Fearing retribution from their employers, Minny and Aibileen are at first reluctant to share their stories, but they eventually come around to allow Skeeter a glimpse into their world. Dale Robinette/Dreamworks Pictures Adapted and directed by Hollywood hopeful Tate Taylor, a childhood friend of Stockett's, The Help trots stolidly after the book, replicating its basic structure while ironing out the verve with which its nested stories unfold. Taylor has none of Stockett's feel for the seething impulses of character, and he has a clunky way with some serious acting talent. In fairness, Emma Stone, the exuberant young star of Easy A, may not be built for earnest melodrama, but she's unaccountably tamped-down as Skeeter, the spirited young daughter of white privilege who powers this tale of racism and tentative reconciliation. In an effort to launch a career in journalism ("the last stop before marriage!" one of her lunch chums cries merrily) and uncover the secret behind the disappearance of her own beloved nanny (Cicely Tyson), Skeeter embarks on a series of clandestine interviews with Aibileen (Viola Davis), a stoical, middle-aged maid submerging her grief over the death of her own son in her love for the little white girl she's raising in the shadow of an indifferent young mother. Fearing retribution from their employers, Minny and Aibileen are at first reluctant to share their stories, but they eventually come around to allow Skeeter a glimpse into their world. Dale Robinette/Dreamworks Pictureshide caption Big hair, fine period frocks and interior design lend The Help a pleasingly retro look. Yet for someone who grew up in Mississippi, the director has little sense of place, unless you count one decidedly low-rent tornado and a few inside shots of a black church. Unlike Stockett, who might have been better off writing her own screenplay, Taylor has a tin ear for the vernacular speech of his own region. Much of the dialogue seems lifted from Margaret Mitchell, with the result that virtually no one escapes caricature, from Bryce Dallas Howard, anxiously overdoing a vicious housewife who has made it her life's mission to bar servants from their employers' bathrooms, to Sissy Spacek, marooned in an excruciating dotty-old-lady role as her mother good habit and bad habit essay, to Jessica Chastain as a good-hearted white-trash interloper trying to break into a circle as conscious of class as it is bigoted about color. The Help is a window onto the mid-century south, giving the reader vivid impressions of the beautiful landscapes and warm culture. This includes positive qualities such as friendliness and generosity; we see these close social ties in the ways that family members treat one another. Yet it also includes racism, segregation, and misogyny, which are evident in the violent enforcement of the separation between races, and the lack of professional options for white women. The novel also focuses on different types of romantic love. Despite his affection for Skeeter, Stuart cannot get over the betrayal of his fiancée, Patricia van Devender, and his attempts to build a new relationship with Skeeter continuously fail. On the other hand, Celia and Johnny have a deeply loving relationship, triumphing over class differences, infertility, and social disapproval. What does it mean to be a writer? The journey to publish the book is not an easy one. After an initial stroke of luck in catching Elaine Stein 's attention, Skeeter struggles to develop her ideas, conduct interviews, write the book, and find a publisher. Each step is fraught with difficulties; for example, she must complete the book in only a few weeks in order to send it in for the annual editor's meeting. Skeeter spends many long nights typing until her hands are covered with ink and paper cuts, but she ultimately prevails. Even when everything in the world is trying to tell you what to do and what to believe, you need to make your own path. The central protagonists recognize that the current state of race relations is wrong, and work to correct it. Aibileen strives to teach racial equality and acceptance to Mae Mobley. Minny persists in working on the book about the maids despite the danger it puts her in with her own husband and Hilly. Skeeter continues working towards racial justice despite the rift it causes between her and her two best friends. It is important to note that as a Black woman, Aibileen could not tell the stories of other Black women and the book be received as well as The Help has. If a Black author wrote the book, or if the story allowed for Aibileen to be in charge of her own freedom, The Help would be relabeled as “African- American fiction” or a “Black movie,” marginalized by its topic and not half as successful. Having Kathryn Stockett express her interpretation of Black southern dialect to channel these women sells more; it’s more fascinating to that dominant culture to see a privileged (through wealth or class status) white person engage in “Black things,” like seeing Gwenyth Paltrow rap. Allowing for Miss Skeeter Phelan to opt out of whiteness in favor of the truth is more shocking to our culture systems because we know there is no better place than wealth, prestige, and whiteness, and for someone to give all of that up for a few Black maids, must truly be the messiah. Unfortunately though, this construction is self-serving for those who buy that story, including Stockett construction essay, because while Skeeter gets to leave Jackson, move to New York paper writing service, and presumably begin a fabulous life doing my homework, Minny, Aibileen should i buy an essay online, and all the other maids are stuck to face the wrath of her doing. However, the audience is left with closure courtesy of a Mary J. Blige song and Aibileen walking down the street towards her bright future. Very much aligned with the book, The Help attempts to dismantle some of these idealized tropes that run rampant in popular culture by showing what was actually lost and who gained from sustaining the image of Scarlett O’Hara and her Tara. What detracts from that noble goal are covert ways the movie eclipses historical white racism through the absence of white men, the blind innocence of white women, and the religious obligation of Black people to heal white people’s wounds and forgive. There are five white female characters that propel The Help. One is the savior, Skeeter Phelan; another is Hilly Holbrook, the racist “Queen Bee”; Elizabeth Leefolt, Holbrook’s lapdog; Celia Foote, a hapless Marilyn Monroe-type, teetering around in stilettos; and Skeeter’s mother, Charlotte, the quintessential Southern mother. Again, a common characterization in Southern themed movies, The Help uses Hilly Holbrook’s character, played by Bryce Dallas Howard essay topics in high school, as the vehicle through which all racism and intolerance are enacted. The other women, minus Skeeter and Celia, are so overcome by desires for class elevation and acceptance from Hilly that they cannot express their discomfort with her need to terrorize “the help.” As Hilly pushes for white families to build separate bathrooms for their Black maids (because “they carry different diseases” than white people despite those Black people cooking their food, cleaning their houses, and taking care of their babies), her fellow bridge club members and Junior League hopefuls awkwardly avert their eyes or nervously titter alongside her instead of speaking out. Like their husbands, these women are not to be judged as prejudiced, racist, or bigoted against the Black citizens of Jackson because the inequality they profit from and perpetuate is not labeled as such. Instead, they are going along with simply how things are what is a good thesis statement, which we are led to believe is no fault of their own. That is where Skeeter, the young educated liberal looking to change things, or at least question why those things exist, comes in. To be released in theaters on August 10, I attended an early screening of The Help back in June. It took me a while to absorb and digest the movie and decide what items were most important to address. I walked away from this piece many times conflicted, hurt, frustrated, angry, and defeated. The Black maid/slave/servant-white “employer” narrative is so convoluted, rich in history and meaning, that it is impossible for one post to encompass it all. There is the narrative itself, both as book and film; there is the personal narrative of the author, Kathryn Stockett, whose wealthy Jackson, Mississippi family employed their own Black maid growing up; there is the south’s nostalgia for the antebellum past; there’s also Hollywood’s general obsession with whitewashing history. Of course, all of that can be summed up by simply acknowledging that the commercialized mainstream media culture is only able to address the United States’ racist past, racial tension, and racial inequality if it absolves white guilt/complicity, valorizes whiteness through history, mythologizes that history write essay for me best site, or ignores historical accuracy all together. And it seems the only way the mass American audience is interested in seeing films that explicitly involve relationships between Blacks and whites is if it does those aforementioned things. While the delusional marketing powers that be pose this story as a tale of sisterhood (instead of servitude), where “three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step compare and contrast essay writing topics,” more realistic people have recognized it as another example of the “white messiah” appointing him/herself as the savior of the poor cover letter examples for internships business, oppressed, uneducated Black people. As Hollywood and other large cultural outputs have made it known they love a good “white salvation through Black (brown, red article, yellow) liberation” narrative, it is not surprising that The Help franchise continues to be successful (still high on the New York Times Best Sellers list); nor is it surprising that it was made into a major motion picture; and even less surprising is the fact that Touchstone Pictures, a Disney entity, is responsible for distribution. Disney, as we all know is the reigning champ of purveying a white, heterosexist ideology where Blacks and other props of “diversity,” including women, are only as useful as their ability to maintain the status quo. Of all this—which influenced the lives and thinking of millions, especially in the South—in The Help. not the hint of a hint. The film’s defenders tout it as heartwarming and uplifting, with a Hollywood-type happy ending that symbolizes the progress made since the 1960s. In truth, there are several moving moments and the performances of all the leads are committed and passionate. Though not articulated, the subtext here has much to do with elation over the ethnicity of the present occupant of the White House. After all, the book was published in 2009 and the film released in 2011. When Minny is booted out of Hilly’s house, she is eventually hired by Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), the wife of a wealthy businessman, who treats her like a human being. Celia herself is an outcast, whom Hilly views as white trash because of her humble origins and also resents because she secretly carries a torch for Celia’s husband. The Help is not simply a reductive—to say the least—period piece, whose main dynamic is a skirmish between good and evil, with blacks on one side and whites on the other. It rewrites, probably out of light-mindedness and lack of knowledge more than anything else, the history of social struggle in America and postwar history in general. It is not, however, directly for those weaknesses that the film has generated a certain amount of controversy, although one confined to a narrow social segment. The Help. based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, is a film about race and class relations in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. A century after the American Civil War, the work makes clear, African-American women had few options but to labor as exploited domestics for wealthy white families. While socialites entrusted the raising of their children to the maids, the latter were barely able to tend to their own families. Aibileen, who has raised 17 white children, acutely feels her lineage as the daughter of a maid and the granddaughter of a house slave. She suffers chronic indignities while attempting to compensate for the emotional blows delivered to the white offspring by their insensitive and absentee parents. In several interviews, Stockett states that “I grew up in the 1970s, but I don’t think a whole lot had changed from the ’60s.” Perhaps in her constricted world, this is true. It is also true that no section of the working class has been liberated, although a layer of the black middle class has been cultivated and co-opted by the ruling strata. The titanic battles in the 1960s did make a difference. The black population and its white allies took up a courageous fight that inspired and moved the whole population. It had a worldwide impact.
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