Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
The comment on the movie from one of the sites on the cheezburger network:
Cons: Anybody else find it a little bit insulting when movies turn the civil rights movement into a story about compassionate white people? |
My answer to this question: yes, I find it insulting, maddening, and purposely apolitical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
I am commenting on the book and not the movie. I can see where the movie would lose all the nuiance of the book.
The Book did a nice job of showing how the White Author was learning a great deal about the real lives of the Black women who had been hired to help her as a child. She benefits from the stories of the women she interviews but the women who provide their stories grow as people though the process. Along the way, the audience learns about their lives and the problems that they face and the jeopardy they were in for participating in the project.
It is not ideal, the White author gains a reputation and career off of the stories of the Black women. At least one of the contributors loses her job and the others could face recriminations and might be in physical danger for participating. But the picture it paints, I thought, was honest.
I am sure the movie misses all of this.
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Hmm....I'm still not sure I'm willing to read it, because what you say in your second to last paragraph is something I find really galling, and I have low tolerance for. That said, you've at least intrigued me enough that I might consider checking the book out from the library some day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
I saw the movie this week and I enjoyed it. I'm usually pretty sensitive to racial issues (though I am by NO MEANS perfect or free of bias or anything like that so take all this as TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE and also probably steeped in privilege  ) and the movie didn't hit any alarm bells for me.
Yes, there is a white protagonist, but considering that the movie is about a book being published about black womens' experiences during the Civil Rights movement, I think it would have been unrealistic for there not to have been a white go-between acting to funnel the stories from the actual women who experienced them to the publisher who otherwise wouldn't have given them the time of day. The movie (imho) makes it very clear that the white protagonist is there simply as that go-between and really nothing else -- she's not a savior, and she actually fades into the background in many (most?) scenes in the second half.
I do understand the point that the movie didn't go far enough to portray, say, the sexual harassment and rape that many housekeepers faced on a daily basis. But I do think that the movie strongly implies that many of the "background" stories (dozens of women are interviewed and we don't see ALL those stories) are darker than the foreground stories. I think the movie was trying to walk the line between "get people in the audience who might otherwise not come to a 'dark' film" and "don't whitewash everything in happy fun times". I felt like the movie succeeded, but that's my subjective opinion.
One of the things I REALLY liked about the movie was that racism wasn't portrayed as something everyone just "got over" by the end of the film. Pretty much everyone who starts out the movie as a racist ends the movie as a racist, and it's clear that no matter how "soft" or "private" their racism is, it's NOT okay or healthy or going to go away on its own. In some ways, for me, that made the film a lot more darker than if they had put in "heavier" material and made all the 'racists' obvious cookie-cut strawmen that most people can congratulate themselves on not being.
As for the film acting like black women love to raise white babies... I didn't see it. There's at least one interview and I think two where it's stated right out that house work was the ONLY job open to the black women at the time, and so it's clearly a job of necessity and not because they like being nannies. Only two of the women in the movie are shown liking their charges, and even then they seem less to like the children and more to identify with them as a disenfranchised member of society (i.e., the little girls are fat/ugly and the mothers are mean as a result). I didn't see it as a "black women love babies" thing but rather more of a "these particular women have experienced a crap life and are sad to see that someone else will also have a crap life". But that was my take on it, anyway.
Well, that's my two cents, anyway. 4 stars from Ana. 
Please return to the ZOMBIE DEAD HORSE mobi/epub thing. I'm an epub user myself, but I'll switch to mobi if everyone will shut up forever on this topic. *sigh* |
This has also intrigued me, though I'm probably even less likely to see the movie. But I'm, um, hyper sensitive to racial issues, and just so damned tired of the white savior stories that it's hard to even tolerate movies/books that use that tired old trope. It may be, though, that this movie is not actually faling into that. I won't know unless I go see it, I guess. But I have to suspect that if the book is doing that well, and the movie is doing that well, then I figure it must be doing some "white washing" (pun intended) because works that really explore the systemic problems with racism don't tend to be that popular.
But I guess I'd be better able to engage in this conversation had I seen the movie or read the book. My main point is I'm at least not dismissing the book/movie out of hand anymore, as I was before reading this.
And interesting that it sold 1,000,000 copies on Kindle. I hope the writer got a decent deal on the royalties on that.