The Help

The Help

Release Date: August 10, 2011
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Starring: Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone, Cicely Tyson, Sissy Spacek
Genre: Drama
B.R.A Rating: D-Danger

SUMMARY: Set in Mississippi during the 1960′s, a southern society girl returns from college determined to become a writer. She decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern white families. In the process she turns her friends and family’s lives upside down while pulling the women she interviewed headlong into the civil rights movement.

WHAT WE SEE: This film glorifies the mammy figure to the heights of black superwomen. These women care for the needs of their employers in the midst of Jim Crow, but manage to actually love the households they work for. In a film based in 1960 Mississippi, there should be a plethora of black men, but there are only three, and only one of them is , the preacher. The other two black male figures are an abusive husband to one of the maids (Minnie), and a random man on the bus who leaves the other maid, (Abeline) to fend for herself when riotous conditions break out after the murder of Medger Evers.

Multiple White men are featured in the movie and they are all successful, stereotypical southern gentlemen who provide well for their families. None of their wives have to work. They try to say that an unlikely friendship was forged, but nothing is unlikely about a a woman who is considered “White Trash” and one that never quite fit into society life reaching out to the Black women who cared for them throughout their childhood. Additionally, neither of these “New Era Sisters” fully faced the upheaval and tribulation of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, one (the white trash) was gracious enough to learn to cook and still offer Minnie a Job, while the other went off to New York to become a writer after stealing the stories of 13 anonymous Black women.

• The Stereotype Scenes: There are the stereotypical scenes of the sassy or inept housekeeper defying the house rules, stealing, and making fun of their employers.
• Stereotypical Characters: The black man on the bus is a stereotypical coward, making advances, then leaving a female helpless against danger, there is the looming stereotype of the abusive black man forcing his daughter to quit school to go work as a maid, there, there is the cycle stereotype “I knew I would be a maid because my mother was a maid and my grandmother was a house slave.”There are the church stereotypes that the majority of black people find solice in their church without doing anything to make a difference.
• Positive Black Role Models (2) The main two characters overcome many challenges and their own fears and difficulties in circumstances to make a difference and become a part of the Civil Rights Movements
• Positive Black Messages (1) The message is that Black People can make a difference dispite their station in life. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t show any positive results for doing so. Excpet to make a southern socialite eat shit and live to tell about it.

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