I saw a surprisingly good Hollywood movie last week, unexpected because black working women are rarely at the center of a mainstream film.
There were some well known aging actors as well, and that alone is unusual for Hollywood and its youth obsession.
The Help, based on the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett, is a story about a young white woman who writes a book based on stories she is told by black maids working in the South in the 1960s.
There it is -- the hard-labored life of black mothers in 1963, women squeezed between the violent caprices of white Mississippi society and the dangerous rise of the civil rights movement. Set in Jackson, Miss., the film's tableaus of domestic workers struggling to get along with the daily tensions of the Jim Crow South churn around news of the growing civil rights struggle and reach a fevered pitch with the assassination in Jackson of black leader Medger Evers.
So, for those who care about social justice, what's not to like?
The N-Word and Fried Chicken
Two criticisms I've seen of The Help are the use of the N-word -- and the stereotype some have tasted in the fried chicken of Minny Jackson, played brilliantly by Olivia Spencer.
Not only does The Help not shy from that history, but the assassination of civil rights Evers in Jackson in June 1963 is not mere background for the film. Audiences see actual news footage of Evers stating his positions on living black-and-white television shortly before he was killed.
The night of his murder, Aibileen Clark (in a star turn by Viola Davis) is shown with another black commuter being ordered off the bus home, the driver calling them by the N-word, because something terrible has happened. Her fear of white brutality so palpitates her heart the she races home, stumbling hard along the way, to gather her children around in the safety of their small home.
Let me get personal for a moment. I was a civil rights worker, a rank-and-file grunt at age 20, in rural Louisiana. It was the summer of 1965, and I wasn't called a dirty "N-word lover." The "N-word" didn't enter our language then. And the full and real term was scary.
Anyone, black or white, hearing the word in The Help should find it disturbing -- that was how it was flung about by whites. And in that ugly environment, I did not hear many black people tossing it around to each other. Listen to it in The Help and get mad -- but at the culture that routinely demeaned black people -- not at the film, which aims to tell it like it was.
How it was, how institutionalized race-hatred soured everything, including the soft lives of the white middle class, is depicted well in The Help. A good example of that is the Skeeter story line -- she is the young white woman at the center of the story. Her romance with a young man who wins her heart by calling her smart and encourages her to write what she believes in, ends when he dumps her -- fires her like an expendable housekeeper-- after learning that she is the author of a book telling the stories of the black maids.
The easy target of critics is the fried chicken. The accusation that some blacks in the film are stereotypical because they speak in dialect and take pride in their fried chicken simply doesn't hold up to an honest viewing of this movie.
As for the knee-jerk reactions about the fried chicken, my experience of the Deep South of the mid-1960s was that even among the bravest and most outspoken women I met in the movement, good food, and especially fried chicken, was a competitive sport. Every Sunday, our leader in New Roads, La., a woman named Tiny Hood, battered up fried chicken with a deep crunch and Louisiana tang I dream of almost a half-century later (and I can still taste her lemon ice-box pie).
Scaring Hollywood Away?
Some criticism of this film is legitimate. Most of the white women in the movie are two dimensional. One exception is the beautifully nuanced depiction of Celia Foote by Jessica Chastain, as the blonde who is shunned by a bevy of young housewives desperate to be part of the clique. And the weakest performance among an otherwise marvelous cast, is by Bryce Dallas Howard as the race-baiting and two-dimensionally callous Hilly.
However, the unwarranted attacks -- that is, those imposing racial preconceptions and discomfort apart from the film's own merits -- can only defeat the intentions of many race-mired critics. How many more films exploring American racism will Hollywood produce in light of the current racial second-guessing? Hollywood will run scared. And potential roles for these or other black actors in midlife or older will remain as scarce as ever.
In the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Farber called for better support for socially relevant middle-brow films. He chided younger critics "desperate to prove they're hip, and so they champion esoteric, highbrow movies."
Farber, a film critic for the Hollywood Reporter, stressed that "unlike the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, specialized films depend on critical endorsements, and these movies are hurt by wan or downright hostile reviews."
I'd love to see film dramas depicting people like the courageous African Americans I met almost 50 years ago, the brave and brilliant and the misfits and nonconformists, who gave backbone and staying power to the movement. I'd like to see scripts showing frightened local leaders of the black middle class who frowned at the "communists" they feared would rock the boat and bring their communities disaster. And no film that I've seen has shown how well-armed local blacks quietly kept racist onslaughts at bay against civil rights workers needing to remain nonviolent and unarmed.
But attacking a worthy film that does not get into these depths won't help the filmic cause of social justice, and won't give courage to the cowardly lions of Hollywood to finance and cast those stories to a theater near you.
I'm tempted to quip, "Give The Help a hand." But the film stands on its own merits, and is the #2 film in the country right now. To me, The Help is an occasion to call for more open and in-depth depiction of race, rancor and resilience in America on its silver screens, if only Americans will give it a chance.
This post has been modified since its original publication.
Holly Palance: Growing Up With The Help: Esmus
1. People getting weird about Fried chicken need to realize that not only was it a staple of southern cooking back then, but that many places wouldn't serve blacks, and Fried Chicken was something you could carry with you that would not go bad. It isn't something made up, it is something small that signifies some major major racism going on.
Also, your comment of "And the weakest performance among an otherwise marvelous cast, is by Bryce Dallas Howard as the race-baiting and two-dimensionally callous Hilly."
I've couldn't understand all these people coming out when this actress first showed up going out of their way to talk about how amazing she was and how stunning her performances were etc... Then of course I find out she is Ron howards daughter and it makes sense. All his friends in the business are of course going to support his daughter. I just never saw any performances from her that were worth her getting paid.
... let's look back ... Will Smith, postapocalyptic survivor and his dog ... Denzel Washington, postapocalyptic survivor and his braille Bible ... no heroic Black women ... Tyler Perry's last movie ... didn't see it, never will ... but did he where a dress in it ... Martin Lawrence ... did he wear a dress in it ... now they give us "The Help" ... where the women are strong in everyway, raising two households, and the Black men die ... now that's uplifting fare ... is this what you're really arguring for ... enough with the Mammy flicks ... but this is apparently what Hollywood is comfortable putting out and has been ... let me repeat what I wrote decades ago concerning a movie that Hollywood talked up to women (The Color Purple), but in our living rooms divided the family ... I'll never see this movie, not just because of the stereotyped characters, but because all I see is it breaking up relationships for no good reason ... over a movie ... this sort of thing doesn't happen by accident, over and over again ... Hollywood knows what it's doing ... studios and producers regularly reject screenplays from black writers that are uplifting in a postiive way ... so please, by all means let Hollywood run scared ...
For those of you who want an education as to why people (white and black, since I'm white) object to the book and also the movie, go to A Dissenting View of The Help on Amazon.
When my husband and I saw the previews of The Help, the shrieks and jumping and down with hysterical screaming turned off my husband (a retired judge with his share of civil rights work) from ever seeing it.
At least the film showed some footage of the terrible killing of Medgar Evers. The author incorrectly stated that he was "bludgeoned to death." For someone who is making up stories about maids without research and putting them into situation comedy, she should have least gotten her facts straight. One presumes that the paperback has corrected it.
Wendell Pierce,a respected AA actor for The Wire and Treme and for starting fresh food markets in "no man's land" areas in New Orleans, took his 80-year-old mother to The Help. He learned then she had once been "help." As white women around him were sniffling, he said his mother was "seething with rage" at how this subject was whitewashed and sugar coated for, yes, a "feel good movie." She lived it. She didn't like the movie. Is that unpatriotic?
Go to that Amazon site.to learn more than you already know.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/ten-black-films-never-be-released-theaters_n_929988.html#comments
Even with these high budget movies ..minorities are never the hero, we may be the assistant to the angelic white character that's the hero. Or we are mutants or half mutants. Hollywood loves to play us as addicts, craze, violent, thugs and just plain undesirable. It's like they're reciting that racist poem "The White man's Burden" in every movie. I'm really sick of it.
Every movie touch by Hollywod produces a white character as a savior.. the fixer. Every single movie.Come on.
But don't worry , they can't get enough of us entertaining them. As long as minorities continue protraying buffoonery in these so called comedies. We will always have an invite in Hollywood.
I was going to touch base on Hollywood love scenes, and their obvious fixation on blonde, fair skin being view as the most desirable species on this planet. But I'm hungry, and not for chicken. But If I was...I prefer bake chicken over fried!
Not "every single movie" that is a major exaggeration and you know it. I don't think I recall a white character as savior/fixer in Do the Right Thing nor in Precious (just the first two films that came to mind). You also know it is unfair in this instance to extrapolate from a film based on a book/quasi real story about a white woman who wrote stuff about black women. The film is about a white woman. It isn't trying to be a movie about black people overcoming whatever, it is a story about a white woman writing a book about black people. Complaining about a white person being a major protagonist in a film about a white person is about as sensible as complaining about all the white characters in a movie about the writing of Uncle Toms Cabin.
I'm interested in learning more about this.
"I'd like to see scripts showing frightened local leaders of the black middle class who frowned at the "communists" they feared would rock the boat and bring their communities disaster."
Not to nitpick you to pieces, but to categorize these people as "frightened" may be simplistic.
A lot of the black middle class were educators or business owners and the product of segregated education. They did not wish to use their children to forward the goal of integrated education. They had high standards and educated their own, in two parent homes and with parental involvement. I am the product of such people, and looking at the current state of education, I can't really fault them.
I, for one, would NEVER put an elementary school child in front of rabid racist adults just to integrate a school.
I know a woman who was used that way and she would wring spit out of her clothes every day. She is in her 60s and, knowing the effect this experience on her psyche, it was not worth it.
Are you kidding??? Those are the ONLY two criticisms you have heard? Well, you need to get out more! Maybe speak to more black folks who are understandably chagrined at the movie--here is a link to a statement by the Association of Black Women Historians--perhaps after reading it you will get it: http://www.abwh.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2:open-statement-the-help&catid=1:latest-news
An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help:
No thank you. I'd choose NOTHING over Hollywood propaganda any day of the week.
I love Viola Davis; god knows I do. But I'll kill myself DEAD before I'd ever see THE HELP.
The Jedi Mindtrick of addressing race relations in the psychologically "safe" terms and ways that avoids the real animus and inherent disregard of other humans as displayed by this movie's dubious origins is what's really going on. And dressing it up as "entertainment" and demeaning those who criticize it for the disingenuous carp that it is. . . is laughable, but predictable. Which only furthers the need for stories portraying the humanity of minority characters through the eyes of the people living that experience unmolested by the white self-centered imaginations passed off as fact or reality.
It also opened the eyes of a few who may not have been aware of the situation in the South during that period (1963). Read Eudora Welty's short story, "Where is the Voice Coming From" for the darvker vision of the period you crave, if you must... if you can get over a white woman entering the mind of the killer of Medgar Evers.
This is entertainment, though. The actresses who play the black maids are proud of their work. If you don't like it, don't go.
Re: the "condescending vernacular", when I was growing up in Minnesota, we had a woman from Mississippi who came to clean once a week to pay off her medical bill to my Dad. She was not educated, but honest and kind and though my 8-year old mind was repulsed at first by the strange way she spoke, I gradually got used to it and even started to enjoy the odd cadence and expressions she used.
It was identical to the dialect spoken in the film, and the actresses did a masterful job of imitating it. The fact that you find it demeaning says more about you.
That is how they spoke at the time.
On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism. This is what happens when you put substance over monetary gain.
Hypocrite.
My initial point was the author of this piece and people like you can't defend this film on it's merits. So you've moved on to using the black actresses as shields against criticism which only protects projections of social superiority the film confirms for the majority.
I enjoyed it.
It is just as bigoted to judge all white people as being exactly the same as it is to judge all blacks, or any other race that way. I think the author of this book did the best she could to bridge the gap between black women and white women, and it's a shame so many people, especially Melissa Harris-Perry, took that and made it ugly. I am usually a fan of hers, but I think she is very wrong about this movie. It's a movie, a fictional story, not a civil rights documentary! It handles a very touchy subject with love and humor. What's wrong with that?
Those who seem to applaud are the younger generation who have no historical context for what they are viewing.