PUT DIFFERENTLY AUGUST 17, 2011
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In the week since its release, The Help, a movie telling the story of a group of black maids in the South in the early 1960s, has been derided repeatedly in blog posts and reviews as a lazy collection of racist tropes, an irredeemable expression of naive bigotry. In an article in the New York Times, film critic Nelson George condemns the filmmakers for failing to properly “come to terms” with America’s racist past. In her review, the University of Georgia’s Valerie Boyd simply called The Help “a feel-good movie for a cowardly nation.”
But I suspect more than a few Americans—many of them black—are coming out of The Help asking their companions “Um, was that movie really racist?” The answer, simply, is no—and the absence of bigotry in the film ought to be apparent to anyone watching it with an open mind. Unfortunately, many people obviously aren’t.
But the ubiquity of the insults against The Help, despite its evident lack of racism, is itself instructive. All too often, charges of racism are the products not of reasoned analysis, but cognitive dissonance: an implacable pique at white America for never quite “owning” its racism, despite a lack of clarity as to just what this owning would entail.
It is a frame of mind that is the product of one of the glummest detours in black history. Just when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts gave thoughtful black people the grounds for a truly autonomous and positive racial self-image, identity politics and the hard-left turn in the world of letters taught instead that that there was a higher wisdom in hearkening ever back to despair. The second shoe having yet to drop, many blacks have been left with a self-conception that is perpetually incomplete—they are ever-questing, ever-owed, never truly whole. Told they were nothing for centuries, many black people are choosing to keep that legacy alive by assailing the depredations of an abstract and evil other, rather than adopt a more self-directed and positive self-image.
In media criticism, this world view manifests itself in the pedantic dismissal of nearly all commercially viable depictions of black people as stereotypes, insults, and other evasions of that eternally withheld “acknowledgment” of racism. Though it is presented as a form of pride, this studiously joyless way of taking in films and television is actually a lack of self-sufficiency and independence of mind. In that way, black pundits’ reflexively hostile take on The Help is a more articulate testament to the depredations of racism than anything in the movie itself.
LET’S REVIEW THE PLOT of this supposedly so benighted piece of work. Emma Stone’s Skeeter, fresh from college and seeking a writing career in contrast to her housewife friends, compiles an oral history book from her Mississippi town’s black maids, starting with one friend’s maid Aibileen (Viola Davis). Despite her employer’s pitiless treatment, including restricting her to a separate bathroom, Aibileen comes along only reluctantly, scarred by her son’s death from racist neglect after an accident and memories of violence inflicted after black people she knows even tried to vote. Even her fiery-tempered friend Minny comes along only with trepidation, meanwhile getting fired from her job for an especially colorful act of insubordination. Local NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers’ assassination, and a more local injustice sparked by Hilly Holbrook, an especially bigoted queen-bee friend of Skeeter’s, spur 31 more maids to come forward for the book. It’s a hit. It gets Skeeter a New York writing job she reluctantly leaves home to take, but leaves Aibileen jobless for contributing to it. Walking away from the employer’s house for the last time, she feels a certain freedom, but she has no job, and also despairs at abruptly leaving the white child who thought of her as her real mother.
This is a “feel-good movie for a cowardly nation”? How could it be that this film, hardly The Sorrow and the Pity but honest and thoroughly affecting, is being treated like a remake of Imitation of Life?
We must dismiss out of hand a discomfort with this sad period being “packaged” by Hollywood at all. The Help certainly includes swelling strings on the soundtrack, what Nelson George terms its “candy-coated cinematography,” and neatly intertwining stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Some might prefer a visually peculiar, spiritually ambiguous, narratively desultory art-house opus. But that film would be seen by only a few, which would contravene the imperative that America as a whole needs to see it to learn about its racist past.
Consider for a moment the opposite case: Say that Hollywood, with its fundamentally commercial orientation, decided not to touch topics as sensitive as the Civil Rights story. The very same critics would no doubt despair that, “Hollywood doesn’t want to address America’s racist past.” The critics who inveigh against The Help for its mass market appeal are being duplicitous. Long ago, black film and television historian Donald Bogle counseled that “black films can liberate audiences from illusions, black and white, and in so freeing can give all of us vision and truth.” That’s a very debatable proposition—but, in any case, it would require that this “responsibility” be exercised within realistic commercial parameters. To be liberated, the audience has to show up.
Within these commercial bounds, then, a major beef of the critics is that the film fails to, as Nelson George judges the issue, “come to terms” with America’s racist past. George dislikes that the film treats Medgar Evers’ murder as a background occurrence, impatient with the story’s dwelling on kitchens and living rooms. But writers have used interpersonal interactions to bring historical periods alive for a very long time now: Is George opposed to the genre of historical fiction? Surely not—but apparently the Civil Rights movement is an exception, incommensurate somehow with the “responsibility” Bogle referred to, perhaps.
But even here, would George allow even an Evers-centered version of The Help as having finally “come to terms” with racism, given that in his article he even feels that Spike Lee’s Malcolm X fell short of the task? And what, exactly, do we mean by “coming to terms”? We must know, if these critics’ complaints are to qualify as constructive counsel. The difficulty of conceiving an answer is indicative. It is not unreasonable to wonder if there is a plausible development in film that could ever qualify as having done the deed. Is complaint the goal itself?
Or take Valerie Boyd’s objection that “The movie never links [Evers’] assassins’ behavior to the relatively benign, comedic behavior of Hilly and her ilk.” Again, in terms of how a film is written and performed, just how would this “linking” be done effectively? Is a character supposed to give a speech about the nature of institutional racism, only to look like a pasted-in mouthpiece? “Coming to terms with racism” is today an almost musical phraseology in the guise of concrete suggestion, along the lines of claims that there is a “conversation” of unspecified format on race that America “never has,” as Attorney General Eric Holder referred to in 2009 and Boyd, predictably, references.
THAT THESE WRITERS are driven more by a frozen animus than a response to the film itself is especially clear in that they miss so much in the narrative that contradicts their analysis. George asks of films about black history, “Do the filmmakers put us inside the head of the black woman braving a gantlet of cheering whites to integrate a segregated school?” and proposes that “It is this nuanced humanity that this movement demands.”
Nuance, we suppose, such as when Aibileen, soberly describing what it’s like to raise other people’s children while your own are at home—or dead—recounts to Skeeter how another white toddler she all but raised asked why she was black and Aibileen jokingly said it was because she had drunk too much coffee. Davis imitates the toddler’s facial expression and drifts into laughter through near tears. It’s a heartbreaking passage, worthy of an Oscar alone. No “nuance” here?
“The sense of physical danger that hovered over the Civil Rights movement is largely absent,” George decides—of a film in which the police crack one maid over the head with a club so soundly that the audience I saw it with winced, and other black women make assorted references to beatings and burnings that have scared them into submission? The Help denies “the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice” in favor of cartoons, George says, about a film that includes a bus driver casually saying “a nigger got shot” to black riders, plus the scenes involving the separate toilets, and much else.
Boyd, meanwhile, misses that Abileen is paid for the book along with Skeeter; that, while Skeeter does not stand up and make a speech about the evils of bigotry, she is so disgusted with Hilly’s racism that the two are no longer friends by the middle of the film, at which point Skeeter embarrasses her publicly; and that the maids do not “inexplicably” consent to be interviewed about the hardships of their lives—they do so slowly and reluctantly, and always fearing for their lives.
One senses that for many, the sheer fact that the movie is about black maids prepared them to sharpen their pencils to decry dusted off Queenies and Beulahs, with the actual content of the movie of little interest. “The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy,” the Association of Black Women Historians complains, a judgment hard to imagine from people who have actually seen both The Help and Gone With the Wind.
CRITICS ALSO SEEM UNCOMFORTABLE with the fact that the film includes comedy. Non-black critics, too, are regularly exhibiting the same supposedly wise skepticism of such “hijinks;” the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis considers the occasional comedy scenes trivializing, as if in the old South blacks and whites spending most of their waking lives with one another interacted solely in chilly, guarded fashion. We like to imagine it that way, as it comforts us that we are aware of the injustice of racism. But to dismiss about ten total minutes of edgy antics involving Minny and about five more involving commodes and bad hair days as rendering the whole movie “about ironing out differences and letting go of the past and anger” is, ironically, a dehumanization of the black experience.
We dishonor black people of the past in assuming that they spent their entire lives fuming at the white man and suffering his abuse. As human beings with a survival instinct, they carved meaningful existences out of what they had been given. This included laughing and good times and, yes, some of it was between whites and blacks.
Laughing, good times, and love, too. The titillation aspect assures that we are regularly taught about the carnal part—Sally Hemmings and such. But maids who raise people’s children have always come to love them, and even Jim Crow could not stanch this fundamental aspect of human nature. It was once common in South Carolina and Georgia for white children to grow up speaking the maids’ “Geechee” dialect, so close was this kind of bond. Aibileen’s love for a little white girl seems to especially get under many critics’ skin: “The kind of ambiguity and complexity that a woman like Aibileen would have felt for that white child is too much for the filmmakers to handle,” Boyd complains. But it could be that it’s Boyd who doesn’t want to handle that a black maid could hate the racism of her society and yet love an innocent white child she spends six days a week one on one.
AT THE END of the day, it is hard to see what The Help’s creators could have done that would have passed muster. Those ever seeking for Hollywood to “come to terms” with black people have developed such an imposing battery of objection tropes over the past forty years that I suspect they would reject even Raisin in the Sun as a bag of stereotypes if it were new.
The Association of Black Women Historians, for example, has distributed a statement condemning the film for, among other things, not depicting white men sexually harassing their maids. But then if The Help had, say, Dennis Quaid as a white husband violating Aibileen, while later Minny’s daughter, starting out as a maid, underwent the same from, oh, let’s say Matthew McConnaughey, wouldn’t we be hearing that The Help is one more film soft-pedaling the strength of black women working hard to support their families, and instead depicting black women as vehicles for white male lust? That was the word on the street, recall, about Monster’s Ball with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton. Or, if Aibileen were shown writing the book herself, which various critics would prefer, wouldn’t it be time to gripe that it sugarcoated the remorseless limitations on advancement for poorly educated black women of the period?
Let’s try a version of The Help that might pass muster with its current critics. The maids would hold the white children at a polite arm’s length. Evers’ murder would be the dramatic focus. The white men behind it would be the main characters, while the maids’ women employers would be background figures. Also, to assuage a common strain in the criticisms, an obscure, very humble working-class black maid of modest education in 1963 would sense it plausible to pen a protest manuscript herself and send it to publishers, rather than rely on Skeeter to do the writing and submission.
To wit: The film that The Help should have been would be psychologically implausible, dramatically reductive, preachy, and not The Help at all. I cannot accept that this would be preferable for any reason to the solid, affecting Hollywood drama that I took in.
Of course, putting this burden on The Help might make a kind of sense if American society were actually as resistant to acknowledging racism as we are so often told. One might see the film as a precious opportunity to introduce a forgotten story, and understandably wince to see the focus on living rooms rather than streets, women in the afternoon rather than Klansmen at night, and sprinklings of harmony in a story that should be about gunshots and fire hoses.
But blissfully, time did not stop in 1963. Historians black and white churn out books and films on racism year round. There will soon be a black history museum in Washington, DC. There is a Black History Month. Mainstream media organs are assiduously devoted to coverage of the black experience: The New York Times is even disproportionately committed to covering white yuppies moving into poor black neighborhoods over countless other ethnic moving trends. Colleges and universities regularly have black studies programs and departments. Stories about racism against black people are prime fodder for the media. Socially, being accused of racism is almost as feared as being accused of pedophilia. Recently, for a while there were three Broadway productions exploring racism, past and present, running at the same time: Race, Memphis and The Scottsboro Boys. The first two were hits. The third was brought to the Great White Way despite not having been a hit Off-Broadway, and by white producers. All three will have long lives in productions around the country.
Post-racial America is not, but is this an America in denial about racism? Yet The Help’s critics seek a relentlessly glum, purse-lipped threnody of a film—perhaps shot in black and white?—monotonously instructing America in its moral inadequacy. Yet if Hollywood did produce a string of race-related narratives that 1) did not “feel good” 2) were judged as “coming to terms with racism” by our critics and 3) were somehow seen by more than seven people, the new word on the street would be that America’d better not think it’s off the hook just because of a few movies. This is not intellection; it is recreation.
More than a few black Americans harbor scars from the contemptuous treatment their grandparents endured from the likes of Hilly Holbrook. This is why it is perceptible that these critics are seeking The Help to heal not America, or black people in general, but themselves.
The Help’s director and producer Tate Taylor, white, grew up with a black maid. She’s still alive, and in the film as the first of the maids after Minny to testify for Skeeter. For the record, Tate brought her to the premiere of the film. She loved it.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic.
19 comments
"The Help" comes off as endorsing the historical view of blacks being delivered from Jim Crow by their white messiah (in this case, Skeeter); after all, it's the white messiah who takes the initiative in the film's liberation project, while the black maids play a reactive (though hardly insubstantial) role. "The Help" is far from the worst cinematic example, and the criticism is overblown, but it fails by still falling into the old narrative that JFK and LBJ "gave" blacks their rights (after an MLK speech, of course). There's no sense of civil rights as being something fought for by the large masses of African Americans, self-organized, self-mobilized in pursuit of their own emancipation.
- whyamihere
August 17, 2011 at 8:46am
JW - Thanks for your ringing defense of this movie, which I enjoyed immensely. In movies, as in other human activities, "the perfect is the enemy of the good". I consider it unfair to criticize a work for not depicting or focusing on something that was not its purpose. I'm sure I could enjoy and benefit from a movie centered on the murder of Medgar Evers, but that wasn't the subject matter of "The Help"; rather it was an allusion to establish context, one of many. The story arc borrows from the model of an exotic joining an indigenous group and fighting against an injustice or threat. We have seen this model in movies as disparate as "Dancing with Wolves" to "Avatar". This is not the only way change occurs, but speaking as a former Peace Corps Volunteer, it is surely one of the ways. I do not regard this as a valid criticism of "The Help". From this movie I learned many of the painful details and daily humiliations of a class of citizens, specific facts of which, had I not read the book, i would have been unaware. Plus I enjoyed the experience. All told, I definitely got my money's worth. As I did as well from JW's review.
- JackR
August 17, 2011 at 9:40am
Thanks, John, for responding to the nonsensical campaign of vitriol against this movie. It may not be great but it is a good film adaptation of a book that tried to show white and black interactions in a sensitive way. The murder of Medgar Evers is not the subject of the movie but it is a catalyst for the understandably reluctant maids to come forward. The final scene is so definitely not "feel-good" that I wonder whether critics as well as supporters have really digested it. For what it's worth, Viola Davis was reluctant to even read the book after she discovered the author was a white woman. But reading it changed her mind: http://www.movieline.com/2011/08/viola-davis-on-the-lingering-ghosts-of-americas-past-and-how-she-questioned---and-then-embraced---th.php
- wamba1
August 17, 2011 at 10:21am
Bravo to John McWhorter for a spirited and enlightened response to critics of The Help! As I watched and enjoyed this film, I also wondered whether I was being duped into consuming a fundamentally racist presentation. I think the only way one could make a good case for that is to recognize the old Hollywood trick of showing white folks serving as the brave saviors of suppressed blacks (see WhyamIhere). But that also tends to work...the film was no 2 at the box office! I also think that examining the Jim Crow period through the eyes of rich white women and their household help is an eye-opener for most audiences and a side of the story we seldom see. Maybe that is partly why the film has received a frosty reception...it didn't focus on the men at all, except for Medgar Evers.
- dromer
August 17, 2011 at 11:18am
As a biracial person (half African-American, half Caucasian), this is what I have a problem with: "Told they were nothing for centuries, many black people are choosing to keep that legacy alive by assailing the depredations of an abstract and evil other, rather than adopt a more self-directed and positive self-image." Yes, black people need to stop defining themselves in reaction to white racism, but that doesn't mean that racism no longer exists (and that people, black and white, cannot point it out). Furthermore, most of the reviews of The Help I've read argue that it slights the role of African-Americans in leading themselves out of oppression during the Civil Rights era. Stockett herself wrote the book to deal with her own feelings of guilt over failing to appreciate her family's black maid. Through Skeeter, the story's protagonist, she creates an alternate reality in which these African-American women all get to have their lives honored in a white woman's written account. That's a nice, feel-good story. But it sanitizes the fact that African-Americans had fought singularly for their own cultural voice for decades (Harlem Rennaissance, anyone?)--without the help of white people. Again, it is important that African-Americans begin to define themselves on their own terms--I agree. But I don't think "The Help" is the best place to begin that debate. Or that movement.
- maxhencke
August 17, 2011 at 1:06pm
Told they were nothing for centuries, many black people are choosing to keep that legacy alive by assailing the depredations of an abstract and evil other, rather than adopt a more self-directed and positive self-image. Ah yes, gotta watch out for those "many blacks" as though a handful of critics stand in for the entire black community. Well, here is one review I glanced upon: A fair-use sample of Harris-Perry’s twitter-criticisms of the film include: “Hard to tell whether it’s the representations of black women or of white women that’s most horrible” and “Thank God magical black women were available to teach white women how to raise their families and to write books!” Perry’s final verdict on the film: “The Help reduces sexism, systematic violent racism, and labor exploitation to a catfight that can be won by cunning and spunk.” I have not seen the movie nor do I care to so I really shouldn't comment on it, but outside of here I have not read any serious reviewer state it was an accurate depiction of the time or a compelling drama in its own right. This was not even a review as much as a criticism of other reviewers, which was of no help of all. Maybe JackR is right and it is a good movie, but calling people who viewed the movie as being trite and insignificant does not make them racists.
- blackton
August 17, 2011 at 1:11pm
I like the boldness of this piece, but it goes to far in defining the opposition as racist in the headline, especially when he provides much more nuance in the article. How about if JW takes his own advice and take the mindreading/accuations out of his criticism too. Let's just change the dialouge, move it forward. This is close, but also buys in to the tired dualities he's condemning.
- WandreyCer
August 17, 2011 at 3:39pm
"Harlem Renaissance, anyone?" The Harlem Renaissance was indeed a flowering of African-American literature, art, and intellectual exploration, but even its most central advocates (e.g. Alain Locke) never claimed that it happened "without the help of white people." From publishers through fellow creative types and academics to just friends, there were white people in the mix (Carl Van Vechten and Melville Herskovits were two significant figures).
- ironyroad
August 17, 2011 at 3:57pm
I often disagree with McWhorter about one thing or another but here I agree with most everything he says. Like JackR, I enjoyed the movie a lot and I give it a 7 and a bit out of 10. McWhorter does a first rate job of dismantling the misconceived criticisms of the movie for not being what it never intended to be. He also effectively asks the plain spoken question that gets behind ready to hand locutions like "coming to terms with," "coming to grips with" "owning" or "having a conversation about" racism and the racist past, the question being in essence what do these locutions concretely mean, what would have they have one, or this movie, do to realize their imperatives? McWhorter is also persuasive in arguing that it's inaccurate to call The Help a feel good movie (as such) for a cowardly nation. I would not go so far as him as to try to psychoanalyze the motives and needs of those critics, or some of them, knocking the movie: “More than a few black Americans harbor scars from the contemptuous treatment their grandparents endured from the likes of Hilly Holbrook. This is why it is perceptible that these critics are seeking The Help to heal not America, or black people in general, but themselves.” I prefer to think that these critics, or some of them, miss The Help's rather quiet power. And they miss seeing that the movie’s perspective of the maids and Skeeter who takes in their stories and befriends them and grows with them in their telling to her of their stories is a unique, illuminating and expansive vantage point from which to see race relations in Mississippi in the early sixties. Finally, I reject the argument that this movie simply fits into a narrative of black helplessness without a white savior. I think, rather, as noted, that this is movie about a young Mississippi fledging writer of a particular time, place and social context who is moved to the idea of seeing matters from the vantage point of "the help" and is about the women whose stories she hears and gives writerly form to as she and her interlocutors affect each other and grow through the experience.
- basman
August 17, 2011 at 5:22pm
p.s. I loved this: "The Help’s director and producer Tate Taylor, white, grew up with a black maid. She’s still alive, and in the film as the first of the maids after Minny to testify for Skeeter. For the record, Tate brought her to the premiere of the film. She loved it."
- basman
August 17, 2011 at 5:36pm
Can't add much to the comments of those who liked the movie. I thought it was a solid piece of storytelling. Curious to see what happens at Oscar time, as Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer were both pretty darn good. There is a tendency in a lot of historical "message" movies to concentrate on a single big event (like the assassination of Medgar Evers) and tell the stories of characters who surround that event from a variety of distances and angles. This movie takes that in reverse to a great extent as it concentrates on the effects of discrimination against a class of people in their everyday working lives. From my vantage point--and that is of a 58-year-old white male--it worked. That's not to say it worked for everyone, but I find the criticism to be talking "past" the focus of the film to some extent.
- Lundell
August 17, 2011 at 9:59pm
I saw the movie yesterday motivated in large part by this bit of a tempest. Good flicker. Once upon a Navy time some 40 years ago this naive white boy from the suburbs of St. Louis was introduced to a 'game' that the brothers (black members of the deck crew) would play. Their name for the game was 'Fuck With'. The stakes were personal dignity. The goal was cruel and brutal. One purposed to crush any self esteem their opponent might possibly harbor. There were no rules or limitations on the extents. Personal threats of physical injury and various degrees of follow through were all permissible. In truth it was a Lord of the Flies peck ordering under the guise of recreation. What a fucking nightmare. The only thing which satisfied was upmanship. Oblique.
- jacko
August 18, 2011 at 8:57am
ironyroad-- No, you're absolutely right that the Harlem Rennaissance had white supporters. No doubt about that. I just resent the idea--embedded in stories like "The Help--that African-Americans have historically needed white people to facilitate their own social progress, and to share their personal histories. Many enterprising black figures throughout history have fought to make their voices heard, without the assistance of white people. These include writers, artists, performers, political leaders, etc. I realize that "The Help" focuses on a very narrow, often overlooked problem within our race relationships. But there was a larger context--only peripherally acknowledged in that story--of bold African-Americans staging peaceful protests against mass resistance in the Civil Rights era. They were sprayed with hoses, beaten down, and unjustly jailed. I'm not presenting an idealized representation of the period; that's the way it was. And, for better or worse, today's film "The Help" aims to present said period, and to comment upon said period in our history. If that's the goal, it could have at least acknowledged that many African-Americans, of various ages, resisted segregation and racism on their own terms.
- maxhencke
August 18, 2011 at 10:46am
Something I wrote to someone about this movie: ...Two immediate things: I of course take for real every syllable of your account of your own and family's experience; and I of course defer to your experience as I grew up, 6 to13, in the snowy, icy climes of Manitoba where we so poor that our butler, chauffer, cook, valet, clothes presser and sommelier were poor. (Actually the butler had quite a few bucks stashed away that he never told anyone about.) I can't help but think, however, (despite it being a weakness of the movie that all the black help and all blacks are shown as ranging from saintly to, at a minimum, benign, except one guy, never on screen, who beats on his maid-wife and a weakness that the white wife overseers are overdrawn to the point of caricature) that even in the exaggeration and symmetrical contrasts we get a telling picture of how it was for domestics in the Mississippi south of the early sixties when Medgar Evers was murdered and change was coming and old ways were under threat. If you take and then consider the details of the facts that whites and blacks were segregated in virtually every aspect of their lives from where they ate, swam, got schooled, pissed, shit then washed their hands and publicly drank water against a background of constant incipient violence bursting into beatings, murders, arson and lynching, with virtually no available justice or law, no one can tell me that generically in the deep south the more muted discordances and injustices between rich white house matron and the help wasn't generically as this movie portrays it and no can tell me that this movie doesn't in its sotto voce way hold that world in its grain of sand. I'd never believe it....
- basman
August 18, 2011 at 11:52am
maxhencke-- Say maxhencke.... I was wondering within that resentment component and its requirements does that further require dismissal of Abraham Lincoln and the Yankee Civil War Vets and fallen as relevant contributors to justice? By my lights there is a lot of fairly recent Civil War revisionism (1960's-70's) with an eye on this consideration.
- jacko
August 18, 2011 at 12:46pm
...The Help" aims to present said period, and to comment upon said period in our history... Not really: it's not an editorial or a lecture as such. It's not balanced pedagogy. It's a story about particular people in particular circumstances. Meanings emerge from it. You want a movie about "...many African-Americans, of various ages, resisti(ng) segregation and racism on their own terms..." i.e. absent significant white facilitation, make one.
- basman
August 18, 2011 at 2:22pm
Thanks for your essay -- I have not seen the movie yet (and am even more interested in it now), but I think you are hitting upon an important notion. While a large majority of our culture recognizes the huge negative impacts of racism and want to address them, it's become a mindless pursuit for much of our writers and intellectuals. Similar to the flag-pin-wearing masses of 2003 who cheered us into war while ignoring the important debates over our soldiers' lives, I think the writers you are responding to are going through some learned motions of reacting to discomfort around racism without really analyzing the subject at hand. The sentiment is noble, but the results are simply lazy. Racism can cut both ways, and engaging in predictable, unthoughtful writing that defines an entire culture as reactive (and often over-sensitive) does not help that culture. Black people have lived a hugely diverse set of histories and have gone through the entire human experience. Operating according to stereotypes, whether you're making movies like Soul Plane or you're faulting movies for dealing with race in novel ways, helps our citizens avoid accountability and actual conversations about race. Depicting blacks as normal, 3-dimensional people, is the most important thing any artist can do to fight racism. Can't wait to see the movie!
- seagoat8888
August 18, 2011 at 3:05pm
I don't like the photo that comes with this article. I'm sure it was unintentional but choosing a photo with a cute little girl, half dressed, on the Internet?
- noga1
August 19, 2011 at 5:00pm
I just saw the movie and agree completely with McWhorter: Skeeter does not come off as the great white savior here. It's the maids who take the risks, and the movie sets it up pretty well that they are risking a lot--the behavior of their white employers, the power they wield over these white women makes that obvious. Though I beg to differ with McWhorter on one point: I think they were spurred to action not b/c of Evers but because of one of their friends (the one picked up by the cops). And honestly, this was hardly a feel-good movie. There were so many alternatives the film-makers could have taken if they'd wanted this to be feel good. And I kept expecting that to happen. The movie-goer in me wanted the white women to turn on the bitch, but that doesn't happen--as well as a lot of other satisfying possibilities. As for Noga's complaint, it figures. She hasn't seen the movie so she hasn't a clue that the kid's half-dressed state is more a reflection of the girl and her nanny's intimacy. But alas, this article doesn't deal with Jewish persecution, so why bother making any substantive contributions to the discussion at hand?
- MOLLYSIMON
August 19, 2011 at 6:13pm