“The Help”

Opening August 10 in theaters nationwide, the Tate Taylor directed film “The Help,” based on Mississippi-born Kathryn Stockett’s #1 New York Times best-selling novel of the same name, is a must see. According to Amy Kaufman, writing in the August 12 Los Angeles Times, those who saw the film, “…gave it a perfect score of A+, echoing largely positive reviews. Older women…have so far made up the largest segment of the audience.”

Even though the story is brought to life by a highly-talented ensemble of women, it’s not just a woman’s movie. It is an American movie.

Set during America’s racial revolution in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi, “The Help” stars Emma Stone as Skeeter, Viola Davis as Aibileen, Octavia Spencer as Minny, Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly and Jessica Hastain as Celia. Becoming central to the movie, we learn about Constantine, played by Cicely Tyson, Skeeter’s family maid of 29 years, who was mysteriously let go. The movie successfully dramatizes, in personal humanistic terms, a small sliver of what a historically-ingrown, rigid slave society spawned in the mid-20th century, albeit, sanitized.

Racism meets Walt Disney!

The story centers around Aibileen who tells us that she’s a maid just like her mother, and that her grandmother was a house slave. In 1960’s Mississippi, as it turns out, “Maid,” or “The Help,” are just other names for house slave. And, as we have learned from other stories from over half-a-century ago, by whatever name these women answered to, they were also a nanny, a surrogate mother, a cook, a teacher and a companion. A pittance demanded a lot. It was easy to be absorbed by “The Help,” despite feeling the underlying dread of the South’s history, because it deals with the most personal and common activities – eating, using a toilet and family-member loyalty – and presents them, as President Obama might say, “as a teachable moment.” Ms. Stockett explains, “The Help is fiction, by far and wide…There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.”

Unfortunately, there are millions of stories, testifying to the continuous and codified inhumane treatment afforded slaves in America, that have never been told. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 645,000 slaves were brought to what is now the United States. According to the United States Census Bureau, by 1860 “the slave population in the United States had grown to four million.” It is estimated that today, in America, there are 38 million black or African-American people, most with histories going back hundreds of years.

I say, “unfortunately,” because it is only through these stories that we will ever understand something of the scourge and lasting effects of racism. Hearing and seeing these stories is not about the “guilt of our ancestors.” It is about a true look at our nation’s history, educating everyone, reaching acceptance and then working towards understanding and change.

How many stories have been told about the brutality of Hitler and his Nazis? To this day, 2/3rds of a century after the Nazis were defeated, we are still learning from and being moved by stories and films about that tragic period.

And, so it must be with racism. While the Nazis ground humanity down for only a few years, America’s racism straddles centuries.

In one of our finest hours, Barrack Obama was elected President. Still, though, in our worst moments, to this day, we have not been able to bring racism to a halt.

We need more stories and films.

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Carl Matthes is a native of Los Angeles and has lived in Eagle Rock for over 40 years. He is a former president and a current Board member of Uptown Gay and Lesbian Alliance. He is a former columnist and a current advisor to the Lesbian News, the oldest lesbian publication in America. He was editor of the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) newsletter and a former GLAAD National Board member. He has also been a Board member of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
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