"lifes of trash": Precious & the Aesthetics of Welfare

Precious examines the life of Claireece Precious Jones, an African American teenager in Harlem in the late 1980s. Precious is illiterate. She’s repeating the eighth grade, again. She’s pregnant with her second child. Her first child has Down Syndrome. Both children are fathered by her father. She’s homeless. She has HIV. She’s physically, sexually, and emotionally abused. She is as sympathetic a character as you could invent (and it’s important to remember that she is invented).

This paper focuses on the home Precious shares with her abusive mother, Mary. Because fictional families are without fictional homes, production designers are forced to imagine how families live, down to the last detail. When the camera pans across Precious’ home, it gives the viewer an overview of the imagined materiality of the welfare mother: piles of garbage, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, an empty bag of pork rinds, a sink filled with murky water, pigs’ feet cooking on a grease-stained stove. These details attempt to convey “realness.” But how does this rhetoric of “realness” create (and solidify) understandings (and misunderstandings) of welfare and the home?

I explore how the set of Precious takes structural issues (wealth, racial, and gender inequalities) and attempts to convey them behaviorally. I consider how objects, dirt, congestion, darkness, and domestic disorder are used to mark Precious’ mother as deviant. The set, I argue, wants the viewer to understand that Mary is not the victim of marginalization. Instead, the set argues that Mary’s problem is behavioral.