celebrity gossip, academic style

This is a blog in two parts. The first part deals with the problems. The second deals with the (relatively) promising.

So let’s start here: this story is a problem. I’m not going to use the word “problematic” because it’s a grad student word that makes people roll their eyes. But shit this story is a PROBLEM. I read the book earlier this year at the prompting of several people, and for all of its feel-good-ness, it remains a problem. I could lay out all the reasons here, but I would not do it nearly as incisively or eloquently as those who have gone before me. To start:

*A fantastic write-up on the problems of the book alone.

*The official statement and condemnation from the Association of Black Historians, along with suggestions for reading that will help contextualized/correct understandings of what it was like to be a female domestic in the South in the ’60s.

And on the film:
*The most incisive review of the film I’ve read thus far.
*And a brilliant flow chart on which film (including The Help) will best help white viewers alleviate their white guilt.

(My huge thanks to Kristen Warner for directing me to all of these).

To summarize: the book uses a white woman to tell black women’s stories; the book uses dialect for the black women but not for the white women; the book (and film) make the villains SO INCREDIBLY VILLAINOUS that it’s difficult for anyone to see any of themselves in the characters who are clearly racist.

The book is also a piece of fiction — and this is what I feel like no one is talking about. It did not happen because in all probability there is no way that it could have happened. Most crucially, a character as altruistic and likable as Skeeter could not have happened. It’s not that I don’t like her, but she’s not a real person from the South — she’s from a fairytale.

Racism isn’t something that you just decide you’re not going to acquire, even though all of your friends, family, and townspeople espouse it. It’s not something that goes away just because you love your maid, as evidenced by the vast majority of white women raised by maids who also grew up to be racist. The story is fiction, but it told in a way — interwoven with real life events of the civil rights movement — that encourages audiences to believe that it could have happened, or maybe even did happen. (Classic Hollywood Cinema, a style in which this film is made, aspires to mimesis, or recreating “real life” conditions as closely as possible — and thus encouraging audiences to “lose themselves” in the reality of the situation. The problem, of course, is that this was not a real life situation, but one imagined and marketed towards 21st century audiences who want to distance themselves from the atrocities of the 1960s).

Which brings me to my overarching issue with the book and film. Both portray the situation in 1960s Mississippi as horrible. Atrocious. Racist. No question. But the book (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the film) also posit this historical period as an “unfortunate” time in our past that we have grown past. And that’s what makes this text a problem: framing racism was something that happened in the past, but not today, because events like the (made-up) ones that occurred in this text helped eliminate it.

In these texts, racism is not a systemic and institutionalized problem, but something that takes place between individuals. This set-up suggest that if you, yourself, are not a racist, are not like the villain in this movie, then you’re doing your part to stop racism. Like other films that make white people feel good about the current state of race relations in this country (Crash, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, The Blind Side, the list goes on), the framing of racism as a problem on the individual level makes it easier to dismiss projects like Affirmative Action meant to counteract the very real systematic racism that manifests within contemporary American society.

Case in point: at the end of the film, one of the main black maids is fired from her job, and decides that she will leave her life as a maid and become a writer, having tested her mettle for the collection of stories published as The Help within the context of the film. But the film doesn’t account for how incredibly difficult it would have been for a black woman from Jackson to have her writing published, or even really gesture towards the fact that the only reason these women’s stories were told in the first place was because a white woman talked to another white woman in New York City. The movie ends on a seemingly positive note — one meant to make audiences go home thinking “That Abilene, she’ll do something with her life, she’s free!” — that ignores the material realities of a single, middle-aged, unemployed black woman’s life in the 1960s in Mississippi.

So. All that said. I was really, really expecting this movie to be sappy, saccharine, and extremely offensive in its subliminal racism. I was expecting it to be Freedom Writers. I was expecting to feel embarrassed for my girl Emma Stone for appearing in it.

But here’s the thing: the film is not the atrocity that it could be. That’s not to say that it’s not still a problem — it is — but it is not a bad film. While the narrative proper still has issues, I was somewhat astounded by how the actors in this movie essentially took an original text pained in bold, reductive strokes and injected it with verve and nuance. This is even more unexpected given that the film was released by Touchstone (owned by Disney) and produced by Chris Columbus (amongst others), a.k.a. the people who brought you Remember the Titans and the two lifeless Harry Potter movies. The director and screenwriter had never worked on a big Hollywood film. This film could have been SO. BAD.

But like David Poland from Movie City News, I think that the performances from Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Jessica Chastain are all pretty astounding. Even Howard playing the villain — Poland’s right; she does something a bit more complicated with it than meets the eye. And he’s spot with the comparison of Chastain’s year with Rachel McAdam’s breakthrough year. (It’s really a great read on the industrial realities — I highly recommend his follow up post as well, even if I don’t agree with it entirely). I also love what Allison Janney does with her role, which could have been much, much more of a caricature. (The bit on “courage skipping a generation” is not in the book). Plus True Blood‘s Layfayette (Nelsan Ellis) gets a three-line role, which I so enjoyed, if only to see him dressed the exact opposite of Layfayette.

(But here’s the thing, as pointed out by my friend Kristen and many others — these are some of the *only* mainstream roles for women as talented as Davis, Spencer, and Ellis. To be considered for an Oscar, they have to play asexual and and historically rooted in films directed by and marketed to white audiences.)

In addition to the performances, the film also shifts significantly away from Skeeter and her problems, including her dying mother and love life. Not only does this provide more room to focus on the lives of true hero/victims of the film, but also makes it seem like less of a melodramatic contrivance. Indeed, the feminist in me really loves the fact that Skeeter’s romance feels tacked on — this guy is so tangental to her life, she really doesn’t even mourn him when he decides that she shouldn’t be writing such things. He seriously has like four scenes in the whole film, which is pretty awesomely dismissive.

Some of the critiques of the film speak to the fact that the men in the film (especially the black men in the film, apart from Ellis’s character and a minister) are predominantly absent, or portrayed as deadbeats off-screen. I agree that this is a problem, especially since black men have been symbolically annihilated from so much of our nation’s social and cultural history. But I do love that this film passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors: women appear in scenes with other women NOT TALKING ABOUT MEN all the time.

I mean, this is clearly a women’s film. There are several moments calculated to make you — especially if you are a woman, and have ever babysat, or have ever had frenimies, or have ever had a mother who you loved/despised/came around to understand — cry. And so I did. I’m pretty sure I shed actual tears at six different points.

But does that make it good? I divide movie-crying into two separate categories: the first is from something that evokes some sort of incredibly evocative sensation of something real and tragic. A story that seems real because the film, both narratively and aesthetically, has done the necessary labor to feel emotionally invested in the characters and what happens to them. I put the crying that I do at Terrence Malick films, the crying that I did earlier this summer at Beginners, the crying that I do at Moulin Rouge, the crying that I did at Brokeback Mountain in these categories.

Then there’s crying that I do because I have been manipulated into investing in an unrealistic, hyper-melodramatic story. I feel this way about the way I cry in every Nicholas Sparks adaption (including The Notebook, because the McGosling storyline doesn’t make me cry; it’s the old people dying in bed storyline that makes me cry, and not because of the McGosling back story but because they’re old and “go away together,” which is totally cheap and unfair but damn if I’m not sobbing). This is “being taken advantage of” crying.

I’m pretty sure The Help took advantage of me. Sure, there were parts of the film that evoked my own real life experience as a full-time nanny of other women’s children. But then again, as a white, educated woman, I never had to deal with the Microsoft mothers who employed me accusing me of stealing the silver or telling me that I couldn’t use their bathrooms. So that’s a case of false identification: I cry because the movie encourages me to identify with the maid’s pain, when, in reality, I know nothing of the complexities of her situation, which include (as one of the above blog posts points out) much more complex emotions towards a white child that will most likely grow up to treat her just the same way that her racist mother does.

I’m also wary of my own tears, because crying — and the catharsis it offers — makes us feel as if afterwards, things are better. Both within and outside of the narrative. That hard/sad thing was tough, but now it’s over, and we can move on. And the neat way the film wraps up every story line only encourages that belief. This film doesn’t make me want to make sure that no vestige of this sort of discrimination, racism, and generalized hatred exists today; it makes feel like I can walk away from the movie theater thankful that that chapter in our nation’s history is closed.

So where does this leave us? In some ways, I do think that films like this are important if only to get readers, audiences, and bloggers talking. I wouldn’t have posted on race today if not for this film, and even bad films can start good conversations. I also like the few gestures towards a slightly more holistic view (again, in comparison to the book) of the discrepancies between the material living conditions of the white characters in this film (plantations; feeling sad over scratches in expensive oak tables) and those of the black characters (four children to a bed). More could have been done to address the class issues between whites (which are dealt with more extensively in the book) and how difference, in whatever form (curly hair, white “trash,” smart woman), is treated as a problem to be solved or ignored.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that mainstream Hollywood (and mainstream publishing, for that matter) and mainstream (read: white) audiences have always responded to these types of narratives, in part because they make us feel like the bad parts of our society and ourselves were historical, not contemporary. They’re feel-good the same way that so much of mainstream pop culture is feel good. But like so much feel-good material, the way it produces that feeling is by eliding what makes life so often feel so bad, whether that’s the persistence of class, racial, or gender divisions. I know that entertainment is our way of escaping those problems, but that’s a bull-shit excuse. The more we try to escape them — including by going to films that encourage us to believe that those problems have been overcome — the more they will persist.