Thoughts on “The Help”

These days people are much more politically correct than they used to be. It’s publicly frowned upon to say or do anything overtly racist or sexist. This is a good thing. The downside is that our prejudices (and others’ ) tend to be a lot more subtle and harder to detect.

I include myself in that last statement, because I have to confess to you that I had a very hard time locating the source of the objection to the movie “The Help.”

I heard about it first through a blog and then read snippets about the controversy in so many other places that I can’t tell you where I saw it first. I didn’t have much intention of seeing it because it sounded to me like it was a movie that African-Americans thought was racist. Why watch something like that?

But my husband and I have a tradition of trying to see as many of the movies nominated for Best Picture every year before the Oscars, and this year “The Help” is on the list.

We intended to watch just half of it the first day and the other half the next. We were so captivated that we never paused it. When it was over, we sat back in silence for a moment. Then I said, “I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I’m not sure why that movie is racist.”

Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of racism depicted in the movie. That wasn’t what I didn’t get. What I didn’t understand was why people currently object to the movie, which is about a group of African-American women who are domestic servants in 1960’s Mississippi. They confidentially tell their story to a white woman who gets it published.

There were a few parts I could identify as potentially offensive, but it seemed to me that there had been A LOT of discussion about how awful this movie was, so I was a bit confused.

Even though we’d already stayed up later on a school night than we’d planned, we both immediately started digging around on the internet trying to find what the common criticisms were. While we brushed our teeth, we discussed each one, agreeing with some and remaining baffled by others.

Just a couple thoughts that came out of our conversation:

~I’m no expert on dialect or customs in 1960’s Mississippi, so I counted it as entirely possible that they had some of the speech wrong or left out some aspects of the culture.

~To me, it was clear that the African-Americans were the heroes of the story, not that they only served as tokens to help the white heroine with her own coming-of-age narrative, but I could see that concern, too, once it was pointed out.

~I was stunned to read that some African-American critics were concerned that the movie portrayed the white housewives too kindly. To me they were completely reprehensible, and I didn’t feel that their overt racism was acceptable even if they were cornered into narrow roles by society.

~I couldn’t understand the criticism that the movie failed in part because it didn’t represent the widespread se.xual abuse of domestic servants that occurred at the time. Again, the lack of that particular aspect didn’t make me feel any more positive toward the white employers. At all.

There were more, but I won’t summarize them all here, because that isn’t my point. The point is that this is the world we now live in. We are surrounded by information, opinions, entertainment, advertisements. It’s all intended to shape our views.

But what shapes our views more than we realize are our race, sex, and socioeconomic status.

I think I had a hard time recognizing many of the criticisms of the movie because I operate with a different set of beliefs, expectations, and experiences than many of the reviewers.

Have you ever been watching something with your spouse and had completely different reactions to it? (The GoDaddy Super Bowl commercials come immediately to mind.) It’s partially because we grow up differently, men and women, even if we do it in the same community, school, or even household.

Two examples for you…

1) I went to a flower-making party once in high school. Do you know what those are? It’s when people get together to make paper flowers for a Homecoming float, though ours was for “Spirit Day.” It was held at the house of one of the girls in our class, in a nice neighborhood of suburban Detroit that was mostly white. One of our classmates arrived a bit late, looking shaken. It turned out that she, an African-American, had been pulled over nearby. She hadn’t been doing anything wrong and had been let go after the officer asked her numerous questions about where she was going. Turns out it was pretty much that he figured she was the wrong color to be driving around that neighborhood. That is an experience that I couldn’t have had, and if she hadn’t been brave enough to share it with us, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me back then that such a thing could happen to someone I knew.

2) Recently I shared a link on Facebook from Finslippy about being a younger woman harassed by men. I noted that it reminded me of walking to my brother’s car in his school’s parking lot every day after school. I went to an all-girl school; his was all boys. His school let out 10 minutes before mine, so by the time I walked over, the boys were already milling around. I could feel eyes on me on all sides as I tried to seem cool and walk past, ignoring the whistles or the occasional suggestive comment. A male friend of mine commented on my status by saying that he didn’t realize this kind of thing was commonplace; to him it felt like it was from some bad TV show.

And that’s just it: we have different experiences, and if you are living the life of one sex or race, it is much, much harder to truly know the experience of another.

So what happens is that we bump into emotional bruises that we didn’t know were there. When I see movies in which people whistle at women walking down the street, or I see stupid ads like GoDaddy puts out, I bristle at them because they remind me of that feeling of being scrutinized and badgered and annoyed every day as a 15-year-old. Many men (including my husband) probably agree that those ads are “a little over the top,” but they don’t think it’s a big deal. They have no bruise there, and they don’t quite understand mine.

I noticed that in the many blog posts I read about “The Help,” there was a defensiveness among the white commenters, who felt that they were being accused of being racist for enjoying the movie or not getting the criticisms. I don’t think that the was goal of the reviewers. I think they were pointing out where the story falls short because it bumped a collective bruise of theirs that I don’t have, because the stories of my race are told often and usually positively.

I’m grateful to them for sharing that with me. Even if I still don’t completely understand, at least it made me stop and think.

And that is one of the best things about this virtual world filled to the brim with information and opinions.

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Linking this post to Yeah Write for the first time in ages. We’ll see if I come in last this week for writing a post that was too long!