"The Help': Racism, or just plain meanness? (1st review)

Resurrecting shameful stereotypes or providing worthy human and historical perspective? The debate rages over Tate Taylor's The Help, adapted from Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel about African-American maids in 1960s Mississippi and the white writer who publishes their stories.

Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), fresh from college graduation, returns home to Jackson, Mississippi. While her porcelain-faced, perfectly-coiffed friends keep to the accustomed circuit of marriage, charity balls and card-games where the gossip is as rich as the pastries, Skeeter dreams of becoming a writer. She lands work penning a household advice column and instantly turns to the black maids who tenderly raise her friends' otherwise neglected toddlers to learn housekeeping tips.

Meanwhile, local social queen Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) mounts a campaign to legislate separate household bathrooms for the maids, lest their white employers suffer the disease and degradation of interracial restroom use. Skeeter, a horrified witness to these and other racist notions, determines to break the long-suffering maids' silence with a tell-all book based on their trials, however dangerous the supposedly anonymous revelations will prove to the wary maids who become her friends.

Two of these maids— the tempered, soulful Aibileen and the sly, humorous Minny— occupy the heart of the film, thanks to the involving, nuanced performances by Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, respectively. By the end of the film, you wish they stood for more than the sage, resigned well-wishers for the protagonist's happily ever after.

Off-screen abuse

This Walt Disney film, while ostensibly tackling the ugliness of domestic violence and segregation, works overtime to sanitize the grief. The closest we come to seeing Minny's abusive husband are the pots he hurls from off-screen; she finds the "strength" to leave him not from her own considerable reserves but from her joy at a sumptuous dinner that her white employer cooks for her. The camera pans coyly away from the actual blows of police violence, and black women who have been thrown in jail guffaw as they read passages of Skeeter's book aloud, draped cozily together over bunk beds as if they're at a sleepover party.

In a statement about the film, the Association of Black Women Historians complains that true history is ignored when "the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi" are portrayed as "attractive, well-dressed society women" instead of the terrors of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council. By making attractive, backbiting socialites the villains, the organization contends, the film "limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness."

Steely contempt

But as the film's socialite antagonist, Hilly's character is seldom sufficiently nuanced to make her racism seem like an "individual" act directed at one group in particular— and this flaw is the biggest evidence of the film's sugarcoating of American segregation. Hilly dominates her friends with steely contempt and blatantly disdains her own family. Next to all this, why is it remarkable that Hilly scorns blacks as well?

Were she a sympathetic figure in any way, Hilly's racism would be much more challenging to the viewer. Instead of facing the complicated, unexpected aspects of racism that existed then as well as today, audiences can judge Hilly comfortably and completely, smugly assuring ourselves that things are different now.

Why so enlightened?

The wide-eyed, sympathetic Skeeter, meanwhile, receives a similarly one-dimensional treatment. Just as we never gain any useful insight into why Hilly is so universally hateful, we never learn why Skeeter is so ahead of her time. Besides a supporting storyline that shows her bond with Constantine (Cicely Tyson)— the black family maid who raised Skeeter, just as all her friends were raised— the film never explains how Skeeter arrived at such a radically different worldview from her peers.

Hilly's racism is one chord in an entertaining symphony of meanness— she's an equal-opportunity hater, if you will, and the impact of her character's racism may also be lessened because Americans are well accustomed to accepting and even embracing nastiness, as long as everyone is targeted equally.

We love the Eric Cartmans of TV, who can safely spew the most shocking epithets precisely because they're leveled at everyone in turn. Similarly, we're often less incensed by sweeping evidence of evil than we are by more individual instances of injustice.

Worse than Hitler?

I detected this tendency in myself during a recent spouse-mandated viewing of the latest "Avengers" film. In Captain America: The First Avenger, the fictional World War II hero Steve Rogers battles the dastardly plans of one Red Skull, a rogue Nazi who's "worse than Hitler." After declaring war even on his own fellow Nazis, Red Skull plans to destroy every capital city on earth with a supernaturally powerful weapon. What could be worse than wanting to blow up everyone in the world?

But somehow, I found Red Skull less troubling than Hitler. At least Red Skull didn't single anyone out for destruction. Hitler, on the other hand, had odious beliefs about who should live and who should die.

Just as Red Skull's plans for mass destruction don't register in a believable way, Hilly Holbrook's caricature of meanness in The Help fails to truly challenge viewers to reflect on real-life racism. To the question of why Hilly hates African-Americans, The Help would simply reply that Hilly is a nasty person"“ an answer that has nothing to do the insidious social context the film claims to examine.

With its strong cast and engaging story, The Help has much to recommend it. But it displays racism as an antique, simplistic evil instead of a thorny, unpredictable reality that can materialize alongside our best qualities, as— unlike both Hilly and Skeeter— we extend charity to some and hatred to others.♦


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