What a good thing, I’m sure we can all agree, that
oppressed black people in Mississippi in 1963, though they lost
Medgar Evers, were saved in the end by that cute white girl just
out of Ole Miss called Skeeter. What? You don’t remember that part
of the story? That’s because Skeeter is a figment of the
imagination of Kathryn Stockett who was born too late for the
heroic days of the civil rights movement and projects her own
girlish liberalism and compassion for black suffering, not to
mention her own literary ambition, onto the imaginary Skeeter, a
cub reporter in charge of the cleaning-tips column for housewives
of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Skeeter, though beset with
boyfriend problems and racist girlfriend problems and a mother with
cancer, not to mention a missing black nanny about whose fate her
mother is maddeningly vague, makes the sort of contribution to
racial progress that she, Ms. Stockett, would doubtless have made,
if only she had had the opportunity, back in the day.
As this fictional contribution comes in the form of a book
called The Help (just like Ms. Stockett’s book) telling
what purport to be the untold stories of Mississippi’s black female
servants (just like Ms. Stockett’s book) — a book which she dashes
off as her brilliant literary debut resulting in fame and fortune
(just like Ms. Stockett’s book) — we can hardly avoid seeing the
thing as politically correct wish-fulfillment fantasy. Which it
undoubtedly is. Not that that appears to matter to anybody. What is
interesting to me about the phenomenon of Ms. Stockett’s
block-busting best-seller and, now, the Dreamworks film that has
been made out of it by Tate Taylor is the extent to which people
these days are prepared to accept what I regard as an outrageous
interpretation of this bloody and eventful chapter of American
history as a journalistic romance, just like Vietnam or
Watergate.
If, like most people, you get your history from the
newspapers, you may well believe that David Halberstam and Neil
Sheehan (and Daniel Ellsberg) of the New York
Times were the heroes of Vietnam, just as Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post were the heroes
of Watergate. Thus, perhaps, you will be easily persuadable that it
must have been some journalist revealing discreditable secrets who
can best be cast in the role of the hero (or at least a
hero) of the civil rights movement — in spite of the fact that we
have always known the evils of segregation and racism in the South
were no secret even to those who fought so hard to prolong and
uphold them. Doubtless there were lots of respectable white folks,
like all the ones in this movie apart from Skeeter (Emma Stone) and
the beautiful but vulnerable social outcast Celia Foote (Jessica
Chastain), who were willfully blind to details of the sufferings
and indignities endured by their black servants, but this was more
of a symptom than a cause of those sufferings and
indignities.
At any rate, the idea that these could have been
alleviated by being poured into the sympathetic ear of a
20-something budding journalist, as interested in finding a
boyfriend and in writing for New York glamour magazines as in her
subjects, is ludicrous. As for the film’s central episode involving
the serving of a chocolate pie with unmentionable contents (though
here they are unfortunately mentioned) to the racist witch Hilly
(Bryce Dallas Howard), Skeeter’s ex-best friend, by her former
cook, Minnie (Octavia Spencer), in retaliation for the latter’s
dismissal after using the white folks’ bathroom instead of
venturing outside in a hurricane to the more Spartan accommodations
provided for their colored help — well, let’s just say that it
lacks a certain something as a symbolic embodiment of racial
conflict in the Jim Crow South before the age of enlightenment in
which we are nowadays so lucky to be living.
That we cling so hard to this belief in our own
enlightenment is one reason why that unbelievable incident, like
the unbelievable movie as a whole, is apparently taken seriously by
the throngs jamming the multiplices to see it. Like Ms. Stockett
and the makers of the movie version of her book, too many of us are
more proud of our own liberal-mindedness than we are interested in
the truth about those who lived before liberal-mindedness became so
readily and cheaply available to us as it is today. That’s why the
liberalism of The Help has a sort of rote quality to it.
The movie even throws in an anticipation of the self-esteem
movement as black nanny Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) teaches her
neglected white charge: “You is kind. You is smart. You is
important.” You is doing the child no favors, lady. But there’s
some more folk wisdom for you from the latest of Hollywood’s
favorite Magic Negroes. Such smugness, it’s true, is not so bad as
bigotry and racism, but neither is it all that much more
attractive.
