The Help

[Deleted]

Aug 19, 2011 14:11:13 GMT -4 @nedsdag said:

As for the "white savior" aspect, I guess To Kill a Mockingbird should be banned as well, right? Face the facts, there will always be that aspect of Hollywood. It will never change. What you can do is either see the movie for what it's worth or don't see the movie at all.

No one calling for anything to be banned. And the comparison is not apt. Mockingbird, both the book and the movie, accurately represented the limited resources a man like Tom Robinson would have had in the 1930s. While black lawyers did exist and occasionally argued cases in the Deep South, that was a rare occurrence. A white lawyer like Atticus Finch would have to step in to provide defense. The book/movie are remarkable because he provides a great defense instead of the perfunctory one that would have been the norm. The Help has been criticized for presenting Skeeter as the maids' only way of publishing their stories and historically, that simply isn't remotely close to true.

Also, Atticus does not exploit Tom Robinson. He doesn't profit from the case or use it to advance his career, so in that way he is very different from Skeeter. He's also not much of a savior, since Tom winds up dead anyway (foreshadowed by the scene where Atticus holds off the lynch mob at the jail; it's obvious the trial is only putting off the inevitable). Mockingbird doesn't create any rosy glow views of segregation, racism, or white enlightenment. Things end up pretty nastily for everyone.

And I refuse to simply see movies just for what they're worth. Why not analyze, discuss, criticize, and dissect? We don't owe Hollywood rapt silence.

[Deleted]

I stand by what I said regarding To Kill a Mockingbird. However, if you want to "analyze, discuss, criticize, and dissect" films, let's not stop at The Help. For example, John Waters' movie Hairspray, which had a successful run on Broadway as a musical and became a box office hit when it was adapted again into a movie gets a pass despite the fact that the leading character, a white girl, was the one leading the cause to integrate a dance show in 1962, when in real life this did not happen.

Again, this is why people should read books before seeing adaptations of movies. Everyone's perspective is different and it wouldn't surprise me if this is what Kathryn Stockett had in mind when she wrote the book.

As someone said previously, the happiest people in regards to the discussion of this movie are Stockett, the producers and the movie studios Touchstone and DreamWorks who own distribution rights to The Help because the money and the publicity is flowing. In fact, Steven Spielberg--one of the head honchos of DreamWorks--is smiling right now as we speak. Perhaps we should boycott his two upcoming films because of this. No, I didn't think so.

[thingee]

If nothing else, I am glad for the discussion the film has generated -- I have learned a lot from it. I appreciate everyone posting their thoughts.

[Deleted]

Aug 19, 2011 18:19:24 GMT -4 @nedsdag said:

I stand by what I said regarding To Kill a Mockingbird. However, if you want to "analyze, discuss, criticize, and dissect" films, let's not stop at The Help. For example, John Waters' movie Hairspray, which had a successful run on Broadway as a musical and became a box office hit when it was adapted again into a movie gets a pass despite the fact that the leading character, a white girl, was the one leading the cause to integrate a dance show in 1962, when in real life this did not happen.

Hairspray doesn't get a pass; it's simply not taken seriously as historical fiction because its a John Waters movie, it's a broad satire with farcical elements, and there's a drag queen playing a housewife. No one expects any more accuracy from it as they would from "Hogan's Heroes".

Anyway, nothing about "The Help" interests me enough to continue debating it. Some will love it, some will not, and time will tell whether or not it holds up.

[Deleted]

Aug 19, 2011 17:01:46 GMT -4 @dguzpy said:

Mockingbird, both the book and the movie, accurately represented the limited resources a man like Tom Robinson would have had in the 1930s. While black lawyers did exist and occasionally argued cases in the Deep South, that was a rare occurrence. A white lawyer like Atticus Finch would have to step in to provide defense. The book/movie are remarkable because he provides a great defense instead of the perfunctory one that would have been the norm. The Help has been criticized for presenting Skeeter as the maids' only way of publishing their stories and historically, that simply isn't remotely close to true.

Also, Atticus does not exploit Tom Robinson. He doesn't profit from the case or use it to advance his career, so in that way he is very different from Skeeter. He's also not much of a savior, since Tom winds up dead anyway (foreshadowed by the scene where Atticus holds off the lynch mob at the jail; it's obvious the trial is only putting off the inevitable). Mockingbird doesn't create any rosy glow views of segregation, racism, or white enlightenment. Things end up pretty nastily for everyone.

I think the point is that To Kill a Mockingbird still tells the story of the tragedy of a black man through a white perspective. Tom Robinson is not a fully fleshed out character the way the white people are. When people talk about the memorable characters from it, it's always Atticus Finch, Scout, Boo Radley - never Tom Robinson.

A novel came out a couple of years ago called Scottsboro - a fictional account of the real-life events that inspired To Kill a Mockingbird. The author told the story from the POV from the white girls who falsely accused the boys of rape - an interesting idea, but even more interesting is the fact that people still go for a white POV, bypassing the black people at the centre of things.

The Help, at least, gives us Aibileen and Minny's POV as well as Skeeter's. I disagree with the idea that Skeeter is the main character - the book begins and ends with Aibileen. The book also doesn't present Skeeter as the only way to get the maid's stories out there: Aibileen's son was writing a book before he died and the characters discuss Ellison's Invisible Man. Also, Aibileen and Skeeter write the book together; it's not Skeeter's book. I don't know if I would say Skeeter saves them - she, Aibileen and Minny all kind of mutually help each other out. Aibileen is the one who makes the book happen and Minny helps them protect themselves.

Unless the movie deviates a lot from the book's plot, there's no rosy glow of segregation and racism there, either. But I suppose if you show white families treating their black maids decently, even if it's alongside some horrible inhumane treatment, you'll always run the risk of people concentrating on the former rather than the latter. The author's chapter at the end of the book does discuss the problem of this and was helpful, as it showed she was aware of the issues of being a white woman writing a black woman's story and that there was always the feeling that she couldn't really understand.

That was the only problem for me, I think. I liked the book a lot, but I will now look up any accounts that black women have written about this kind of life. I don't agree with the Association of Black Women Historians' statement, but I appreciate that they provided a list.

[Deleted]

I haven't seen (or read) The Help, but I've been following the criticism of it, and one of the issues that's keeping me from being at all interested in it is specifically that Skeeter is presented as an ally without the film acknowledging that she's complicit. She benefits from the system that oppresses Aibileen and Minny, that's an inescapable truth of racism. Doesn't she first start speaking to Aibileen because she's using her to write a cleaning column? A column which Aibileen gets no pay or credit for? A column that Skeeter has no idea how to write because a black woman has been cleaning up after her since she was born? Fighting racism is about far, FAR more than getting white people to think that "we're all the same on the inside." It's systemic, institutionalized oppression, and even if the white housewives in the story didn't demean and dehumanize their domestic workers, racism would still exist. So a movie that presents such a fluffy, shallow picture of race relations in such a turbulent time is at best problematic, and at worst offensive and damaging. And that's not even touching the serious issues over why THIS book, why THIS movie, why THIS author? Why are books and movies created by people of color overlooked and unknown, while one by a white author sparks and takes off? And that's an even tougher problem to confront, because no one will ever say or want to believe that racism had anything to do with it. That's the problem with To Kill a Mockingbird as well. It's not the content and the narrative so much as: why is the narrative of white people privileged even when it comes to the issues of non-white people?

To me, the real danger is that this is the sort of movie that possibly allows a lot white people to think, boy, I'm glad racism is over! without ever examining their own privilege and how they are complicit in the oppression of others, even if they don't mean to be or want to be. After all, they'd never force a maid to use a toilet in the garage or anything horrible like that.

[butternut]

It's not the content and the narrative so much as: why is the narrative of white people privileged even when it comes to the issues of non-white people?

Because privileged, white men control everything. This thread is filled with comments on complex issues and feelings of diverse people with different opinions about "The Help." But white people control the narratives in this country that reach a mass audience. It sucks, but it is still very true.

[Deleted]

Well. Yes. Exactly. Which is why this is a problem and why The Help isn't some innocent movie. Just because it's true, doesn't make it right. And if you know it's true and you know it isn't right and you don't say anything, you're complicit in the system too.

[Deleted]

It all comes back to the lack of history being taught in schools. People, particularly Americans, don't know or care about what happened 40, 50, or even 60 years ago and depend on movies to teach them everything about what happened in the past. As a history buff, I knew the book and the movie was fictional; however, there are those who take this as fact. Perhaps if schools and parents were more in synch about what should be taught in schools instead of what shouldn't be taught (i.e. creationism over evolution), then we wouldn't have debates over whether a fictional book is actually the truth.

[Deleted]

Since when is the debate over whether it's actually the truth?