I don’t see any of The Help‘s journey as pleasurable for either side: Black women are oppressed and fight back passive-aggressively. (Black men are all but invisible in this world.) Whites are mostly evil or sheep: soulless or brainless. It’s a Lifetime-y simplistic movie, a Disneyfication of segregation, with a gross and unintentionally comical stereotype parade marching through it. There’s the ditzy blonde who can’t manage to do anything but get dressed. There’s the callous ice queen who thinks blacks have special diseases that can be transmitted by sharing a toilet. There’s the undeterable do-gooder. And then there are the blacks who are the latest iteration of that Hollywood staple: the magical negro. They are blacks who arrive in the lives of whites with more knowledge and more soul and go on to teach whites about life, thus making white lives better.
Magical negroes are there to use the knowledge and spirit that comes from blackness to enlighten or redeem whites who are lost or broken. Think of Will Smith in the Legend of Bagger Vance, Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile, Anthony Mackie in The Adjustment Bureau and Sir Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in The Matrix. In The Help, Spencer’s Minnie actually teaches a white woman, “Frying chicken just makes you feel better about life.” I must be doing it wrong. Once the ditzy blonde learns to use Crisco properly she does indeed feel better about life. Even though she’s just learned she’s probably infertile. Minnie helps turn her boss lady into a regular Martha Stewart and what does she get out of it? The promise of lifetime employment as the family maid. Thank yuh, ma’am. Davis’s Aibilene teaches the white kids she’s raising, “You is important,” while being constantly reminded that she is not.
The magical negro role is offensive because despite wisdom and, often, supernatural power, the black character is subordinate to weakened whites. They are there only to help whites. This relates to screenwriter James McBride’s recent assertion that in cinematic terms we’re often what he calls “cultural maids.” He means we’re there to service white characters — not always literally serving them but functioning as a vehicle for them to show or prove their morality and/or heroism. We appear as mere props in white lives. McBride says, “Only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid. Because you’re a kind cultural maid. You serve up the music, the life, the pain, the spirituality. You clean house.”
Outside of films produced by the small number of black filmmakers and the rare George Lucas or Quentin Tarantino, black characters and stories are almost always relevant only in terms of what they do for or bring out of white characters. Our lives are valuable solely because of how white characters respond to them. I never imagined white supremacy would rest when the theater lights went down but isn’t anyone else tired of seeing whites save blacks and blacks magically improving white lives?
I wouldn’t have gone to see The Help but for the Oscar race raising a conundrum. A movie that is loathsome to many blacks has given people we respect — Davis and Octavia Spencer — a serious shot to win Oscars. But their progress comes as two steps forward and one step back: Davis and Spencer have acquired the talent and access to be players in Hollywood but are reduced to updating Hattie McDaniels. I can’t blame them, large roles don’t come along every month, sometimes an actor has to take what’s available. I once (politely) asked George Clooney why he does bad movies. You’d think he has access to every great script he wants. He said you’d be surprised. There aren’t many great ones, and he has to work every so often to keep his name aloft and because there’s many people in Hollywood relying on him working. Davis and Spencer aren’t in a position to reject work like this or th
via ideas.time.com
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