The Help is nominated for four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain & Octavia Spencer), and has garnered numerous other nominations and awards.
This piece, by guest writer elle, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 5, 2011.
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| The Help (2011) |
A caveat: I have not seen The Help. I do not plan to see The Help, yet I feel pretty confident that I have The Help all figured out. If you don’t know about this film, please see this post. I’m going to ground my thoughts about The Help in two other documents I will link: Valerie Boyd’s review entitled, “‘The Help,’ a feel-good movie for white people” and “An Open Statement to the Fans of ‘The Help’” from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH). A brief description from Boyd:
“The Help”—the film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett—is a feel-good movie for a cowardly [wrt to the ways we deal (or don’t deal) with issues of race] nation.
Despite its title, the film is not so much about the help—the black maids who kept many white Southern homes running before the civil rights movement gave them broader opportunities—as it is about the white women who employed and sometimes terrorized them.
And there you have it, the problem at the heart of works like The Help that blossoms into myriad other problems—the centering of white women in a story that is supposed to be about women of color, the positioning of white women as saviors who give WoC voice. As my colleagues in the ABWH note:
Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers.
I want to meld these critiques of The Help with my own critique of phenomena that make movies like this possible. My critique is rooted in who I am: My name is elle, and I am a granddaughter of The Help. And while I can never begin (and would never want) to imagine myself as the voice of black domestic workers, I can at least share some of their own words with you and tell you some places you can find more of their words and thoughts.