[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by shibamistress

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.

I guess I can see how people might *see* it as a white savior story especially if you're used to seeing white savior stories, but I didn't see it that way because I never saw the white protagonist as a "main" protagonist. The opening and closing shots of the movie are of Viola Davis' character, and if Hollywood as taught me anything it's that the opening/closing shot character is THE protagonist and everyone else is ancillary.

It's also made (again -- in my opinion) extremely clear that Stone's character is very privileged and sheltered and that her motivation is at least as much a career-choice / piss-off-my-mom thing than a white-man's-burden thing, so she's not playing to the Pure Hearted Savior type for much of the movie. And at least from my perspective, Davis and the other black women were on screen, front-and-center much more and in more vivid scenes than Stone is -- as I say, Stone just feels like a (well-acted) Excuse Character to explain how these black women got their story published.

Spoiler:

I also don't see it as a coming-of-age drama. Stone's character is essentially the same at the end as she was in the beginning -- she's (again, a very well-acted) static character. She *does* get a job offer off the book deal, but since she started the movie WITH said job offer (on the assumption that she get a little more experience), it's not a huge leap of development. And the boyfriend she gains leaves her because he's a racist, and he doesn't get better, which pleased my black little heart to no end. Yes, Hollywood, sometimes boys leave and don't come back. Reality!

As for the white washing... I guess I would compare it to "Fiddler on the Roof". Sure, it probably would have been more realistic for all the Jewish women in that movie to have been raped in the trash-the-wedding scene, and sure it probably was a little infantilizing of the people to make everyone so calm and accepting when they're tossed out of their ancestral village... but does that make it a bad movie? I found the movie approachable as a child because it wasn't "realistic", but still took away from it that Racism Is Bad.

I see The Help in the same category. It's made very clear (imho) that these black women have had horrible lives -- lives with few choices and very little happiness available to them. Would it have been more realistic with rapes thrown in? Yes. Would it have potentially watered down the "You Don't Have To Be A Monster To Be Racist So You Might Check That" message to a very different "If You Haven't Raped Anyone Today, You're Probably OK" message? Maybe. Would it have been accessible to as many audiences? No.

That's my two cents. If you're on the fence, you might wait until it's out on video because OMG MISSISSIPPI ACCENTS ARE HARD TO PARSE. And I went to the theater with a Texan and two Arkansans, and we ALL had trouble in places.