The Helllllllppppp! or Why I Don't See Chick Flicks

(*I'd issue a "spoiler alert", but you've already seen this movie. A gah-zillion times.)

There is a reason I don't see chick flicks. It's the same reason I don't read chick lit. But. BUT.

The Help wasn't a chick flick. It was a serious movie examining the racial prejudice of the early 1960's in Jackson, Mississippi. Right? RIGHT?

Assessment FAIL. And I'm pissed.

This is not a movie about race. I have not read the book, so I'll keep my comments solely to the movie. However, I've no desire to read the book because if it's anything at all like the movie, I've already read it, seen it, heard it, lived it. 

The movie was filled with predictable, stock characters. First we have the gutsy, tom-boy- closet-lesbian-but-not-really girl who went to college and who, through her own trials of not being utterly stunning as all of the other Southern Belles in the area, has a soft spot for the black resident underclass, aka The Help. 

 She alone speaks up for the disgusting way all of the other women her age and older treat The Help. Of course, she's a drain on her poor, ill mother because she's the only girl her age not married and poppin' out little future KKK members. Of course. 

Smart=unattractive=smart=inexplicably non-racist in a world where everyone around her IS a racist. Simple. A very not-so-subtle sub-plot is, of course, everyone's hunt for her to find a husband. She meets a man who *seems* pretty cool. Until the end, when he does something totally out of character. But then, one can play around with character when there really isn't a character...you see, a typical chick lit/flick device is to make every male character  a vapor, a non sequitur. In other words--cardboard.  

But I digress.  

The next important character, I dare say, is the maid who broke the silence and did the right thing by breaking the silence. And her breaking her silence did....well....okay, absolutely squat for her and anyone else in her black community...but, BUT she did the right thing. Oh and a book got written and so the super-smart heroine of course sent all of them 1/15th of the royalty check. 

And finally, we can't have a good chick flick without the Bitch, can we?  Oh and she's a really mean one.

Oops; wrong one. Sorry.

whoops. Sorry...

Oh THERE you are. Silly, silly moi.

Everything, of course, works out in the end. The spunky main character's sick mother is recovering from cancer (miraculously), and the main gal gets a job offer in the big city. No, THE big city--New Yawk! Oh, but she can't possibly go...she has a new-found respect for her once racist mama....ah, this is where The Help becomes oh, so helpful:

"Ah cain't go to New Yawk. My mama needs me--"

"Oh Miss Skeetuh, yo mama, she doin' jus fine, now. Now you go'on. You go make sumfun uh yo-sef Miss, you go live yo life" ('cause you ruined ours forever here in ol' Jackson, but oh well, they wuz ruined anyways).

Psst. This is the part where you're supposed to simultaneously tear up AND feel a warm fuzzy ball growing in your chest.

*****

I hate chick flicks. This movie was not about race. This movie was about bitchy women. Race was just a vehicle the movie, and I suspect book, used to tell the story of bitchy, mean women.


All of the white women--besides our smarty-pants heroine and one social outcast-white trash woman, were heartless, maternal and human decency-lacking bitches. All of the black people in the movie were stellar examples of humanity--with the exception of an off-screen wife beater and one maid--who we can forgive because she only stole that ring to send both her twin boys to college.  A totally acceptable theft. Of course, when she got arrested, we, the audience--as well as all of the maids in the movie, were outraged that she had been caught and arrested.


Wait...theft is still illegal, yes?

The moments of "tenderness" were contrived and emotionally manipulative and that, friends, is how you can tell a chick lit/chick flick concoction from anything and everything else. They use cheap devices to elicit a tear and juxtapose them with some comic relief so you are left with a feeling of drained emotional abatement mixed with a false sense of "rightness" about the world.

I loathe being manipulated and I can smell it a mile away. It pisses me off, it's contrived and it's over done. STOP making 2-hour Hallmark commercials! Stop writing 79k-word Hallmark cards! Just STOP IT!

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is....I didn't really enjoy the movie, The Help. It was a chick flick disguised as a movie about race. And if you consider the history of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's, it makes you wonder what the author and movie makers  could have done to illuminate the actual struggles the blacks faced at this time. You know, if they'd tried to have a social conscience. Imagine....doing something enlightening and important with art. What a concept.

Instead, we just get another story about bitchy women.  

Chowder