"The Help"

Cafe Society
1

How did people like this movie? I took my fiancee to see it, as she got very interested in the previews. Its not normally my kind of movie but I did enjoy it, and it was refreshing to be in a movie where everybody was mature and quiet.

The culture of Southerners (at least the way the film depicted them) was alien to me, and it was wierd how they acted around their maids, in particular-

So these racist white people are so squicked out by black people they dont want them to use their bathroom “they have different diseases than we do” but have NO PROBLEM with them raising their kids/kissing them/etc. It seemed really inconsistent.

2

It was an inconsistant lifestyle. My aunt was raised that way and admits it was very confusing to her as a child and young adult. It took her a loooong time to admit it though. She was as southern belle as they come - a real Mardi Gras queen from the '50s.

Thanks for your thoughts on the movie. I have read the book and can only assume the movie doesn’t go into half the story the book does. But I still want to see the movie.

3

I’ve read that such inconsistencies were common in the South – people objected to black butchers, handling the things they ate. Yet had no objection at all to black cooks and waiters. And I believe they had no objection to black wet-nurses back in the 19th century.

4

I’ve read the book twice, saw the movie this past Sunday, and I can tell you that the movie covers pretty much everything that’s in the book. The only thing missing that I noticed was the great sense of suspense about what would happen when the book came out, but even that was in there a little.

I really enjoyed the movie. All the acting was superb, it hit all the right emotional points. The crowd I saw it with applauded when it was over.

FWIW, I saw the movie with my grandmother, mother, and aunt, all who were living in Arkansas during the sixties. My mom grew up with a black maid, etc. They all said the movie got the attitudes and way of life back then pretty accurately.

5

I haven’t watched the movie, but the book was one of my recent “airport purchases” and I passed it on to my mother; in turn, she got her Book Club to read it.

Take out the racism (or, in some cases, merely trade it for a different brand of xenophobia), and a lot of the attitudes and of the relationship between servants and masters (including dialectal differences, and workers who speak differently on duty and at home) are equally valid for Spain up to more or less the same years; those things reflect family histories for many of us.

The flat where I’m staying right now was built in the 1960s: it has a closet-sized bedroom which was clearly intended for a live-in servant, the electric system includes ringers in each room (they ring up the doorbell and a gizmo in the kitchen tells the servant where has the summon actually come from), and there are two bathrooms not as a general convenience but because the smallest one (accesible from the kitchen, not from the closet-sized bedroom) was intended for the servant; my flat is from the same era and has 25% more footage, but since no live-in servants were expected, it has a single bathroom. My paternal grandparents’ household included five adults (of which one was the live-in cook; the cleaner wasn’t live-in) and five children: everybody used the two bathrooms in their c. 1950s home, but I understand that back when they moved there some people were scandalized by this arrangement (they got put down faster than you can say “moron”).

6

I don’t intend to see it. I have read the book. Which is why I don’t intend to see the movie.

The dust jacket blurb was pretty misleading, IYAM. “Oh, this poor woman,” I thought. “Raising seventeen children that are not her own. And college girl who wants to be a writer? Oh, this must be one of the kids she raised! She’ll write a book like an as-told-to, and be the one white child who gave something back; I think I’m gonna cry.”

Sometime after that, Sampiro started a thread in which he absolutely excoriated the book. I read some excerpts from it on Google books, and it seemed like his outrage was justified, at least as far as the whole thing being poorly written. I spotted some historical inaccuracies as well. Fast forward a few months more, and I’m in a client’s apartment. I see it on her coffee table and venture, “Do you like–”

“Oh, don’t you just looooooove it?” Well, she’s from NYC, so she wouldn’t have much context. Anyway, at her urging, I borrowed it, powered through it, and honestly, I want to know who I have to blow to get a contract like Stockett’s.

Now, I can’t address the black domestic POV at all. I’m white and I’m not from the south, and although I’ve read quite a few novels by and about African-Americans, I don’t think I’ve ever read one where the main storyline was “This is my life serving white people.” So I don’t even have that context. I will say, though, that from having read books by and about white southerners, and having known a handful of people from the south, I think I’m at least not completely off base in saying a lot of it doesn’t sound right.

– Okay, so Skeeter is so distracted that she goes out to the mailbox in her nightgown, and doesn’t realize her error until a carful of (IIRC, black) guys leer at her. That doesn’t seem to match what I’ve heard and read. I thought that back then, especially in the south, modesty was so ingrained that to leave your room without putting a robe on, much less leave the house less than fully clothed, you’d have to be mentally ill. Or at least it seems more extreme than her reaction (and theirs) warrants. And then the other scene where she’s in the car, “pull[s] my dress up to my underwear” and Love Interest rolls up on her. I’m aware that sex happened back then, but it seems that there was a lot of effort put into pretending it didn’t. As such, I find it hard to believe that he’d start groping her in broad daylight, and then ask “When are we going to do it?” as if three months, or however long they’d been going out, was long enough for her to be holding out on him. (Unless I’m remembering that wrong.)

– And Love Interest in general. I find it hard to believe that he’d have thought he had anything to apologize for after their first meeting. Or that he’d start macking on her right there in the hotel dining room, instead of in the privacy of his car. And I find it really hard to believe that he’d say “Maybe we could try listening to each other this time.” People didn’t talk like that until the '70s, I’m pretty sure. And the whole backstory with his ex-fiancee? It was supposed to have happened in 1962. Try 1967. And then it’d still be trite, but at least it would be plausible. There were no long-haired guys in 1962.

– And can someone explain to me about Junior League? Is it really “junior” in that there’s an upward age limit? I thought that in service organizations, someone literally had to die before even an officer position opened up. Could Hilly really have gotten to be president at 24 and have that much power in town? And even if she could, the Junior Leaguers really seem more like college girls in a sorority, not wives and mothers in a service organization. ETA: And if that was supposed to be the point, then I say to that what I say to the book in general, “Who cares?”

So, yeah, won’t be seeing it.