LYCHEE: "Their Eyes Were Watching God" -- The Movie

One of the best aspects of teaching is my own continual education and growth. I recently decided to teach Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for my 11th grade American Literature class. My goal was to do a unit on the Harlem Renaissance and I wanted to include one novel (all that I could expect my students to get through in a quarter) and female writers. In rereading and researching this novel, I absolutely fell in love with this book and with the genius and vitatlity of Hurston. Many, including her contemporaries, would consdier this an unconventional choice for studying this movement in American literature. I hoped that my students would gain a better understanding of the dynamics that spurred the Harlem Renaissance by grasping the radicalness of Hurston's sytle and choices in creating the character Janie and in depicting the ordinary lives of African-Americans in Florida. In actuality, Hurston endured much criticism from male Harlem Renaissance writers and, eventually,was shunned as a writer for portraying the revereing the real, honest portraits of African-American life rather than transforming them into something more palatable and reflective of mainstream (at the time White) approval. Hurston died poor and anonymous. Today, she leaves us with unparallelled anthropological studies of African-American culture.

With all this enthusiasm, why, then, did I have mixed feelings about the fact that ABC would be airing a movie version of this novel. Surely, the women at the helm of this movie recognize Hurston's contribution to American culture and will celebrate the legacy of this great American writer. First, I felt relief and a certain smugness that the movie would air one week after the paper and test were due for my class. To my students' frustration this meant that they would actually have to read the book and could not just wait and watch the movie. Secondly, I was pleased that a novel that had only been rediscoved in the past 30 years had garnered enough respect and interest to become a movie. However, when I saw that the movie would star Halle Berry, my heart sank. I vowed to have faith despite this fact. (Yes, I am in a minority who, depite the little gold man, thinks that Ms. Berry cannot act. If she could not deliver a convincing line in a 007 movie, how could she depict the complexity and dignity of a character like Janie?) Yet, in collaboration with prominent African-American women -- Oprah Winfrey and Suzan-Lori Parks and Ruby Dee -- I had hope that the movie would faithfully reflect Hurston's radical story.

I was wrong. Somehow, Janie was not good enough. Having gone out the night the movie aired, I sat down to watch the taped program the next evening. I was excited to see the beauty of Hurston's prose transformed by Hollywood movie magic. I wanted to believe that not even Berry's mediocre acting could completely ruin this. I suffered through the introductory scenes where Berry carried herself with a haughtiness more like a woman who had returned from some Hollywood action movie war than a woman who just survived wading through the floods of a hurricane and lost the love of her life, a love she waited decades to find. I conceded the filmmakers the overly sensual first kiss where Berry excuded the sultriness of a whore more than the awkward innocence of a teenage girl experimenting with her blossoming feelings of sexual awakening and kissing her first boy. I chalked it up to the oversexualized Hollywood culture and gave the creators credit for more or less sticking to the story. Howver, I couldn't get beyond when Janie and Joe's first night in Eatonville where, in bed, Janie whispered to Joe about how he could become mayor and make the town something big. Apparently, the thoughts and lines Hurston gave to Janie were not up to par for modern women, so the writers gave her Joe's self-aggrendizing lines. Essentially, Berry's character emerged as the opposite imposter of the real Janie, who didn't care about such things as power and posturing the antics of whites. She just wanted a lovely, quiet life where she could be herself, where she would expeirence pure love like the peach tree mating with the honey bee (my students loved the peach tree metaphor, even if that is the only thing any of them read in the book), and she could live a dignified life as a black woman in America continuing the beauty of African-American culture without judgement. Apparently, Hurston's celebration of a black woman being herself and engaging in the enjoyment of storytelling, checkers, and music is not acceptable enough. Instead, Janie, in order to be a proper role model for modern African-American women, needs to be a calculating, ambitious, hyper-sexual woman. I knew the only thing left to look forward to in the movie was the dirty-dancing inspired scenes with Tea Cake. I did want to subject the images of heroism, love, and true beauty that Hurston painted with her words to be soiled by this shoddy and irresponsible representation of an artful expression of a too often misrepresented or underrepresented part of American culture.

In the end, the filmmakers ended up judging Janie as much as the women on the porch did when she returned to Eatonville in her overalls without Tea Cake. Only, rather than only imagining how fate would justify their own discomfort with Janie's self-assurance by bringing Janie down to their own level, these privileged modern women were actually able to bring this lesser woman into our fictional reality. I mourn the fact that there may be a generation that will now turn to this bastardized version of Hurston and think this is the radical outcome of one of the greatest writers of the Harlem Renaissance era.