One of the upsides to a movie like The Help is the fallout that accompanies it. Because of its Civil Rights era setting and racial politics, the film is a prime target for strong criticism from academics, bloggers and other critics who take issue with its portrayal of race relations.
Check Nelson George’s excellent piece in the New York Times as an example. He criticizes the movie, but puts it within the larger context of the struggle to portray the Civil Rights Movement in fiction.
One of the difficulties, George argues, is presenting it in a coherent narrative. The PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize is to date the best on-screen chronicle of the era, he says, largely because of how it shifts perspectives, going from little known civil rights organizers to more prominent figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., giving both equal weight and significance. Fictional interpretations, on the other hand, always seem to tell the story from the white hero’s point of view. The worst example of this, George says, is Mississippi Burning, about the FBI investigation into the 1964 slaying of three Civil Rights workers. Seeing as how J. Edgar Hoover was as vicious a racist and enemy of the movement as the Klan, choosing to do a film showing the Bureau as the heroes was a slap in the face to the Movement.
George says part of the problem with Hollywood movies about racism is that Hollywood has always been racist:
“The film industry was as much a pillar of institutional racism as any business in this country. To indict American racism is, by definition, to attack the machine that created decades of stereotypes.”
“The fail-safe response for Hollywood has been to depict racial prejudice in cartoon caricature, a technique that has made the Southern redneck a cinematic bad guy on par with Nazis, Arab terrorists and zombies. By denying the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice, and peering into the saddest values of the greatest generation, Hollywood perpetuates an ahistorical vision of how democracy and white supremacy comfortably co-existed.”
Which is why we get movies like Driving Miss Daisy, Ghosts of Mississippi and A Time to Kill. It’s a lot easier to portray individual racists rather than address the systemic issues underpinning their racism. My favourite example of this was in The Hurricane, when they cast Dan Hedaya as a racist cop that was responsible for every bad thing that ever happened to Rubin Carter, including having him imprisoned for over 20 years! As if all of Carter’s problems were the result of just one racist person rather than a judicial process that was and still is disproportionately unfair to black people.
Anyway, reading George’s piece actually makes me want to see The Help now and see how it lines up with other race relations movies. It can’t be nearly as bad as The Blind Side, could it?
