Why Tyler Perry Matters...And Why We Should Be Concerned

Why Tyler Perry Matters—and Why We Should Be Concerned
by Mark Anthony Neal

With seven theatrical releases, beginning with 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, that have grossed nearly $400 million and two syndicated television series, Tyler Perry is easily the most successful black filmmaker and producer in a generation. Perry has rode the house-dress of his most popular character, Aunt Madea—a chain-smoking, gun-toting and cussing doppelganger of everybody’s favorite auntie—to become a phenomenon. Perry’s most recent film Madea Goes to Jail, for example, had an opening weekend gross of $41 million ultimately grossing more than $90 million. To place these numbers in perspective, of the films off Spike Lee and John Singleton, the two most visible black directors of the last generation, only Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious has made more money. Lee’s most successful film, Inside Man (2006) made $88 million, while his most recent theatrical release Miracle at St Anna barely made $10 Million. All eyes are again on Tyler Perry with the release of I Can Do Bad All By Myself and the announcement that he will do a screen version of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff.

Tyler Perry got his start in the entertainment industry, writing, directing and producing a string of Gospel plays in the late 1990s. Some of those plays, which are available on DVD, were later made in films. I Can Do Bad All By Myself was Perry’s second play and marked the first appearance of Aunt Madea. With the plays, Perry tapped into a burgeoning self-styled black theater movement that cropped up in the post-Civil Rights era as an offshoot of the Negro Ensemble Company, which was founded in 1967 by director Douglas Turner Ward and actor Robert Hooks. Shange’s For Colored Girls…, initially produced in 1974, is a great exemplar of that moment as was the work of Charles Fuller, whose Award-winning A Soldier’s Play was produced by the Negro Ensemble in 1981 and made into a film that featured Academy Award winner Denzil Washington and Academy Award nominees Adolph Caesar and Howard E. Rollins.

It was Vy Higginson’s successful Mama I Want to Sing franchise from the 1980s, that was a direct inspiration for a generation of popular urban theater with plays like Checkmates (which starred Washington), Diary of a Black Man and Beauty Shop. Perry and contemporary David E. Talbert represented the next generation of these plays, which were always popular with Black Church audiences. Taken as a whole the these plays harked back to the days of the Chitlin Circuit, the network of theaters and clubs that catered to black audiences in segregated cities. Though the term “chitlin circuit” has become bit of a pejorative, the circuit was critical to the development of black artists from Bert Williams and Bessie Smith to James Brown and Tina Turner. Without access to formal film schools, like the programs at New York University and USC, where Lee and Singleton attended respectively, Perry plays allowed him opportunity hone his skills as a writer and director. But what Perry likely most learned from that experience was that there was an audience that was underserved by mainstream entertainment industry.

Perry in particularly infused his plays with the gospel of the “Black Bible Belt”—so much so that it was not unusual to attend one of Perry plays and not be greeting with dozens of buses filled with folk who just left morning services. I use the term “Black Bible Belt” as a metaphor for a bloc within Black America that has come to social, economic and, increasingly, political prominence in the last two decades. With his plays, Perry tapped into a demographic that had been largely forgotten and ignored by major advertisers.

Perry rise occurs roughly with the increased fortunes of this generation of black televangelists like Bishop T.D. Jakes, Pastor Creflo Dollar and Bishop Eddie L. Long. As Jonathan Walton suggest in his book Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, the aforementioned church leaders were part of a generation willing to embrace popular culture in order to reach their audience. Tyler Perry and his “neo-blaxploitation genre” as Walton describes it, was a logical extension of those efforts. The stage production of Jakes’ novel-turned-movie Woman Thou Art Loosed, for instance, was a collaboration between the minster and Perry. When Perry’s Dairy of a Mad Black Woman, which he didn’t direct, generated box office of $50 million, while being made on a budget of $5 million, Hollywood took notice. When Perry’s directorial debut, Madea’s Family Reunion, made even more money, $63 million on roughly the same budget, it was clear that the numbers didn’t lie. Perry had delivered an audience to Hollywood and advertisers that that had not been able to reach for decades.

By the summer of 2007, Perry was rolling out his first syndicated television series, House of Payne. Perry’s strategy for producing the series was brilliant; House of Payne was introduced a year earlier as a ten-episode package that appeared in ten television markets. Perry produced the episodes with his own money, reportedly $500,00 per episodes and shopped the episodes to TBS, who after the successful initial run, signed on for future seasons of House of Payne and later Meet the Browns, based on one of Perry popular characters from his plays. Perry’s initial risk taking allowed him total creative control of his product, in ways that were unprecedented for black television producers. The Tyler Perry brand was born.

But it’s some the core messages of that brand that have raised eyebrows about Perry’s work. The most obvious criticism has come from those uncomfortable with Perry's drag performance of Madea, arguing that the boisterous and decidedly “ghetto” Madea was little more than a contemporary riff on the blackface minstrelsy of the early 20th-century, where black performers “blackened up”—literally and figuratively—for the delight of white audiences. But to truly understand why Madea is so troublesome is to fully understand what Perry’s core audience really looks like. As Walton suggest, Perry’s films are primarily directed at black women and revolve around “Strong Black Man protagonists who are able to redeem the black woman, black family, and larger community by virtue of their strong character and testicular fortitude.” In this regard Perry’s audience mirrors that of the congregations of many black church were black women parishioners often outnumber male members, significantly. Perry films, as such often reinforce very traditional and even conservative notions of gender in black communities and Madea, as a supposed female character, simply represent patriarchy in drag.

Increasingly though, Perry films have publicaly admonished black women, particularly educated and middle class women, who dared to be too ambitious. As Courtney Young recently wrote in The Nation, “Each of his films advances nearly the same message to his audience. Be demure. Be strong but not too strong. Too much ambition is a detriment to your ability to find a partner and spiritual health. Female beauty can be dangerous. Let a man be a ‘man’.” Letting a be a man often entails the use of violence, as was the case in Perry’s The Family that Preys, that featured a cast headed by A-Listers and Academy Award winner Kathy Bates and nominee Alfre Woodard. In the film Sanaa Latham and Rockmond Dunbar play a young married couple. She’s an Ivy-League graduate and he’s a construction worker and as she become more successful in her career—and begins to flaunt it--there is obvious tension. The situation comes to a head when Dunbar’s character confronts his wife about her affair with her white boss (a white boss who has fathered a child, Dunbar’s character thought was his own) and proceeds to slap his wife across a lunch counter. The scene alone was troubling, but more troubling was the audiences reaction when I screened the film, many of whom stood up and applauded the man’s act of violence.

What I thought was an isolated experience was repeated to me by colleagues and friends who also saw the film. Perhaps most troubling is that Perry’s take on black gender politics—not much different than the everyday rapper we are so willing to label as misogynistic—is not something marginal to the black community, but seems to reflect mainstream opinion in black communities, particularly in light of the current economic crisis. It seems that Perry has placed a mirror up to our collective image and if we don’t like what we see, we need to move beyond simply complaining about what Perry is doing.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. He is a professor of African-American Studies at Duke University.