The Help, a drama that takes place in early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, is yet another of Hollywood’s curiously tangled efforts to invite a paying audience to congratulate itself for not being racists.
Is it really that simple? Yes, it really is, and it’s easy to imagine left-wing black viewers reacting with a certain amount of astonishment as they realize that all of the travails of a group of black maids suffering from prejudice in the Deep South are supposed to be balanced out by the fact that a cute white girl (Emma Stone) gets a book deal out of them.
Stone’s character, Skeeter, is a young newspaper columnist who writes up housekeeping tips which she borrows without credit from her helpful black domestic, Aibileen, who is played with quiet, suffering dignity by Viola Davis. The nanny who raised Skeeter, Constantine, has moved to Chicago under mysterious circumstances that Skeeter’s mom (Allison Janney) doesn’t want to discuss.
Meanwhile, a friend of Aibileen and fellow servant Minny (Octavia Spencer) confronts racism with a much less accepting style, earning herself considerable turmoil in the bargain. She is heading for a showdown with a racist friend of Skeeter’s, Hilly (played by Ron Howard’s elfin daughter Bryce Dallas Howard). Hilly’s main political issue is bathrooms: She doesn’t want “colored” people anywhere near any that might be used by a white person, and is horrified by white people who share their facilities with their help. Blacks, it appears to Hilly, carry different germs and should be made to use outhouses.
Within 20 minutes it is obvious that these characters are set up in a nice, reassuring quadrant pattern. On one side are whites, who are either racist or not; on the other side there are black people, who either choose to be submissive or rebellious in the face of segregation.
We know from history (not to mention Faulkner) that race in the South is much more complicated than this, though. Segregationist Strom Thurmond, for instance, secretly had a daughter with his teenaged black servant — and as an adult the daughter later declared, “I did love my father. He was very good to us.” And while only the characters stamped “racist” in fizzing neon are heard using racial slurs in The Help, the fact is what would now be considered shocking, racially-charged epithets were commonplace in the era. Would even a nice girl like Skeeter have used the N-word? She might have. But not in this movie, because that would challenge and confuse the audience, which the movie studio hopes will be filled with people like Skeeter who bought the bestselling novel on which The Help is based.
In Hollywood, a racism story should, for maximum commercial potential, be told primarily through the eyes of white people and must leave us with a warm feeling. However can this be accomplished given the grim history involved? One way is by having the black women agree to tell their stories to Skeeter, who then anonymously writes them up and publishes them, to great success, as an anthologized memoir. Hooray, the women have told their stories! Except they are still stuck with being humiliated on a daily basis. Only if you take an upper-middle-class women’s book club view of the world — an Oprah Winfrey view, if you will — can you possibly find much of a solace or a counterbalance to institutionalized racism in the idea of “telling your story.” The women aren’t even able to use their own names in the book. But Skeeter gives them each a nice tip for their troubles, so that is supposed to cheer us all up.
A second way the movie is meant to make us feel good about race involves what will shortly become one of the most infamous desserts in movie history. For something like 30 minutes of screen time, all anyone can talk about is that dessert, which involves a practical joke. But if you think for a moment about Jim Crow and the unthinking brutality of authority figures — a black woman being arrested is shown being beaten with a nightstick for trying to collect her purse before she is hauled off by cops– the joke doesn’t seem like much to laugh about. It’s there to let us off the hook, to distract us, to reduce the too-real racial conflicts of the Deep South to the level of the frivolous.
Though the movie is in part redeemed by its superb period sets and costumes — it’s a sort of Dixieland Mad Men — and terrific performances, particularly by the wily Spencer as the maid who fights back and Howard as her sweetly vicious employer, the movie is doomed by its format. The demands of the weepie chick flick simply don’t harmonize with the unbeautiful truths about racial injustice under Jim Crow.
Let’s see.
Nice White Lady Who Stands in for Audience? Check
Magical Negro(es) who impart their Timeless Wisdom? Check
Self-congratulatory for Tackling An Issue? Check
And I thought it was early for Oscar bait.
Brillently stated!
I took this woman a long time to get her tale published. I suspect it was sent back and forth until she got it right on the yankee view of southern discrimination. A good example is the concern over use of the toilet. I had “help”, they were family, in every way.
“Took a long time to get published” means nothing.
There is no sense – absolutely none – to what gets published and what gets rejected.
How do you think Random House got their name?
The process that publishers use to choose one manuscript over another is as silly as tossing chicken guts on a star chart.
“On one side are whites, who are either racist or not…”
i’d guess it is also easy to extrapolate the “tea party and ilk” versus the “enlightened/socially conscious” from their archetypes in the movie
Does reality ever enter into these discussions? We of a certain age all remember when the civil rights issue par excellence was housing discrimination. Whites tried to keep blacks from buying houses in their neighborhoods. This was obviously wrong because there was no valid reason for this prejudice. Of course, blacks living in your neighborhood would not lower the value of your home. Of course, there would be no increase in crime. Of course, the local schools would continue to be safe and effective. Only a racist could believe any of this. With housing restrictions abolished, whites predictably moved to the farthest suburbs they could find, with long commutes to work in the center city. As the housing in the old neighborhoods was destroyed and blacks moved to the suburbs, new, even farther-out suburbs were built for whites. Jobs began following their employees to the outer ring, leaving the center cities vacant and starved for tax revenues. The death spiral continues to this day, with Detroit as the inevitable end-stage. The question that ought to be asked at some point is, who was most correct in their predictions about the effects of ‘civil rights’ laws? Read the words of the golden-age George Wallace or Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and look around. Who had it right? Or are you still waiting for Hubert Humphrey to eat the 1964 Civil Rights Act (if it should ever result in reverse racial discrinmination/quotas)? I hope he has to munch on it every day in Hell.
I don’t mean to sound argumentative; however, some of your comments are inaccurate. Unfortunately, with the integration of communities, there was a downward spiral in thefts, murders, rapes, etc. There was a loss in home value. This is the reason why whites and upper-class minorities began moving out further – not because of someone’s “color.” What they had feared – happened.
As each area became less segregated, the neighborhoods reflected the groups that lived there. Neighborhoods that were mainly black, became ghettos with high levels of violence, theft, drugs, etc. You can’t blame this on being poor, because poor white/Hispanic/Italian/Polish/Jewish neighborhoods did not fall into ruins in the same way. This is historically accurate information that has been documented – through reports, records, photos, etc.
Does this mean blacks couldn’t maintain their neighborhoods? Certainly not! It means that their leaders had CREATED a culture that embraced low expectations like a badge of honor. “See, I’m black and it’s because of whites that my building is rat infested, graffiti ridden, filthy and overrun by drugs and violence.”
Instead of setting high expectations for themselves and their children, the blame game allowed many of them to wallow in self-pity and excuses for their environment. Poor does NOT equal filth or drugs or violence. Because some blacks allowed this to become so pervasive in their neighborhoods, it created a fear of these neighborhoods.
A good example of how higher/lower expectations create our immediate environment is to look at poor whites that live in-town vs. less populated areas. Many times there is a stark difference in how they live. Those in-town live under expectations from their neighbors, cities, HOA’s, etc., so their houses reflect that. They may not be perfect, but they are not eyesores or full of drugs and violence because the neighborhood does not accept such behavior.
In contract, look at poor whites that live in unpopulated, unregulated areas. Here we often see the same lack of care, cleanliness, healthy living as that of black neighborhoods. There are no expectations, no neighborhoods, no regulations that are implemented. They are forgotten and no one cares how they live.
The point is, that no matter the culture or race, it is the expectations we place on ourselves and our peers/neighbors/family that determines how we live, no matter our economic reality.
I’m sorry, but jobs don’t chase employees, but the other way around.
Any group of people moving away from jobs will not cause jobs to move with them. That just doesn’t make sense.
The jobs leave and people chase them. Read Sewell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies.
Vacuuming for Miss Daisey.
The book was good.
When attending a movie (that isn’t a documentary except something made by Mickey Moore) I make it a priority to suspend belief. As far as I know the movie was made from a book of fiction and no one has made any claims that it is, in fact, based on any specific or general events.
IT’S A STORY.
Just like Lord of the Rings
Pretty Woman
The Importance of Being Ernest
The Manchurian Candidate
and Carrie
Was the story enjoyable, did you laugh, cry, gnash your teeth? Were the performances good, bad, indifferent?
When I go the the movies I seek a few hours entertainment. If I want a lecture on racism in the 1960′s I’ll take a class at the local community college.
I also never expect Hollywood to tell the truth about anything. Just sayin’.
Good old Hollywood. This is the kind of movie you’d want to like, if it got anything important right. I was mildly interested until I inspected the trailer closely, and realized I couldn’t endure 90 minutes (or whatever it is) of wrong, non-period make-up and Suthun Gals flouncing around being screechy or vaguely hysterical, as if that was ops normal 24/7 for a woman who had the bad taste to hire domestic help.
Hollywood (almost) NEVER gets the make-up right. It has a lot of trouble with the hair, too. You can pin down the production date of virtually any period flick by the hair and make-up on the women. (Some exceptions: Mermaids, Now and Then, What’s Love Got to Do With It? — the latter is a masterpiece of period grooming.)
But good stories aren’t political morality plays. They’re about human motivations and the human heart. A wonderful story to tell would be that of a black household helper who lived with transcendent dignity because of who SHE was — probably a pillar of her church, a woman whose children and grandchildren, friends and relatives blessed her. How about the stories of children with black nannies whom they loved with all their heart and depended on? Or stories like those from Florence King’s childhood. She writes about the maid who came to clean their house, and how the maid got about an hour’s work done, and then Grandma told her, “You come sit down and have some ice tea and tell me what’s been going on,” and they’d knit and laugh raucously and tell stories the rest of the day. Or depict a life like that of Condoleezza Rice’s parents, with their background and accomplishments in an era when that made them different from so many of their racial fellows. Show their lives as they lived them, in the fullness of long days spent in work and thought and love and aspiration and joy, and not just as a series of encounters with white people.
Then, having shown the folks on both sides of the color divide to be human beings, and not just cut-outs from a Political Paper Doll set; having shown the richness and humanity of life, with all its warts and its goods and bads; then — and only then — bring in the jarring, unwelcome dissonance of public segregation.
If you want an audience to shake its head and think, “How could we be so stupid?” you have to give them a reason that resonates in the heart. Ideological indignation doesn’t fill the bill.