The Help

[Ladybug]

I'm white and I grew up in the 80s and 90s in Mississippi and Louisiana. I haven't read this book or seen the movie, but I'll probably catch it when it comes on cable. The thing that is keeping me from reading/watching this sooner is that when I was growing up, I heard so many of our family and friends brush aside the racism of theirs and previous generations with examples of white people being nice to blacks. Like just because your grandma was nice to her maid, that meant that racism wasn't as bad as the blacks would have you believe. Just because my dad had a black playmate growing up, that meant racism wasn't that bad. We had one very respected and successful black businessman in my hometown: "see, how could he have made it if racism was as bad as the liberals tell you?" That kind of distortion and selective memory is so common among whites of a certain age. It wasn't until I went to college (in Mississippi) and started learning some actual facts about Jim Crow and the civil rights era that I could see the real level of violence and hatred that permeated the area. I don't think any of my family were directly involved in it, but they clearly approved of and beneffited from the Jim Crow system and didn't want it to end. Now they want to go back and absolve themselves for whatever racist and discriminatory attitudes they did have (and still have to some extent) by saying things weren't really that bad. When I saw the preview for this movie, and how warm hearted and happy and funny it all seemed, it reminded me a lot of those stories my family used to tell. I know there were true friendships and partnerships that developed between whites and blacks, but for the most part, this was a time of serious injustice and cruelty and I don't want it whitewashed or made light of. Those are just my thoughts on it.

[Neurochick]

For me, as a minority, it's more just a sort of sadness that in this day and age, we're still not able to tell our own stories. So while the book (and the movie) may be well crafted and lovely, it still says something about society that we seem to be more comfortable using black women as accessories in a white woman's story. I think academics call it centering whiteness.

It not that the book/movie/author/fans are necessarily racist, not at all, it's just that it's so sad that we're never the center of our own stories in pop culture. You can't blame Stockett for that. But you can still be unhappy with a system that popularizes these stories above all.

And that is my problem with this movie. If a movie is about white people, then it's fine for the main protagonist to be white; but why is it that when a movie is supposed to be about black people, or a black person's story, the main protagonist STILL has to be white? Why can't black people be the stars of our own stories?

[baileydash]

I suspect studio heads fear that white American movie-goers won't bother to see a civil rights film unless the story it is filtered trough the experiences of a virtuous white character.

Also, we are constantly being told that films with majority black casts do poorly overseas even when the subject matter isn't race.

[celerydunk]

I read the book, wont go see the movie. The stories about the maids lives were interesting, but that main character annoyed me. The story has been told a hundred times. White man/lady goes in and bonds with the poor/uneducated/disadvantaged minorities in a way the other unevolved white people haven't. Has there even been a story where a somewhat well off minority main character saves some poor white kids?

Although I do agree that the book/movie would not have been the big seller it was without the white main character.

[stina]

I'm not so sure that the book wouldn't have been a big seller without a white protagonist, but I think for sure that the movie would have been a small, indie if not for a white protagonist. If it had been a hit, it would be labeled a "surprise hit" and marketed as an underdog movie. That's just the way Hollywood is.

As for Emma Stone being featured prominently in the movie, I think that's probably a little due to her being white, but mostly due to her being hot right now. She was featured prominently in the Friends With Benefits trailer, and she was in the actual movie for like a second. I could see Bryce Dallas Howard being featured more if not for this being Emma's Big Year. So I guess same difference, really.

I read the book in a day. I read it in the same way I read so-called "chick lit", enjoyable, but hardly great literature.

I'll probably see the movie, though. I love me some Allison Janney.

[incognito]

I saw this in the IMDB trivia section:

"Director Tate Taylor kept a calendar of the actresses' menstruation periods so he would know who would be hormonal."

What? This man sounds gross.

[MrsCatHead]

ok, that's just bizarre. There is no reason a woman has to reveal that for this sort of movie shoot. No reason.

[GoldenFleece]

I had to look that one up: (interview with Tate Taylor and Octavia Spencer)

Tate, what was it like to work with a cast of all women?
TT: It fits naturally for me. I was raised by a single mom and then Carol Lee, the woman my mother hired to help with me, a woman, I’ve got four sisters. It’s funny, Kathryn Stockett is my longest and dearest friend, so female energy has been a part of my life forever. My dad’s that way. My dad only likes to work with women. He’s a traveling salesman and he was in the haberdashery business and he was the same way. So it really fit naturally.

Emma said you kept a calendar of everyone’s hormonal states?
TT: Oh, yeah. Yeah, varying menstrual cycles and 110-degree weather in Mississippi could have been a time bomb, but it was not.
OS: Let me just clarify …
TT: It was not! Everybody was wonderful. She had some bad days …
OS: He’s like my brother, and obviously I’m going to have bad days with him. But you know that’s the misperception though. That a group of women … is going to be crazy. But our hormones, while they can be problematic, I think there are so many professionals and such a good group that men will find—and I’m glad that he’s a person who has been around a lot of women in his life that that really wasn’t that daunting.
TT: No, it really wasn’t. Everybody was fantastic.

And obviously there’s a special calendar that you can buy to keep it all organized.
OS: No, he can just tell, because if I give him a look—
TT: The calendar’s her face.
OS: If I give him a look, [saying], “Don’t look this way; don’t look at me; don’t talk to me,” because we’re family, he knows, and then he starts probably looking for those looks with other women. But I think they were not detectable, not everyone.

[Deleted]

A great movie about maids from the perspective of maids themselves is Dirt. It was a movie made in 2003 by a woman by Nancy Savoca, I believe. (FYI: the character was Salvadoran and not African American but if you need to see a relevant and contemporary movie from the perspective of the maids, try that.)

[Deleted]

As an African American who didn't read the book for a long period of time and eventually read it, I am going to see the movie tomorrow; however, I'm going to see the film from an aesthetic standpoint. This is not a docudrama or a biography, it's a fictional movie based on the black domestic help in the South.

To be honest, I'm getting a little tired of black writers jumping on the bandwagon dumping on the movie when I was wondering where were they when the book became a cultural phenomenon that both blacks and whites read? If you don't like the film, don't see it. I know everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but everyone knew that the main character in the book was a white girl who wasn't trying to change the South from Jim Crow, but wanted to write about the domestics who worked for white families.

The so-called Greek chorus of African American writers who complained about The Help are the same ones who praise a film like Jumping the Broom, which to me was more insulting to African Americans yet it gets a pass because it was written, produced and directed by African Americans. You cannot have it both ways, people!