sophia, is attributed in both novel and film to the advice of his father (at one point seconded by the envious Celie), but the film depicts the beatings as less sustained and programmatic. Indeed, the film turns them to broadly comic purpose at moments, as Harpo concocts extraordinary explanations for the bruises with which Sophia repaid him. Harpo becomes in the film a harmless buffoon, guaranteed to fall through a roof nearly every time he appears.

The most significant alteration the film makes in the depiction of men, however, is the radical change of ending. At the conclusion of the novel, the principal male characters are redeemed by their entry into a female-ordered world. The emblems of that world are domestic and nurturing activities traditionally coded as feminine. Mister and Celie, reconciled through their similar longings for Shug, become friends and end up sewing together on the porch. Likewise Harpo, reconciled with Sophia after she finds him sleeping with his ailing father in his arms, indulges a long-suppressed urge to cook.

The film excises all trace of such “feminine” activities by men. Mister never learns to sew,³ and the catastrophic breakfast-cooking scene suggests his utter dissociation from all domestic tasks. Not only does Harpo stay out of the kitchen, but when Sophia suggests that he assist his drunken father home, he assures her that his father does not need him. Instead, Harpo is reconciled to Sophia without explanation, and Celie and her estranged husband remain alienated. Nonetheless, Mister redeems himself in the audience's eyes—and eventually, we are allowed to assume, in Celie's—by secretly visiting the Office of Immigration to arrange for the return home of Celie's long-lost sister, Nettie. This radical change in the ending of the film may have been based partly on the belief that Walker's ending was too unrealistic, as many reviewers of the novel charged.⁴ However, Hollywood has seldom let realism stand in the way of a happy ending, particularly in a film with as many lapses from realism as this one. More likely Spielberg and his scriptwriter, Menno Meyjes, didn't see Walker's ending as a happy one for male viewers. Gerald Early, in his article in the Antioch Review, complained that Walker's novel makes Mister “a feminized man by the end” (271). Many women viewers too might be dismayed by such a radical upset in power relations: Pauline Kael, for instance, sneered that Walker “allows some of the lazy, lecherous oppressors to redeem themselves by accepting their inferiority to their wives and developing their aptitudes for cooking and sewing” (81). In contrast, Spielberg's conclusion allows both for audience gratification, in seeing the heroine's tormentor mend his sorry ways, and simultaneously for Mister's retention of his male dignity. Spielberg's Mister repents of the horrendous wrong he did in depriving Celie of her sister, but, unlike Walker's, does not yield himself to a new, female-centered order.⁵

While Spielberg's film avoids controversy over female defiance of male power by erasing the novel's feminization of men, it further solidifies male authority through the new subplot involving Shug's father. In Walker's novel, Shug's mother and “pappy”—who is hinted not to be her biological father—are shadowy figures who have rejected her as a “Tramp” and who never make an appearance (Walker 45). In Spielberg's film, Shug's father is the local minister, who refuses to speak to her on similar grounds. Although the film, like the book, mentions that Shug's children are being raised by her parents—significantly, in the film she explains that “kids only come out right with a man around”—in Spielberg's version she is never seen to visit or even wonder about her mother or her own children. Instead all her attention is focused on obtaining her father's love and forgiveness. Twice she visits him in the hope of a reconciliation, once explaining to him how sick she has been and once showing off a wedding ring as the symbol of her newfound respectability. Both times he turns away from her in silence. But then, in the penultimate sequence of the film, father and daughter are reconciled when she leads the crowd from the juke joint into her father's church one Sunday and embraces him as both congregations sing “Lord is trying to tell you something.”

Even given the upbeat tone of Spielberg's work, this “big Vincente Minelli-style musical number” (Ansen 6)—with its vivid colors, rousing musical duel, and parade-like march to the church—seems oddly out of place in a film about such serious subjects as child abuse, oppression, and thwarted love. But however dissonant it may be, this extravaganza accomplishes two important functions: it masks the lack of narrative logic for the sudden reconciliation of father and daughter, and it provides an emotional uplift to ratify the importance of patriarchy. In performing the latter function, it is just one of Spielberg's methods of defusing the potentially controversial feminist politics of the novel by reinscribing male dignity and power.

This same scene accomplishes a second goal as well: to defuse the novel's potentially controversial rejection of traditional Christianity. Celie's denial of God in the novel—a denial based on her realization that “the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown”—might be explained away as a natural result of her anger at men. But Shug's feminist and pantheistic religion, to which Celie is converted, is more potentially troubling to a resolutely Judeo-Christian culture. In rejecting the biblical “old white man” image of God (Walker 201), and the Bible along with it, Shug directly challenges both white and male hegemony and traditional Christianity. She also scorns religious ritual, asking Celie, “have you ever found God in church? I never did” (Walker 202). Shug's god is not a male deity found in heaven or in church, but a genderless presence “inside you and inside everybody else. … God is everything” (Walker 202). What her god demands is only that you “praise God by liking what you like,” specifically including sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual (Walker 203). The novel endorses Shug's view of God by having several likable characters come to share it as they age—even Nettie and Samuel, who had gone off to Africa as Christian missionaries. As James C. Hall explains, Nettie's recognition in Africa of the ties between white patriarchal religious institutions and the oppression of blacks chimes with Celie's growing realization that “the Christian ‘father’ is not their father, not their spiritual reservoir” (94).

Spielberg's version of The Color Purple avoids any obvious repudiation of the Christian father. It does so in part by suppressing almost all references to religion. Celie and Shug's six-page discussion of theology is reduced in the film to a few disconnected lines placed just before the reconciliation scene between Shug and her minister-father. Shug's claim that God loves admiration is included in the film, as is (inescapably) the line that gives the work its title: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.” God is once referred to as “it” rather than “he,” but so ambiguously that the antecedent of the pronoun is difficult to catch. Moreover, the conversation about God takes place while the women cross a field of flowers so relentlessly lavender that the mise en scène overwhelms the dialogue. Most importantly, the effect of the scene is not to explore Celie's changing conception of God, as in the novel, but to emphasize Shug's longing for her father. Shug's explanation in the novel that God/everything “want to be loved” (204) is placed in a context in the film that suggests that the discontented Shug is really speaking of her own desire to be loved by her godly father. Such a suggestion is confirmed by the juxtaposition of the religious discussion and reconciliation scenes. Moments after Shug explains, “Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved,” the film cuts to the scene in which Shug does just these things in her successful attempt to reach her father. In finally embracing her father, the film's Shug is simultaneously embracing “the representative of the Christian white father-God explicitly repudiated” in Walker's novel (Hite 115).

The added subplot, then, embodies the return in the film of the patriarchal structures that Walker's novel works to undermine. In reinscribing such structures, it helps to undercut the novel's unacceptable ideology. This return of the father is just one of several modifications that make the film more palatable to the mainstream viewer. And these strategies clearly succeeded, because the film proved extremely popular both in theatrical release and on videotape. Moreover, they may well have been necessary strategies: it is worth remembering that in 1985 just getting Hollywood to make a major film with an all-black cast was a landmark achievement. To get financing for a film that was also feminist, anti-Christian, and pro-lesbian would no doubt have been impossible even for a director with Steven Spielberg's clout.

Notes

1. Jacqueline Bobo's study of the reception of the film makes clear both that African-American women generally liked the film and that African-American men, who generally criticized the film, were sometimes reacting to the film on the basis of their feelings toward the novel. For instance, she points out that both Courtland Milloy, a black male columnist for the Washington Post, and Tony Brown, the host of a weekly television program, condemned the film without having even seen it (Bobo 337).

2. Spielberg found this film “scary” to start with, since it was to be a new genre for him. Although he stated before its release that he did not expect The Color Purple to prove a “massively popular entertainment,” he added, “I would like a lot of people to see the movie” (Breskind 74).

3. John Peacock, in an article in Literature/Film Quarterly, points out that the film's erasure of reconciliation through sewing is also a rejection of an African-American folk tradition of reestablishing community in favor of an Anglo-American tradition of resolution through reversal of fortunes.

4. See Hite for a survey of charges that the novel lacks realism and a reading of the novel as a romance (103-18).

5. John Digby offers an additional reason for the film to excise Celic's reconciliation with Mister: that the dinnertable scene in which Celic defies her husband is so powerful that “the film had not sufficient time to create the illusion of regeneration complete enough to bring her back” (Digby 164).

Works Cited

Ansen, David. “We Shall Overcome.” Newsweek 30 Dec. 1985: 59-60.

Bobo, Jacqueline. “Sifting through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple.” Callaloo 12 (Spring 1989): 332-42.

Breskind, David. Interview with Steven Spielberg. Rolling Stone 24 Oct. 1985: 22-24, 70-80.

Canby, Vincent. “From a Palette of Cliches Comes The Color Purple.” New York Times 5 Jan. 1986: H17＋.

Digby, Joan. “From Walker to Spielberg: Transformations of The Color Purple.” Novel Images. Ed. Peter Reynolds. New York: Routledge, 1993. 157-174.

The Color Purple. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Warner, 1985.

Dworkin, Susan. “The Strange and Wonderful Story of the Making of The Color Purple.” Ms. Dec. 1985: 66-70, 94-95.

Early, Gerald. “The Color Purple as Everybody's Protest Art.” Antioch Review 44 (Summer 1986): 261-75.

Glicksman, Marlaine. “Lee Way.” Film Comment October 1986: 46.

Hall, James C. “Towards a Map of Mis(sed) Reading: The Presence of Absence in The Color Purple.” African American Review 26 (Spring 1992): 89-97.

Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989.

Kael, Pauline. “Sacred Monsters.” Hooked. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989: 80-83.

Peacock, John. “When Folk Goes Pop: Consuming The Color Purple.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19.3 (1991): 176-80.

Simon, John. “Black and White in Purple.” National Review 14 Feb. 1986: 56.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1985.