On Pop Feminist I poach the terrain of pop history, claiming a booty of heretofore discarded artifacts, doing my part to put flesh on the bones of an impoverished feminist aesthetic. Now and then I may jump through a few hoops to sell my readings of popular culture to my readership, but occasionally I have the pleasure of highlighting feminisms that are wonderfully self-evident.
Prince’s Purple Rain is one such artifact. Both the film and the album are unambiguously feminist.
In the film, Prince plays the lead of a locally popular band (poignantly named The Family), when he encounters the aspiring singer Apallonia, with whom he instantly falls in love. There is a dual dramatic arc in Purple Rain, one of the tortured love between Prince and Apallonia and one of Prince’s struggle to retain artistic integrity in a sales driven music industry.
Though Prince loves Apallonia, he struggles with his own tormented past, having grown up in a household of domestic abuse where he witnesses his tyrannical father beating his mother daily. The conditioning of naturalized male authority Prince undergoes in his household leaves him unable to express his love to Apallonia without violence. He is undermined throughout the film by his own destructive displays of masculinity and is trapped within a dark patriarchal narrative as expressed by the great track “When Doves Cry”.
Meanwhile, the two female members of “The Family” (guitarist Lisa, and keyboardist Wendy) want Prince to listen to the music they wrote; a request cruelly dismissed by Prince without a moment’s consideration. Though he is losing coherency as an artist, characterized by increasingly misogynistic tracks (“Darling Nikki”), he is unwilling to consider the women in The Family as his artistic equal.
Further, Prince’s guitar is fashioned clearly as a symbol of the phallus (in one scene a female band member pretends to give it fellatio on stage). Apallonia purchases Prince the guitar/phallus of his dreams, and in exchange Prince presents her with a ring (a hoop earring in his case) as a traditional symbol of heterosexual union. However, when Apallonia discovers that Prince expects her submission in service of their monogamy, she tears the ring off and throws it at his feet.
Distraught, Prince returns home only to discover his father has attempted suicide—an act Prince too entertains as the only possible outcome of his father’s patriarchal pattern.
It is this dilemma which finally inspires Prince to seriously listen to the music of the women in The Family and has an epiphany through feminine art.
The song they wrote, which Prince performs on stage for the crucial moment of his artistic career is “Purple Rain”.
Prince – Purple Rain – MyVideo
Prince sings,
“I only wanted 2 see u bathing in the purple rain
I never wanted 2 be your weekend lover
I only wanted 2 be some kind of friend
Baby I could never steal u from another
Its such a shame our friendship had 2 end”
The song is a release of sexual and jealous claims on women, instead urging a cleansing to take place in the “purple rain”, an experience offered from a man to a woman as a friend—an equal.
“Purple Rain” reduces the audience to tears, and Prince breaks free from his torturous struggles within masculinity by finally discarding the guitar/phallus and launches into the jubilant “I Would Die 4 U”, which opens with the stanza,
“I’m not a woman
I’m not a man
I am something that you’ll never understand”
Prince sheds the chains of gender and is finally free from the narrative of his parents, to forge a new path in solidarity with women.
His band “The Family” is also called “The Revolution”.
For those who have seen Purple Rain, or plan to, I’d like to know your reading of the very last scene in the film…you’ll know the moment I’m interested in if you see it.
This film belongs in the cannon of feminist cinema. I’m starting the campaign now.
Next Waving 
12 comments
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September 1, 2008 at 8:28 am
Zenobia
I haven’t seen the movie, but the album along with Sign O’ The Times is one of my favourite ever. And I love what he does with relationships in his songs, they’re always so complex, like in If I was Your Girlfriend, when he wants a completely chaste relationship with some girl, and he’s imagining it, and it works out until they’re having a bath together. Awesome, no one does that kind of thing like Prince.
September 1, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Cara
Did you see the analysis of Prince that appeared in Bitch I think two issues ago? You’d probably be interested. But interestingly enough, they argued that this film was not one of Prince’s feminist moments.
I’ve never seen the movie, so I’m hardly a judge. But from your synopisis, it seems to me that what we have here is yet another case of violence against women used in the service of helping a man to “grow” — with the woman against whom the violence is committed getting nothing in return and being expected to take it for the sake of that man’s salvation. Which is anything but feminist. (I also have a problem with this sentence on its merits: “The conditioning of naturalized male authority Prince undergoes in his household leaves him unable to express his love to Apallonia without violence.” Violence isn’t an expression of love, it’s an expression of contempt and control. Whether you meant it that way or not, I think the sentence suggests the further far more than the latter.) But again, I haven’t actually seen the film, so I could be wrong.
September 1, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Pop Feminist
Cara-
I wasn’t implying violence is an expression of love–I’m saying the he can’t express love without also exerting violence which (of course) undermines his feelings for Apallonia. I may have worded that awkwardly, but I hope you’re certain that I would not consider abuse against a woman as an act of love!
I read the article in [i]Bitch[/i]. They describe[i] Purple Rain [/i]as “blatantly misogynistic”, and yet the only scenes cited are those acts perpetrated by the villain Morris Day, and the obviously negative moments for Prince’s character. While this article is otherwise overwhelmingly pro-Prince, I’m generally annoyed how often Bitch Magazine focuses on the negatives in popular culture and condemns almost everything that isn’t completely politically literal.
Your right: the Apallonia character is objectified and is the sacrificial pawn in Prince’s journey towards self-actualization. Every character, men and women alike serve Prince’s vanity project as merely vehicles for his ultimate pro-feminist epiphany, which could be interpreted as the ends not justifying the means.
There are a ton of scenes in [i]Purple Rain[/i] that I could piece together in an anti-feminist narrative with here. Laura Mulvey makes the case in her seminal text that if any film produces visual pleasure in the audience it’s [i]necessarily[/i] anti-feminist. Therefore, even films that try to be pro-woman are in fact working against feminist aims by the fact of narrative.
No film, and certainly not [i]Purple Rain[/i], is exempt from the inevitability of its reinforcement of patriarchy. So, the options are then to either dismiss film as a medium in the name of feminism– which many are willing to do, produce Avante Garde feminist cinema and leave the mainstream alone to shape the minds of the majority of the world’s audience, or find alternative readings in great films to reshape its significance for feminist aims (I’ll write more on the process of doing so in a future post).
For those films (and other popular texts) that are open to reinterpretation, I will always choose option 3.
Prince’s entire career is politically varied and rich, and I feel it’s a great mistake to discard the entirety of him or [i]Purple Rain [/i]for failings, when there is so much material he provides us with to fashion an narrative of feminist resistance.
[i]Purple Rain[/i] makes that easy to do.
The Bitch article ends by saying “Prince will never be canonized as a feminist saint” for occasionally opening himself up to anti-feminist readings—which is too bad, because any worthy pop artist will offer themselves up as a broad and ambiguous text, thus disqualifying almost anyone other than, like, Melissa Ferrick and the Indigo Girls as canonized feminist artists.
Besides, bell hooks has always felt Prince was feminist claiming he was “the only man I would ever go on a date with.”
September 2, 2008 at 12:42 am
Cara
So, the options are then to either dismiss film as a medium in the name of feminism– which many are willing to do, produce Avante Garde feminist cinema and leave the mainstream alone to shape the minds of the majority of the world’s audience, or find alternative readings in great films to reshape its significance for feminist aims (I’ll write more on the process of doing so in a future post).
I’m interested in reading that post.
And you could always submit to Bitch yourself! I think your writing would be perfect . . .
September 2, 2008 at 8:47 am
Zenobia
I’m generally annoyed how often Bitch Magazine focuses on the negatives in popular culture and condemns almost everything that isn’t completely politically literal.
I haven’t read Bitch, but that’s one of my pet hates in feminism, mainly because it’s taking something from the outside, that doesn’t belong to you, that others have put time and effort into or have as a part of their culture, and going ‘not feminist enough, kill ’em centurion’. It’s kind of dismissive. Or my favourite, when feminists demonstrated against Death Proof last year, they were like ‘women have spoken, and they have spoken against this vile filth that glorifies violence against women!’. And like, most of the women I know are Tarantino fans on some level.
I think a lot of feminists seem to work from the fairly bourgeois assumption that pop culture is low culture anyway (god knows what passes for high culture, Harry Potter and vagina-shaped coffee mugs?), but really they vastly underestimate the importance of pop culture.
Also, I don’t want a revolution where I can’t dance to Prince, to paraphrase Emma Goldman – whose politics I find a little dodgy, whose motivations and ability for independent thought I find suspect, but whose spirit and sincerity are beyond a doubt.
September 3, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Winter
Laura Mulvey makes the case in her seminal text that if any film produces visual pleasure in the audience it’s [i]necessarily[/i] anti-feminist. Therefore, even films that try to be pro-woman are in fact working against feminist aims by the fact of narrative.
Ah, Laura Mulvey, the bane of lesbian and queer film criticism!
September 3, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Pop Feminist
zenobia-
Totally. Feminist theory is way too often applied with the grace and nuance of a bulldozer.
winter-
THANK YOU! I’m sorry, but the “male gaze” just isn’t sufficient critique. Still? Is that really all we have to say about Hitchcock?
*stabs self in eye*
perhaps I should submit to Bitch myself! Now there’s a thought…
September 5, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Transpontine
Purple Rain is a better film than Under the Cherry Moon, though the latter has a better soundrack – Parade is Prince’s best album in my opinion and therefore one of the best albums ever.
September 30, 2014 at 2:02 pm
Melaniecar
I’m a domestic violence social worker. I really liked your interpretation of Purple Rain, as some think it wasn’t an appropriate choice for a domestic violence PSA I made. Check it out here: http://youtu.be/o7daj86RQAE thanks again for your entry 🙂
April 24, 2016 at 1:55 am
Anonymous
The first thing I thought after viewing the film was that Purple Rain was about domestic violence. As a survivor it hit home.
May 27, 2016 at 9:55 pm
Anonymous
Violence against women is not a feminist value. I can only read your article as though it was written in complete sarcasm.
November 11, 2016 at 11:16 am
Anonymous
OMG we were totally prepared for a little misogyny when we went to see this film last night, but had to leave after about quarter of an hour. Sure, it might not be Prince’s character who throws that woman in a dumpster, but Prince’s character does force Apallonia into submission right from the start with the threat of driving off on his motorbike while she’s cold and wet in the middle of nowhere. This is supposedly just a “prank” but then he nudges the bike every time she tries to get on. She’s totally at his mercy and to me, this renders their first sex scene (which follows soon after) unfortunately coercive and gross.
From there, the film couldn’t really redeem itself for me and if Prince’s amazing “redemption” was to be that he uses the song his female bandmates wrote about solidarity with women for his own professional gain, then I’m a bit like, wow if this is feminism then we’re all doooooooomed.
And for the record, I’m not an academic, have no tertiary degree at all, I love pop culture but I’m just not ever gonna accept that that film, was a feminist one. It uses the degradation of women for entertainment and frankly, imho, should come with a content warning. For the woman getting abducted and thrown into the dumpster and then laughed at, alone.