Feb 022012
By Colleen McGuire
Culturally sensitive film goers find it hard to accept that The Help has reached the stratosphere of Hollywood success, currently pulling in several Oscar nominations. Many critics have lambasted a white male director’s chutzpah to tell the story of the tribulations of black maids in the 1960s South, as best exemplified by Valerie Boyd’s insightful review here.
Beyond annoying, The Help actually angered me over a bizarre aspect of the film that I have not seen mentioned in any reviews I’ve read by white or black critics.The Help has got to be the most scatological movie in Hollywood history. I’ve never seen so many references to bodily waste and toilets in one mainstream film. Below are five notorious examples. (This review assumes the reader has seen the movie, so the plot and characters are not explained in depth.)
1. A big focus of the film is on the maids’ inability to use the bathroom in their white employers’ homes. Of course it was an issue in those days, and the film did use other examples of racist working conditions, but I was dismayed by the inordinate amount of attention on this one aspect of the racism — the forbidden white bathroom — to exemplify the inequality of races. Minny is filmed inside her employer Hilly’s bathroom sitting on the toilet doing her business, then lowering the lid, flushing the toilet, and getting fired for this rebellious act. Aibileen starts to enter her employer’s bathroom, but hesitates at the door to listen in on the white women as they play a round of bridge talk about the necessity of separate bathrooms for maids. We are shown Aibileen entering a port-o-john built just for her while the innocent little white girl looks on confused that she cannot accompany her beloved nanny. The bathroom seemed to be this film’s Exhibit A for tense racial relations in Southern households.
2. Of course the big prop of the whole movie was Minny’s chocolate cream pie given to Hilly after she fired Minny for using the family bathroom. It is unimaginable that any flavoring could eradicate the smell or taste of excrement that Minny added to the recipe. But anyway, this shit-pie was referenced over and over and over again ad nauseam. It was a prominent element in the movie’s story line.3. Skeeter, the non-complying white friend, mischievously mistyped a newsletter announcement so that instead of readers bringing coats to Hilly’s house for a charity benefit, Skeeter wrote “commodes.” Skeeter was motivated to get back at Hilly, who had chastised her for getting too friendly with “the help.” But why would Skeeter choose toilets as the vehicle for her practical joke? Given the subject of their antagonism, what message was Skeeter supposed to be sending? And the mise-en-scene was so preposterous: the supposedly “dropped off” commodes were meticulously arranged in Hilly’s front yard as if it were a kinky sculpture garden.
4. In the commode lawn scene, the little white girl sits on one of the displayed toilets, and her mother, aghast, grabs her off the seat, spanks her, and turns her over to Aibileen, who earnestly consoles the child. The film could easily have made the same point of a comforting maid were the setting changed to a grocery store with the kid grabbing a soft drink, spilling it, and embarrassing the mom. But no, it had to be toilets. The perverted subtext is that black maids ain’t squeamish about shit the way these prissy white ladies were.5. The film seeks to make the point that these white Southern moms didn’t know how or didn’t want to raise their youngsters, but the black domestics did so and with love and empathy to boot. One way this got depicted is in the scene where Aibileen is teaching the little white girl who sits on the toilet how to pee-pee while her mother literally runs from the bathroom. Learning to urinate is an important rite of passage in a child’s life, but there are many milestones in childhood — tying your own shoes, for example. Tacky is an understatement for how the filmmakers used potty training to make their point. Translate the subtext of this scene, and you get a message that pristine white women are terrified of anything related to bodily wastes while earthy black women are naturally sensitive and thus adept at introducing children to their bodies.
Only white Hollywood would make a mainstream movie where toilets and shit are used as significant tropes to tell a story of black-white relations, as if the topic is right up black folks’ alley — which it just may be if you’re a white filmmaker who consciously or unconsciously regards blacks as some sort of raw, primitive species.And of course, Minny’s pie just had to be chocolate, not peanut butter, pumpkin, or pecan. Bull shit.
For sixteen years Colleen McGuire ran her own housing rights law firm in Manhattan until 2003, when she shifted gears so to speak and co-founded CycleGreece, a bicycle tour company in Greece, where she lives much of the year. In 1997, she solo cycled from New York City to San Francisco. Colleen travels extensively — over 80 countries to date — and frequently writes travelogues. In addition to a chapter in Greece: A Love Story (Seal Press, 2007), she has co-authored with her twin sister two essays on ecofeminism appearing in American Political Thought, (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2004) (a university textbook), and Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 1998). She has a passion for documentaries and watches between 50 and 55 films in one week when she attends Amsterdam’s International Documentary Film Festival.
If I remember correctly, in the opening scene, or close to it, one of the indistinguishable white girls was making pen marks on the sheets of toilet paper. I guess this would signal if the maid had used the toilet. Or at least if she wiped. Stupid movie. When they weren’t focused on shit, they did squeeze in the obligatory good for nothing black male, a staple in every black themed film directed by a white male. And what purpose did Sissy Spacek serve? Shitty movie.
Vastly superior an investment of time and thought is the HBO (via Netflix disc) Thurgood.
Lawrence Fishburn in a one man stage presentation of Thurgood Marshall’s life.
The writing is excellent, concise, historic, illuminating and deeply moving.
Hollywood is best paired with the stinking rancid oil served over the stale popcorn in corporate chains.
Thurgood. You must!
I have not seen the film yet, but as a film historian, I will speculate here. You hinted at it yourself: Public and private bathrooms were segregated in the South, a historical fact that every schoolkid is taught, so I am not surprised that the idea of bathrooms and what occurs in bathrooms is foregrounded. The shot of the commodes on the lawn is a visual image that recalls that aspect of segregation but also tosses it back in the faces of those who perpetuated it. It’s a motif, if you will, that underscores a particularly humiliating part of segregation.
And, if you really think this is scatological humor, you ought to see the so-called “gross out” comedies by Judd Apatow and his minions. I am sure The Help is not nearly as immature as those male-dominated movies.
I’d say you are overthinking. There’s no sign that the black women are earthy or unafraid of shit or any other such nonsense. Clearly the snooty white women are trying to avoid all unpleasant things, which includes the grotty part of child-rearing. I thought it was interesting that Abeline never hesitates – despite her personal humiliation by the mother – to always do right by her charge. I think it was meant to show she that she had a bigger heart and did what needed to be done. She’s never known the luxury of putting unpleasant but necessary tasks off on someone else. And I can’t help but be moved by the fact that Abeline is trying to make up for the little girl’s mother. It’s shameful for a mother to not be present for her daughter’s formative experiences, including toilet training.
The Help used the excrement theme not as a metaphor for the real filth that was racism in the Jim Crow era south but as a distraction from it. Of course, making a palatable feel-good chick flick out of the real life hell that was life for Blacks in that era would be some slick trick. Was the poop plot comic relief or social commentary? Human waste as teaching tool. Holding it, letting it go, even eating it. The great equalizer regardless of race, color or creed, everybody deals with shit.
The true story of the times is conspicuously absent. Rape, KKK night raids, bombing churches, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer. Serious shit, not thoughtful shit or funny shit. Is it plausible that this privileged white woman, Skeeter, wasn’t aware that her own family, friends and neighbors were doing far dirtier deeds to their black maids than making them hold it till they could make a potty run to the gas station? I guess. It was well into the film before she even inquired about the old faithful servant that raised her. Then when she found out that her family treated their own maid worse than the maids she was conspiring with, she gave herself a pass and didn’t include that story. In the tight community of domestics surely they were aware that Skeeter’s family was no more kind and fair than their own employers, the subject of the book.
The white heroine answered the call to action because she actually saw the bathroom inequities firsthand. She seized this opportunity to further her writing career. She stayed safe and the most vulnerable took all the risk. Even as the requisite white savior character, she was cowardly. Not such good writing, I’d say.
Something is just unsettling about this film. Yeah the actors gave us our money’s worth. They really acted. But, okay I’ll say it. Whites don’t deal well with the subject of racism in america.
The reviewer has scat on the brain.
Help was a wonderful film in many respects, but may have been somewhat flawed in it’s editing. Transitions between scenes were not always smooth. The director (a home-town boy) was the product of independent movie making and got to the feeling level of the story while not being the best editor technically.
I enjoyed the film immensely – watched it twice and will again. I visited Mississippi for a month in 1954 and lived in the state for two years 57 to 59. My college education in the social sciences, I think, gave me a good basis upon which to rate Help a solid four star. I will refrain from the obvious derogatory remark about the critic.
Thanks for pointing out this bizarrely pathological aspect of the movie. I offered a whiff of it in my brief review: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/movies/124987-help/
Since this film was an adaptation, the director chose to translate not only the “plot” (sujet) elements of the text, but the metaphorical implication of this repetitive “commode” motif (fabula). I find this article to be truly beneath the academic heft of this film journal- this review flies in the face of very basic film adaptation theory for analyzing adaptations.
Adaptation theory. Sounds misleadingly flexible to me!
My question is , to what was the original cultural artifact adapted?
In theory, possible answers include: the silver screen,
an American audience,
a pan-racial demographic who reads surface as depth ,
a vehicle for two gifted actresses of color ( with a prerequisite box/ timeline for insuring their lateral mobility),
box office,
A desire that the original artifact become merely an aside?
And why ” The Help”?
What if the adaptation carried a title with a bit of balls?
What if it were titled “The Mighty”
?
What if.
Adaptation theory? Sounds misleadingly flexible to me.
To what was the original cultural artifact adapted?
In theory – possiblities include;
The silver screen,
A pan-racial audience willing to read surface as depth ,
Box office,
A vehicle for two gifted actresses of color ( with a built-in box/ timeline for their achievement and lateral mobility respectively)?,
A desire that the original artifact become nothing more than a aside to the American audience or parts thereof?
The easy and utterly misleading answer is
‘from a book’
BLOODY IPHONES! Lol
All apologies.
Mr. Krueger- Your response shows that you are a true student of adaptation theory aqnd the various critical lenses that must be explored and applied in order to understand the various layers of intertextuality working on any and all film adaptations- the psychological, sociologicaql, political, textual, etc. I think you could have written a much more informed, academic and enlightening article than was offered here.