Textual Analysis Of The Movie Precious

The film Precious depicts a powerful story about the road to resilience. The film tells a story about a black, obese and illiterate teenager named Precious that lives in a run-down community. In the film, Precious is a victim of many violations from the people around her such as rape, domestic violence, mental abuse that generates a detachment of her personality. This discouragement leads to Precious suffering from depression and low self-esteem, to which she never thinks she will be capable to develop a proper life for herself away from her hostile environment. However, as the movie progresses, Precious progresses too and starts to develop a better support system and begins to find confidence in herself. This film will be applied to Carl Roger’s

Thus, Roger’s conceptualises an actualising tendency, which is a motivational effort that manifests growth and autonomy (Rogers, 1959). Furthermore, individuals seek positive self-regard to develop a positive self-esteem (Boeree, 1998). The theory encourages self-regulation where a person is in control of his or her advancement and not by any external forces that could possibly lead the individual off-track (Nelson-Jones, 2000). Thus, the actualising tendency involves an individual’s total experiences that are congruent of their reality to which those experiences are satisfied and pursued without impediment. If the experiences represent a full perception of reality, then a person has mostly encountered an unconditional positive regard from others as a means of acceptance even with indifferences (Chang, 1991). Thus, the real self is formed and brings about an autonomous, fully functioning person where the actualising tendency becomes unified. However, if experiences represent a warped perception of reality, a person encounters conditional positive regard creating a detachment of the self (Rogers, 1959). Thus, a fake-self is formed that serves to satisfy everyone else but the self and this representation interferes with the actualising tendency. Essentially, the actualising tendency will gradually grow incongruent of the individual’s experiences and become unsatisfying (Nelson-Jones,

Precious’ personality is aggressive, pessimistic and impulsive that is a result of physical abuse from her father, mental and verbal abuse from her mother and public abuse from society because she is overweight, illiterate and black (Taylor, 2014). Furthermore, the film depicts Precious’ environment as conditional because she is a victim of abuse, racial oppression, illiteracy and obesity to which she receives a lot of discouragement about her self-concept and considers herself underserving of love. Her mother, Mary clearly marginalises Precious because she constantly criticises her that nobody needs or wants her and implies that Precious is stupid and will never be educated ( Precious, 2010). Her mother’s verbal abuse especially causes Precious to generate a detachment of her real self-concept thus, Precious avoids her actual self-experiences and rather meets up to the expectations of her, set by the external world. Furthermore, Precious is evaluating herself through what Roger’s called the conditions of worth (Rogers, 1959). Conditions of worth are merely when a person is only rewarded if they meet up to the expectations set by the environment rather than actualising their own potentials (Boeree, 1998). This is seen with Precious because she is always trying to meet the demands of her mother. For