Push/Precious Essay

After watching “Precious” and reading Push, I feel like no matter how either one ended, it still happened. There was a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order for the two. Precious endured a lot of physical and mental abuse. She learned a very valuable lesson in the end, and that was to love, be loved, and have an education. For me it seemed like the beginning of the book was only a small portion of the middle of her life. The beginning of the movie was more like the beginning of the end for Clareece “Precious” Jones. I feel like she went through her own personal hell to get to heaven. Precious needed to love herself before anybody else could love her. She was hurt most by the main people in her life, the people that should have been there for her, the people that are supposed to love her unconditionally, her parents. She needed to be surrounded by people that she could trust and those who would accept for who she is. She wanted to be loved, skinny, famous, in her own little world and most of all, happy.

In the book, Precious is not a defenseless character. With every turn of the page she becomes more of a survivor. Her drive to be something more than what people made her seem is how she becomes on top in the end. It was portrayed both in the film and in the novel perfectly. When Precious was forced to go through sexual and mental abuse from her parents she had no one to turn to.

She uses her imagination frequently to escape reality, to get away from all things negative and to be a happy individual. Her thoughts and imagination pushed her to do great things with her life. She was not going to let her mother bring her down with her cruel words and continuous abuse. Precious knew that a proper education would be her ticket away from all of the bad things in her life.

In the film, precious had several dreams of being a big movie star and walking down the red carpet, being blinded by the bright lights from the cameras of the paparazzi, and signing autographs. It seems as if this was one of the many outlets for her. Her kids made her happy, being in school made her happy, and when she learned how to read, she was ecstatic.

One person that helped her along the way of her long, agonizing journey was a lady named Miss Rain, her teacher when she went to the alternative school. "She dark. got nice face, big eyes, and long dread-locky hair." In the film this character was played by Paula Patton, a light-skinned African American woman with straightened hair and beautiful eyes. She even wore a strand of pearls. I think that the author wanted to keep the whole “Harlem” theme and it only made sense to have such a character description for her teacher in the book or maybe it would not be believable by readers. Even though Miss Rain had a totally different description in the book and in the movie, she was still the same person at heart. She still taught Precious how to read and write. She still was a support system for her. So whether you saw the movie first or read the book, you would be able see that she had someone in her life that cared about her and wanted her to do well and strive in life.