sincere and naive question about the movie "The Help"

[steve2470]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/

I enjoyed the movie. Is it accurate ? Thank you kindly.

Steve

[GeorgeGist]

1. Yes

[upaloopa]

2. As a white kid growing up in the fifties we would ride the busses with

the maids to the rich part of town. They went to work in the houses and we went to caddie at the country club. From knowing the women that we caddied for and listening to them talk about their maids I would say the movie is very accurate.

[steve2470]

3. to respond to my own thread...

I found it accurate, but then again I'm Caucasian and my family employed a maid. I loved her almost as much as my own mother, cried when she died and went to her funeral service at her church. Her name was Easter. I'm getting a tad emotional just typing this.

Steve

[Warpy]

5. Same here but only for a few weeks

because my mother drove us crazy overcleaning everything before the maid came so the woman wouldn't think we lived like pigs. The maid's responsibilities were ironing and a light bathroom cleaning.

Being a kid in the Jim Crow south was enlightening, though, when I'd ride my bike past a group of maids waiting for the bus. They didn't hold anything back among themselves.

[steve2470]

6. my mother did almost no cleaning

She was "impaired", to put it kindly. I'm sure Easter had some interesting things to say. She was probably pretty kind to me, she did care about me a lot.

[Warpy]

7. My mother was NY Irish

which is why she wasn't one of the delicate flowers of southern womanhood who needed their hankies picked up for them every five minutes. The southern neighbors had impressed upon her that doling out jobs to black maids helped them feed their families (it did) and that she was both entitled to a maid and compelled to hire one to alleviate her poverty(by paying poverty wages).

She hated ironing, so Leola came in a couple of days a week to do it. I remember her as a stern and dignified lady who was all work. I mostly just tried to stay out of her way and out of her hair.

I do know she got a glowing recommendation when my dad put his foot down about my mother's nuttiness.

[Warpy]

4. How the help were treated is accurate

Some were treated like part of the family. More weren't. Some were abused. More weren't.

Mostly, no one ever asked if they had children to raise and their own housework to do.

What isn't accurate is their opening up to some young white woman. Skeeter is the most unrealistic thing in that book. Also, none of them would have disclosed the special ingredient in that chocolate pie. Going around smiling inwardly was revenge enough. And it was better than spending decades in prison for attempted murder, which is how the white courts would have seen it.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

8. It was actually fiction.

I thought it was based on fact. There was a woman who sued the author for stealing her story. The Plaintiff worked for the sister of the author, and the Plaintiff's unusual name was very close to the name of the main character who was a maid. This was on the Daily Mail website in the U.K.

I did a search and couldn't find a link to the article.

That said, it probably is realistic.

[Number23]

9. Paging JustAnotherGen. Paging JustAnotherGen

JAG, please pick up the Hot Pink Anti-The Help phone in reception. Please pick up the Hot Pink "We Hate The Help" phone in reception.

[steve2470]

10. oh it was that bad ?

eeks.

[Number23]

11. JAG is one of the smartest, most passionate people here and she's got LOTS to say about The Help!

I've never seen the movie (absolutely refuse to do so) but have read so much about the racial dynamics of it. JAG can give you some really good points of view.

[steve2470]

12. ok thank you ! :) nt

[JustAnotherGen]

18. The white wine just sprayed

Everywhere!

[FreedRadical]

13. Snicker nt

[steve2470]

14. care to elaborate ? nt

[FreedRadical]

15. Do I really need to?

[steve2470]

16. yes you do....

I have no idea why you're snickering.

[FreedRadical]

17. Mostly because it is a free country and my snichering is not acountable to you.

[JustAnotherGen]

21. We try to be respectful

In this group. It was an honest and fair question. Granted I thought the book was awful - but I'm gong back and reading Fitzgerald's work again - after reading all of E L Doctorows work again - so that's not a writing style I appreciated.

[steve2470]

23. I appreciate your respect

My question was sincere and meant well, of course. Now I know the full truth, and for that I'm grateful to you.

[FreedRadical]

24. I am humbled.

Please excuse me.

[JustAnotherGen]

32. Want you to read this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11874893

I wanted to let the thread kind of go where it goes - but you have to read that to understand where the snicker came from.

I wasn't chastising FreedRadical - I was hoping he would link to it himself.

[steve2470]

33. ok, yes I will read it, thank you :) nt

[JustAnotherGen]

19. Watch this

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100046/

Not that. It's far more accurate.

Then dig into the novelist that "lifted" the story from a black woman.

Then ask yourself - with our First Lady being who she is . . . Why this novel - this movie was so popular with right wing Americans.

Old times won't be soon forgotten?

Then think about the sacrifices black women had to make due to the new slavery and Jim Crow (imprisonment of black men) to feed and clothe their families.

How their children went without - so they didn't go without.

Look up Melissa's writing on the subject. She addressed that specific stereotype of the "Mammy" in Sister Citizen. The toiling fat uneducated black woman was twisted into The Welfare Queen in 1976.

Then of course - note - Mammy would have looked like me - not Hattie. She was very often the product of a plantation rape.

I think Strom Thurmond's daughter's mother probably had a far more accurate experience of being "The Help". Many young white men raping the black women in their household as "The Help" was just standard operating procedure.

My husband says I should write a book called The Real Help about how horrifying that experience was. I know when my grandmother finally yelled "Uncle" in 1949 in Talladega Alabama (nine kids in the family) she had more than 50 women show up. The chance to work for a black family that would pay a better wage, for 30 hours work was very appealing.

Her laundry woman put her laundry first. All of those white families came behind my Grandmama.

Why was that? That's the question that hangs in the air.

White Southerners by and large didn't know any better. Not ALL - but very many.

And not better out West. Mom's family is white - and my Grammy was looked at sideways for having a white maid in La Jolla. She was a German immigrant lady. But that might have had to do being post war America. Still - my mom's friends all had Mexican maids in their homes.

[steve2470]

20. thank you for a very detailed and informative answer !

I will do as you suggest.

[FreedRadical]

22. I feel like I was right about my 12 years thread.

At the time I couldn't put my finger on it, But I knew something was coming. Over the last couple of months I have been reading with my mouth hanging open with the bullshit here on DU I have been reading about race. I will not for one second be put on the defensive for the racist shit I have experienced, that continue to this day.

That's why I snickered at two southern white "gentlemen" starting this thread hear. What should I think of you? Your happy history, or what I know of your cultural history of the time? I'm going with what I know. Not what I am told.

[JustAnotherGen]

25. There's another one

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024781614

And the usual suspects - well at least one is on there.

That's it. I'm starting a Democratic Underground Underground on Facebook for those at DU who need a safe haven from stupidity and would like to have a reasonable discussion.

[bravenak]

26. I hate that stupid fucking movie with all of my heart and soul.

The bleaching of history in that movie stands out to me.
I called it The great White Hype redux for a while. Through the entire movie i kept saying yeah right over and over. Yeah right!
Sweet young highly educated whte lady comes home and helps the help; inspired by their tribulations and deveststed because of the loss of her mammy, she helps them triumph over tragdy, while assisting them in obtaining vengance over their tormentors and financial stablity. Bullshit.

[JustAnotherGen]

27. Giovanni? Gio!

How the hell did you break into bravenak's account? You have problems with right click save!





Those were his words when he got off a flight where he watched it. Let's add in - How about when the black woman speaks we shut up and listen.

Seriously brave - this is why he HATES the "angry black woman" stereotype but thinks we SHOULD be. When we have to fight to be heard even when it's OUR experience - as he says . . . America ought to be ashamed of itself.

[bravenak]

29. You're killing me!!!!

I spent months grumbling about people gushing over that 'film'. How accurate it was..... They loved it... Strangers asked me about that movie over and over. You should have seen their faces. Absolutely Crestfallen. I felt like i stole their dreams and loved it. I made sure to tell anyone who had the audacity to ask me about that movie how they left out all the rapes and assaults. And why were all the maids so dark? Most maids were light skinned to make the household more comfortable for the employers, and they really did prefer maids who were lighter. A dark maid gave them less status. Everybody knows that. Don't they?

Helps them feel better about their nostalgia. Love how they give themselves the white savior role.
The woman who wrote that book needs not author anything else. Ever. I feel like she owes me money and i watched it on bootleg.

[LuvNewcastle]

28. I didn't see the movie, but I'd like to say one thing that I

think is a distortion in books and movies about the South in that period. Most white people in Mississippi didn't have maids. They couldn't even afford the meager wages that were paid to the women at that time. I'm descended from a long line of white southern farmers, and all of them did their own work. The white people in those movies about the South were a minority, just as slaves were owned by a small minority. I think these movies about southern life are caricatures, and accurate portrayals of southern life in books and film are a rarity. White people didn't have to deal with the institutional racism that pervaded society then, but otherwise, blacks and whites led very similar lives.

[FreedRadical]

30. A distortion? Of Mississippi?

I refer you to that mule conversation Gene Hackman had with Willem Defoe bout his shear cropper daddy in Mississippi Burning.

I found it to be a pretty accurate depiction. But hey, I could be wrong. I didn't live in 1950s Mississippi.

[JI7]

35. how could they have led similar lives when you consider instititional racism ?

especially back then ?

i just don't see it as possible.

[noiretextatique]

31. the movie was a white-washed version of the book

there were a couple of key changes in the movie. the changes made the white people seem nicer. accurate? some parts probably were, others were not. that bit about the pie...she probably would have been beaten or killed.

[NOLALady]

34. Killed.

I'm certain of it. I was not amused by that part at all. I knew that what she did was dangerous and I expected her to be killed.

[noiretextatique]

36. or beaten so severely

she would have wished for death. you are right though: i thought she was going to die too.

[Bok_Tukalo]

37. I have a very good friend that cannot stand the movie.

If I ever want to wind her up after a couple of glasses of wine, I just say two magic words: "The Help."