I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free:

On Rise Of the Planet of the Apes and The Help By

Max S. Gordon

There is…a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead…this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.

-James Baldwin, (Nobody Knows My Name, 1961)

1

You know something very bizarre is going on in Hollywood when the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes tells more about the black experience in America than The Help.

I went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes because it’s summer, the time for escapist movies, and right now there is a lot I want to escape from. I’m tired of hearing about the Tea Party and debt ceilings; Christine O’Donnell, pampered and indulged by Fox News, just walked off Piers Morgan’s talk show because he had the nerve to ask her as a politician about her views on gay marriage and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: the Bush insanity is making a comeback. I go back and forth between being outraged and disappointed with Obama and feeling genuinely sorry for him. Having not run for president as a black person, he can’t play the “discrimination” card against John Boehner & Co. now when he needs it most. (Whether he has the most powerful position in the world or works at McDonald’s, Obama’s black in America, which means he has to deal with at least one racist white person at his job.)

An hour into Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and on the verge of tears, I felt questions of politics and race more present than ever, and thought, “What the hell is going on in this movie?” So much for escapism.

One thing that was definitely going on was the beauty of Andy Serkis’ peformance as the chimpanzee Caesar. (Regrettably, it is almost impossible to discuss the film without giving away some plot details.) Caesar’s mother is killed after she goes on a destructive rampage in the laboratory where she has been used for drug testing. It is later discovered that she was trying to protect the baby no one knew she had. Caesar, as he is later named, has absorbed traces of the drug given to his mother to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s. The drug, it is soon discovered, also has the effect of increasing mental ability. When the research is terminated, all the chimps are put down, but one of the scientists, Will Rodman, played by James Franco, sneaks Caesar home from the lab and raises him. Caesar goes from an adorable baby to a soulful, intelligent adult. When, during a misunderstanding, Caesar attacks a neighbor fighting with Will’s father, he is sent to a court-ordered sanctuary and forced to stay there, separated from everyone he knows and loves. It becomes clear that the sanctuary is a brutal place, and the apes there reflect long-term oppression and neglect: rage, depression, sickness, in-fighting, hysteria, and heartbreak. Rodman is forced to leave Caesar, and is tricked into thinking the sanctuary is a safe place. The apes are kept in dark, damp cages out of sight, where they are treated cruelly, taunted by a white overseer.

So many things are happening in these scenes: the primates in their cages and the attempts to the communicate through the bars despite their differences (Caesar befriends a circus orangutan), recalls enslaved Africans trying to communicate with each other whilst speaking different languages during the Middle Passage. At one point, Caesar has a hose turned on him as punishment for rebelling, recalling images of brutality from the civil rights movement. The man who runs the Sanctuary tells Rodman to make sure to call before he comes, meaning he wants time to prepare for his visit and hide the signs of abuse. Rise of the Planet of the Apes then becomes a movie about those thrown away in our society, about institutional care for the mentally ill, or elder care when patients are left to waste, only to be “cleaned up” for their families on visiting days. In the yard, when all the apes are briefly allowed to leave their cages, Caesar is forced to defend himself from another inmate. The viewer experiences the horror of being incarcerated, of having to survive within the prison system. Because there is no condescension in Serkis’ performance, nor in the writing or directing, the scenes have the power to overwhelm one emotionally. When the apes orchestrate their break from the “sanctuary” there is a soulful look between Caesar and the orangutan, a deep, mature, knowing exchange that made me want to sit up and shout, “Now that was definitely a black look!”

At one point in the movie, when the testing of the drug is reinstated, a new chimp named Koba is brought in, who has clearly been through hell. His face alone can move one to tears, or terror. I loved the movie at this point for showing us that face, because every black person in America has at least one family member with a face like that, whether we admit it or not. It’s the cousin in prison, or the relative driven mad by racism or poverty. It’s the face of an angry slave, a face that has been whipped and tortured. It’s a dangerous face, a face that you keep incarcerated, or your boot pressed down against, because if that face ever gets up, it’s going to have something for your ass. (There’s no face like this, by the way, in The Help.)

On one of the promotional posters I saw, an ape is holding up his fist, Black Panther Party-style, and the tagline reads, “Evolution Becomes Revolution.” Could it be that when Hollywood finally decides to tell the truth about black lives, it’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes? And, if so, how fucking shady is that? Perhaps no one would come to see a bunch of black people rioting and throwing metal spears at police cars (spears made from the broken fence of the local zoo where the primates liberate others from captivity), but they’ll watch these apes. And with one very cruel exception, the apes are surprisingly non-violent. They kick ass, but only when they feel they have to: and there are many instances where the film could have poured on the sadism, but the apes make their point, and let the people go. They don’t want revenge for revenge’s sake, but self-determination.

(One person they don’t let go, however, is the greedy, unscrupulous black man who finances and runs the lab. David Oyelowo may have the singular distinction of being the longest-surviving black man in a horror film. I wasn’t sure what to make of his casting, but it does provide an interesting curly-cue, having the evil capitalist in the movie be black. (Shades of Condi Rice?) As more blacks seem to be craving a piece of the corporate, capitalist pie without apology, or scruples, Rise of the Planet of the Apes may be making the point that to the oppressed and the poor, the distinction between whites and blacks in power may not be so distinct anymore.)

I came out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes feeling larger and beautiful, which isn’t easy for a black man to admit, because the last thing you want anyone to compare you to, or to compare yourself to in a racist society, is an ape. I am aware that a white writer might seriously hesitate to write a piece comparing Caesar to a black man. But the real truth of the movie is an emotional one, transcending race and categorization. Rise of the Planet of the Apes could have been done in the “blaxploitation” tradition, a revenge fantasy for the oppressed, but it goes deeper than that. It speaks to anyone who has been brutalized, but even more significantly, underestimated. And if you’ve ever been raped, or bashed, or bullied, or called a faggot for being gay, or “caged” by being made “other”, you know what it means to want to escape from the cruelty of being unvalued, to find your own sense of self-definition and power.

When Rodman is reunited with Caesar in the forest and offers to bring him home, Caesar, who is now smart enough to talk, says, “Caesar is home” with the resonance and power of James Earl Jones. He starts out the child of a kidnapped mother that he never really knew (a mother captured by black hands in the movie’s preamble, referencing African tribes’ participation in the slave trade), and through intelligence and skill survives the prison his oppressors put him in. Creating a liberation experience from his incarceration (Nelson Mandela), he finds his courage and independence and becomes a leader.

Nina Simone sings, “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. I wish I could break all the chains binding me.” It feels utterly bizarre to suggest people of color see Rise of the Planet of the Apes because of its healing power, but I will say that when Caesar’s black hand opens his cage for the first time, you feel the potential to be released from your own, and you rejoice.

2

My first real introduction to the film The Help was a movie poster I saw at a bus stop: two black women in maids’ uniforms, whispering conspiratorially, and standing beside two well-dressed white women seated on a bench. I immediately recognized the actress Viola Davis, whose work I have come to admire greatly, and I was intrigued. (I’d heard about the book, but I hadn’t read it.) I felt the usual black skepticism about Hollywood’s depiction of black life: “Will they finally get it right this time?” and tried to respond with the well-known (from movies), black good- naturedness; “Just give it a chance.”

My second introduction to The Help was from a friend who, after seeing the trailer weeks before, wrote on his Facebook page, “I love Viola Davis, but The Help can kiss my ass and go to hell.” I wondered about his hostility, found the trailer online, and in those few minutes saw exactly what he meant. A discussion ensued, as most of us realized that Hollywood definitely wasn’t going to get it right this time, or perhaps any other time, and that this film, like so many others about the “black experience” was going to be an assault on not just our family histories, but on American history, for which we could all be outraged, white and black.

It was clear from the trailer that The Help was trying for something, but since that something wasn’t historical accuracy, I’m still not sure what that something was. What is clear is that it was created in the “chick-flick”, summer-vacation, drop-your-pre-teenage-daughters-and-their-friends-at-the-mall-to-get-them-out of-the-house movie romance variety, with a little civil rights back story tossed in for spice.

This cynicism isn’t mine, however. It comes from movie studio boardrooms and marketing departments, and a screenwriter, typing away eagerly at his adaptation while trying to solve a problem which has nothing to do with history, and everything to do with business: how do you create a movie about civil rights without lynching, or fire-hoses and police dogs turned on crowds, or crosses burned on lawns, or angry white men, or angry black men, or sex, or hate, or cruelty, and still find room for laughs, romance, a mother/daughter story, a spunky career-girl story, and a happy ending? Definitely a conundrum, which could only lead to the dissociated, warped script that unfolded on the screen in front of me.

Sitting in the theater for the first fifteen minutes of the film, I gave The Help a chance, thinking it would be impossible to tell the story of black maids and the houses they worked in Mississippi during the 60s, without something ringing true. And with a sold-out, rapt audience, I was eager to find out what that truth was.

But about a half hour later, a deeply unsettling feeling came over me as I began to realize that The Help was determined to create an all-female universe conveniently called Mississippi, where Southern violence didn’t exist. An hour later, concern became horror, as a white character, who has hired Minny, a black maid (Octavia Spencer), behind her husband’s back (she wants him to think she can maintain the house herself), suggests to her, “Maybe we could burn the chicken a little?” (so he won’t find out). With the same TV emphasis as J.J.’s “Dyn-o-mite” on Good Times, and Arnold’s, “What you talkin’ bout, Willis?” on Diff’rent Strokes, Minny all but looks out into the audience and replies: “Minny Don’t Burn No Chicken.”

The Upper West Side audience I sat in began clapping and cheering, and I sank lower in my seat, thinking of the franchise potential of the phrase, and wondering who would be savvy enough to exploit it first – KFC or Popeye’s.

What The Help does have is great period sense - the right furniture, clothes and hair - that makes you sit in awe, as if you’d gone to a museum and it had suddenly come alive. Which is another reason why the movie can get into one’s consciousness and confuse things. Older people who grew up during the period may know they are watching candy, but children may see The Help as authentic, as documentary. The Southern women presented to us are all in perfect shape and ready for the cover of Elle. No fat Southern women here, no physical grotesques or eccentrics like in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote or Harper Lee, and no “crackers” either. Poor whites, like Mayella Ewell in To Kill A Mockingbird just don’t exist in this movie. Because the film and the people in it are beautiful, the shots filled with light, and the racism is friendly, The Help has all the racial immediacy and power of the two months old magazine you half read in the beauty parlor while sitting under a hairdryer. You can follow the minor persecutions of the black characters by whites in the movie and still think, “Gosh, I love her hair like that,” “That green dress is beautiful against her skin…” “I wonder what’s in that fried chicken recipe?”

Near the end of the film, Minny’s employer finally learns how to cook on her own, and presents Minny with a dinner she has prepared, including fried chicken done all the way through with no red parts. The movie shows us Minny sitting down to the meal, and the white couple she works for standing back and watching proudly, while the voice-over tells us that the food is so good (and filled with love, presumably) that Minny finally finds the strength to leave her abusive husband (whom we’ve never seen.) At this point, I looked around at the other members of the audience as if we were in the Twilight Zone, and instead of shock, or anger, found rapturous and delighted faces illuminated by the screen.

I take the risk of turning off some white readers at this point, and perhaps a few black ones. For those who loved the book, the loyalty borders on absolute devotion. Stockett does have an ear; some of the sentences in the book ring true, even if the situations do not. And that’s part of the problem. With the maids’ voices written in the first person, readers may take Stockett’s conceit, of a white woman who publishes the authentic stories of black women, as the actual book they are holding in their hands, blurring fiction and reality in an irresponsible way. The book boasts a legend that sixty agents rejected the material, ignoring the fact that, while we may often feel empathy for unpublished writers who keep trying, some manuscripts are rejected for a reason. (Flannery O’Connor once said, “Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”) As of August 2011, The Help has spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and of course it's flying off the shelves, it's a civil-rights Valley of the Dolls; Jim Crow South the way we wished it might have been. As the movie plays to packed theaters, it is quite clear that The Help is reaching the status of cultural phenomenon – making our resistance and outrage appropriate and critical.

I am also anticipating the reader who becomes exasperated with this kind of analysis of film, thinking it unworthy and a waste of time because, “Hey, it’s only a movie.” As Susan Sarandon said about film in Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet:

“Oh, movies are important and they’re dangerous because we’re the keepers of the dreams. You go into a little dark room and become incredibly vulnerable - on one hand all your perspectives can be challenged, you could feel something you couldn’t feel normally. It can encourage you to be the protagonist in your own life. On the other hand it can completely misshape you.”

In a narcissistic society, the mirror that reflects you is the television and movie screen, and if you don’t see yourself in the accepted cultural image, you don’t exist. Which is the reason that, like Charles Brown trusting Lucy not to yank the football one more time, blacks come to the movies to see their experience portrayed, and are disappointed year after year. We are starving for portrayals of authentic black life, and may even munch on a thick piece of corn pone like The Help and say it’s great in order to justify our wasted money and time, or to support black actors we admire. And what’s the alternative, the Soul Planes, Barbershops and Madea?

We sat through Mississippi Burning in the 80s, an awful, brutal film that was a racist assault in itself. In that movie we were told black people were getting their heads bashed in and victimized until the FBI started the Civil Rights Movement. I know I saw Ghosts of Mississippi about the shooting of Medgar Evers, but all I can honestly remember about the entire film was the outrageous, drag-queen-sized wig that Whoopi Goldberg wore as Myrlie Evers; ridiculously large, and obviously designed to cover up Ms. Goldberg’s dreadlocks, that wig would have been a liability to any serious freedom fighter on the go simply because of its weight. Years before, Cry Freedom introduced a mainstream public to Steven Biko, a South African freedom fighter who died in police custody, and the white journalist who covered his story. For the first half of the movie there are riveting scenes of Denzel Washington on the witness stand, testifying about cruelty in South Africa. Then halfway through the movie, Biko disappears and it becomes the story of a journalist on the run with his manuscript about Biko. Pauline Kael, movie reviewer for The New Yorker, called the movie “dumbfounding” and wrote “The (white) family escape story recalls The Sound of Music.”

The movie studios patronize us because they don’t trust us; assuming a heroic black story won’t be dramatic or financially successful enough without a white tour-guide, the lawyer, the white best friend, the “voiceover”, someone to whom the audience can “relate” and who helps mitigate the potential force of unfiltered black anger unleashed on a white audience. So after watching the trailer of The Help I thought, “Great, now we get to find out that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks didn’t lead the Civil Rights Movement after all. It was actually a young white woman in her early twenties writing for her local newspaper who, after interviewing the black maids in her town, helped raise their consciousness and understand the need to change their lives.”

(I remember in 3rd grade begging my mother to take me to the movie Grease. She relented, but reminded me as we left the theater, “They didn’t dance like that in the fifties; in fact, they barely danced at all. We danced like that.” I remember at the time being slightly annoyed that she was raining on my parade: I just wanted to be cool, and see Grease like all my friends. And since there wasn’t anything factual on TV or in the movies to challenge my fantasy, I accepted what I saw as truth.)

And that’s my fear about The Help – that there will be millions who see this film, and think that the worst thing black maids in white households had to deal with during Jim Crow were petty white women in bouffant hairdos; white women who were about as dangerous as the popular girls in high school who sulked because they didn’t win Homecoming Queen. Where is the feature film, by an A-list director, that really tells the story of the true terror and heroism of that era? (No one say Eyes on The Prize. While beautiful and brilliantly done, Eyes isn’t fiction, and fiction, paradoxically, has its own truth, allowing one to absorb the material in a way that perhaps documentaries or even real-life bio-pics can’t.)

I knew that no matter what soured ideas The Help proffered, what would be fresh and nuanced was Viola Davis’ performance. When Skeeter (Emma Stone), who has decided to interview and publish the stories of the black maids who will talk to her, asks Davis’ Aibaleen what it is like to raise white children, knowing that it means time away from her own, Davis pauses and looks out the window, and there is more history and pain in the circles under her eyes, the haunted, hollow look on her face in those seconds, than in the entire remainder of the film. Viola Davis never loses her grip on the character Aibileen, but the movie simply can’t contain her; and in fact, the conviction of her performance makes the film all the more ludicrous. A lesser or more histrionic actress might have distracted us with her “effects”, but Viola Davis is all quiet, a vortex, and with all the indicating and broad, low comedy acting around her, she seems to be in a completely different movie – the one I wanted to watch.

But you take what you can get, and black audiences have done so since the movies began. When Sidney Poitier’s escaped convict jumped off the train, sabotaging his own freedom to save Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, black audiences were outraged and bewildered. But even with the ridiculous, “We Are The World (When We Go Down the Drain Together)” ending, the rage and dignity in Poitier’s performance, and the “Bowlin’ Green, Sewing Machine” song he sings throughout the film, speak to the blues tradition of irony and dislocation, and tell a moving black truth.

We were encouraged to watch Lana Turner’s costume-changes and jewelry in Imitation of Life, but watched instead the unconditional love of Juanita Moore’s Annie Johnson, faithful and compassionate to her daughter Sarah Jane who has been psychologically ripped apart by racism, and is “passing” as white. When Sarah Jane chases her mother’s casket at the end of the film, begging for forgiveness, we are chasing that casket too, trying to understand our own mothers, why we resented them for not protecting us from racism, and ashamed that they couldn’t always protect themselves. Sarah Jane feels humiliated by her mother’s being a black maid because in the paradigm of a racist society Annie is economically powerless, not white, and, as Sarah Jane defines her, nothing. It is only after she dies that Sarah Jane can truly see how powerful her mother was; that her ability to love and forgive, despite the cruelty she has seen, and never to stop loving Sarah Jane, makes her spiritually majestic, all-powerful. I don’t know if that was what Douglas Sirk intended, but it is in Juanita Moore’s heart-wrenching performance.

And Ethel Waters in Pinky, and Member of the Wedding, Morgan Freeman in Diving Miss Daisy, and Cicely Tyson in everything: there is a truth in these performances, whether the movies are honest or not, a direct communication. Without uttering a line, Samuel L. Jackson has a face that no slave-master would ever turn his back on. When Forrest Whittaker’s thief watches the money blow away in the last two minutes of the foolish Panic Room, the look on his face tells me more about black people, and dreams, and money, and despair than any other movie I’ve seen. And Training Day could have been just another black/white cop film, but in Denzel Washington’s hands, Dectective Alonzo Harris becomes Shakespeare. Cicely Tyson appears in The Help at one point as Skeeter’s family’s maid, fired after decades of service and having raised Skeeter from an infant. Tyson is an actress who can tell the history of a people simply by the way she lifts her chin or crooks her finger. Her presence in The Help elevates it considerably, giving it some pedigree; but with less than ten minutes of screen time, she can’t redeem it, only making one wistful for her acting career, and for a time when TV, at least, seemed interested in saying something about the black experience with Roots, A Woman Called Moses, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

It is always a pleasure to see veterans like Tyson, and, also in the film, Sissy Spacek. While her part as the mother of the most monstrous of the Southern belles, Hilly Hollbrook, is wasted, Spacek does have a funky laugh that is the blackest and freest thing going on in The Help. Spacek is not a stranger to this Civil Rights genre, having starred in the underrated The Long Walk Home, a movie, one could argue, where Hollywood got it right for once. In that film, she plays Miriam Thompson, a Southern woman with privilege, who, after becoming more conscious about what is happening in her town of Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, decides to become one of the white women who offers rides to black maids during the bus boycotts. The film is rare in that equal time is given to the white and black families, so that when Goldberg’s Odessa Cotter arrives at work, we know who she has left, and who is waiting for her when she gets home - what that “Long Walk” means to her and her children. When Miriam decides to join the car pool, we are aware that the decision may cost her a lot more than her marriage. This is a movie of heroes, black and white. The film ends with a confrontation in a parking lot where Miriam’s brother-in-law, part of a group of white men who have come to break up the car pool with baseball bats, hits her in front of her child, and with the others begins to intimidate a group of black women waiting for rides, while chanting “Walk, Nigger, Walk.” One should see the film, if for no other reason, because of the miraculous moment that takes place in its finale. As the men terrorize the group of women, a black woman steps from the crowd with her hand extended and begins to sing a hymn. Soon the other women join her. There is no way this can read on the page as effectively as on the screen. The women begin to sing in the style that I identify with Bernice Johnson Reagan and the group Sweet Honey In the Rock, tapping into the “Holy Ghost” power of the Civil Rights Movement. Until that scene, I hadn’t completely understood the supernatural energy that flowed through the Movement, the role played by faith, and the victory of spiritual beauty over evil. The song neutralizes the white men (perhaps reminding them of songs sung by the black women who raised them) and has the same effect as the 1963 historic march in Birmingham, Alabama when Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety, called for his firefighters to open hoses and unleash police dogs on the crowd of young people, who knelt in prayer and sang. When the police and firefighters saw the faces and heard the singing, they refused the orders, some of them even crying. Dr. King later said, "It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence."

To someone else’s sensibility, it may be a triumph that a movie about race created in 2011 doesn’t have the word nigger in it, but a 1960s Mississippi without the word isn’t Mississippi, nor America. It’s not even America in 2011. When Minny comes into the house of her prospective employer for the first time and sees the chaos, she says, loud enough for the woman to hear, “What the hell?” recalling Oprah Winfrey as Sofia in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, saying “Hell naw” to Miss Minny, the mayor’s wife, who has asked Sofia to be her maid. For her backtalk to whites, Sofia is struck across the face by the mayor. When she hits him back, she is surrounded by a violent mob, and eventually the sheriff who, instead of helping her to safety, hits her with the butt of a gun, knocking her unconscious. Sophia is imprisoned for eight years without seeing her children. The Color Purple was often criticized for not being the most accurate depiction of the South during the 30s, but it was at least remotely recognizable. (A friend of mine in the 80s watched The Color Purple with her grandmother who said afterwards, “That’s exactly how it was.”)

The issue isn’t that Minny is sassy - so is Sophia; the problem is that her sassiness has no context, no basis in reality, so it isn’t empowering, just a meaningless stunt by moviemakers. In a South where Emmett Till was murdered for flirting with a white woman, blacks feared violent reprisals for the smallest “infractions”: not moving aside when a white person passed, forgetting to add a “yes, sir” in answer to a request, direct eye-contact. The problem of Minny’s behavior as a character is not just that she’s lazily conceived; it’s revisionist, and disturbing, and creates a fantasy South where black women say and do whatever they want to white women with no fear of retaliation.

I was truly appalled by The Help when I realized where the story was eventually going: Minny, fired because she has used the white family’s toilet instead of an outhouse created for her, exacts revenge on her employer by feeding her one of her famous chocolate pies, secretly filled with her own feces. The white employer, Hilly Hollbrook, finds out because Minny tells her, in front of her own mother, “Eat my shit.”

Rise of the Planet of the Apes may not be “blaxploitation”, but The Help certainly feels like it – a black person’s revenge fantasy, or a white person’s fantasy of what a black person fantasizes. Like those people who say -and there’s always one -“I don’t know why anyone would be a slave. Me? When the master said ‘Boy, go pick that cotton’, I’d have told him to kiss my black ass.” The idea of an oppressed maid exacting revenge on her cruel boss is dramatically interesting, perhaps even justified, but only if we believe the context surrounding the insurrectionary act.

When the book is published in the film, and Hilly is publicly humiliated and ridiculed, if this is the Mississippi of history books and family lore, we know the hysteria to come: someone is going to pay for Minny’s action and, if it is not Minny, it will be one of her children or someone randomly chosen - a woman defiled in the street, a cross burned on a lawn, a church bombed. Minny’s behavior is more than irresponsible - as a woman with children and a relationship to her community, it makes her psychotic not to consider the consequences of her behavior in the South, or anywhere. Because the movie presents her action as little more than a practical joke, and audiences laugh with her, we have no sense of the danger she faces and are invited to share in this delusion. When the movie ends, Minny and Aibileen (hate that name! Was Stockett aware how close it is to the name of a popular make-up remover?) reassure Skeeter who is off to New York and worried about leaving the two black women behind to deal with the fallout - “You listen to me, Miss Skeeter. I'm on take care a Aibileen and she gone take care a me”, and, “them bad things gone happen whether you here or not...so don't walk your white butt to New York, run it", the three stand together laughing and framed by glowing sunlight. Something really insane is going on.

Aibileen loses her job, but, more importantly to her, the relationship to the white child she loves. As she walks away from the child banging on the window at the end of the picture, past trimmed lawns that recall Beverly Hills more than Mississippi, the camera pans over her in a Mary-Tyler-Moore “You’re Gonna Make It After All” style. Viola Davis moves us with her tears, but by this point, if you’ve been looking for a civil rights movie, or any movie at all, you’re completely numb. Or at least I was. But when the lights went up, everyone clapped, smiled at each other and gathered their things to go home.

The Help is a movie about race in Mississippi with no consequences, because race and consequences make movie audiences nervous. Which means The Help isn’t a story about Mississippi, or racism, or black women, or white women, or anything, or anybody. Do audiences come away from this movie saying, “Isn’t it amazing how those maids fought back!”, or do they think wistfully, “I wish I’d had a black maid who loved me like Aibileen.” (Aibileen tells all the white children she raises “You’s Kind, You’s Special, You’s Important.”) We never see an Aibileen who is frustrated with a white child, or wants to strangle it because the kid may turn out to be just like one of the women she works for. Aibileen is always kind, always patient. The script makes her low energy the result of grief, but that’s too easy. Aibileen, (with the exception of a few lines), has almost no growl, not even in private when white people aren’t looking. Which means her devotion is total – she is Mammy.

I would love to dismiss a movie like The Help as just another Hollywood flick gone awry, but it’s more sinister than that. When trying to understand the nature of human cruelty, while it is probably futile to rank persecutions, one would definitely argue that Jim Crow in the South contained some the cruelest treatment of human beings in history. The Help goes from being inept to diabolical when we don’t see the cruelty, because someone stands to make less money from the film if they put it in. So what we end up with is a “feel –good” civil rights movie. It is inconceivable to me that someone would make a film about Nazi Germany without brutality, a story about Jewish women and a Nazi officer’s wife who befriends them and wants to hear their stories, with none of the “ickiness” of concentration camps, or gas chambers, or mass genocide. Civil Rights deniers are next. “Really? That many lynched….that seemes exaggerated to me: I saw the Help and it wasn’t that bad in Misssissippi….”

And how can you blame the children who watch the film for thinking this way, children who are learning about Civil Rights for the first time? The white men in The Help are innocuous, like something out of The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy, sitcom white men who look at their watches and have to go when things get a little heated with the black maids and their wives. These are not the white men or their sons as depicted in lynching photographs. What universe does The Help exist in? If the scariest thing a black woman had to face in Mississippi during the 50s and 60s was angry looks from her white employer’s bridge club, what does it mean for Rosa Parks to refuse to move to the back of the bus, or for Fannie Lou Hamer, despite being brutally beaten for exercising her right to vote, to have said, "The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember." In an interview that Viola Davis gave with Moira McDonald of the Seattle Times, Davis said she also based the character, "very, very loosely" on Hamer, who was born the same year as Aibileen, in Mississippi. Watching the film, you can see the love for women like Hamer in Davis’ performance, but anything resembling Hamer’s life, or the evil she faced, ends there.

We come to art, to literature, to film, to understand ourselves, to understand how to love. And, of course, to be entertained, which is sometimes reason enough. But when our need to be entertained is so great that we distort facts, only allowing in what we want to see, then our relationship to that art becomes pathological.

3

When I went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I ran into a black gay friend of mine I hadn’t seen for years, Darren, and his white partner. I had just come out Rise of the Planet of the Apes with mine. The four of us exchanged greetings and introductions, two interracial couples, and, in anticipation of this piece, I bought a ticket and joined them in line for The Help. Adam told me as we waited for the film to start that the book was so good that he had literally considered taking off work the day he started in order to finish. When the movie was over and we compared notes, my friend asked me what I thought, and I told him I thought the film was ludicrous. Adam looked slightly wounded, and without looking at me again turned to my friend and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

I followed them into the lobby and at one point Adam and I were alone when Darren realized he’d left his bag in the theater. As we stood there in what now felt like hostile silence, Adam very decidedly focused on his phone. When I asked him, “What did you think of the movie?” he shrugged without looking up and said, indifferently, “It was good.”

I left the theater despising him, myself, and The Help. I felt degraded by the whole experience, right down to the shit in the chocolate pie, and thought, “The men and women who fought in the Civil Rights Movement deserve better than a movie that goes down as easy as popcorn, and is pretty much forgotten when you hit the street.” As I walked up Broadway before catching the subway, I tried to repair my memories. I thought about my friend, Iyatunde Folayan (LaTrice Dixon), and her film My Grandmother Worked – detailing her experience one year as a nanny, and the two generations of white children her grandmother raised. I thought about the black women I’ve seen in the almost twenty years I’ve lived in New York, taking care of white children on the Upper West Side, and gossiping together in the park, the articles written about their being underpaid, underfed, dealing with sexual advances and temper tantrums from employers, even violence. I remember asking myself so many times, particularly when they became aggressive with the kids in their charge, Why would you lowball someone’s salary, abuse them, and then entrust your child to them? I wondered if the employers felt they knew these women at all, and what were the women’s private thoughts about the children they raised.

I remembered the song “Pirate Jenny” by Bertolt Brecht, and what a different timbre it took on when Nina Simone sang it:

“You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors

And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking.

Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell

In this crummy Southern town

In this crummy old hotel

But you'll never guess to who you're talkin'.

No. You couldn't ever guess to who you're talkin'.”

How could I see myself in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and feel completely absent from The Help? (There are no black men in The Help except for a grinning preacher, a benign soda jerk, and a husband heard over the phone.) The Help, cleverly and conveniently, gives Minny the young children in the film, while Aibileen has only a grown son who has died as a result of racist indifference. By not giving Aibileen daughters, the viewer is spared the kind of devastating scene found in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, as the young black girl Pecola is humiliated by her mother, whom she calls Mrs. Breedlove, in front of the white girl her mother works for (and who calls Mrs. Breedlove by her first name, Polly.) Pecola accidentally tips over a pie her mother has baked for the white family. Morrison writes,

“In one gallop she was on Pecola, and with the back of her hand knocked her to the floor…’Crazy fool…my floor, mess…look what you….work…go on out….now that….my floor, my floor….my floor.’

“The little girl in pink started to cry. Mrs. Breedlove turned to her. “Hush, baby, hush. Come here. Oh, Lord, look at your dress. Polly will change it.” She went to the sink and turned up water on a fresh towel. “Pick up that wash and get on out of here, so I can get this mess cleaned up.”

Mrs. Breedlove comforts the frightened white girl, and Pecola lets herself out while taking the family’s laundry home. It’s a grotesque and horrifying scene, and anything like it in the film would shatter The Help and its romance.

When I got home, I watched Jesse Jackson, in his 1984 speech for the Democratic National Convention, address the audience with memories from his childhood:

“People say, ‘Jesse, you don’t my situation.' I understand….They see me running for the White House, (but) they don’t see the house I’m running from…

“My mother, a working woman, so many days she went to work early, with runs in her stockings…she knew better, but she wore runs in her stockings so my brother and I could have matching socks and not be laughed at at school…at three o’clock on Thanksgiving day we couldn’t eat turkey, because Mama was preparing somebody else’s turkey at three o’clock, we had to play football to entertain ourselves, and then around 6 o’clock she would get off the bus and we would bring up the leftovers and eat our turkey, leftovers, the carcass, the cranberries; I really do understand.”

4

Loving ain’t easy. James Baldwin once said, “We try to treat people like the miracles they are while protecting ourselves from the disasters they have become.” As Americans, white and black, some of us are trying to have - have succeeded in having - loving relationships, despite the brutality of the past. And sometimes we are scared, and confused, and searching, and guilt isn’t the answer, honesty is. And art, when it is authentic, when it is truthful, can lead us. When it lies, or withholds, strictly to make money or to reassure, then it betrays us.

There is love in Viola Davis’ performance, and Emma Stone’s as well, but it simply isn’t enough. This period in our history had women and men, both black and white, who were brave, many of whom lost their lives; and they, and we, deserve a whole lot better than the bullshit science-fiction found in The Help. And if there’s a choice between the unreal, pastel-colored South of the film and its paternalistic treatment of blacks, and the movie “reality” of primates who have the courage to liberate themselves, then I’ll stand with the apes.

copyright Max S. Gordon

www.maxgordonworks.blogspot.com

maxgordon19@hotmail.com