THE HELP

I like the TV show done by Prof. Mellisa Harris-Perry. In fact, she's my favorite news show host. She is about the only one ready to engage with ideas. (She's on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday morning early.)

I've been aware for some time that she disapproves of The Help. I wanted to know why, and this weekend she put on a panel to discuss the matter: herself (an academician of mixed racial background), a white woman professor who strongly disliked the movie because it did not present the true grimness faced by African Americans in the South, a black male comic, who kept out of the way, and an African American former house cleaner who now works for an association of such workers. As I had predicted, the former house cleaner enjoyed the film as much as I did, while the white professor denounced it, apparently on the grounds that she would have preferred either a documentary or a tragedy. In short, she was complaining that a comedy should have been a tragedy (which is jaw-dropping in its ignorance). She copmmented that no black woman in the film had been raped by a white employer (something that did and no doubt does happen). Another flaw she found was that a young white woman with a college education was functional in the film in finding a publisher for what the black women had to say--and that runs counter to the position that African Americans need no white connections.

There was something horrifying in the positions taken by a woman who was, without doubt, well meaning.

There were two kinds of people missing from the panel. There was no producer. If there had been, she might have said that the film had been financed to send a message but also to sell tickets. The big ticket buyers in the USA are white, so it made sense to have several white characters (good and bad) play major roles. The panel also lacked a creative writer or literary critic, who might have pointed out that the film was a comedy. It wasn't an outlandish comedy like SOME LIKE IT HOT or FAST DAYS AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, but it was fiction and a comedy--and in an ancient exaggerated comic tradition. You know, the one where the wily servants outsmart their cartoonlike boss. I've enjoyed films in that genre many times, and the basic plot line must go back to the ancient Greeks.

Audiences love THE HELP, perhaps because it is a comedy. Where I live, household help is usually Latina, and I've seen people treat Latina workers with the same easy inhumanity we witness in the movie. I thank THE HELP for bringing this back to my attention.