Bad Feminist: Essays

by Roxane Gay

  If you go to the theater without your brain (leave it in the glove compartment), The Help is a good movie. The production is competent. The cast is uniformly excellent and includes the immensely talented supporting cast of Cicely Tyson, Allison Janney, and Sissy Spacek. Both Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer received Oscar nominations because they do excellent work in the movie and Hollywood loves to reward black women for playing magical negroes. Spencer would go on to win, and deservedly, the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. While I wondered how so many talented people signed on to this movie, the cast is not the problem here. As others have noted, The Help is endemic of a much bigger problem, one where even today, a prime role for a two-time Tony Award winner and one-time Oscar nominee like Viola Davis is that of a maid.

  Davis, who is always sublime, brings intelligence, gravitas, and heart to the role of Aibileen Clark, an older maid who has just lost her only son to a mill accident and has worked her whole life as a maid and nanny, raising seventeen white children. When we meet her, Aibileen is mourning her son and working as the maid for Elizabeth Leefolt and her daughter, Mae Mobley, a chubby, homely girl who is often neglected by her mother. Aibileen’s magical power is making young white children feel good about theyselves. Whenever Mae Mobley is feeling down, Aibileen chants, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” She showers the child with love and affection even while having to listen to young white women discuss black people as a subhuman species, dealing with the indignity of using a bathroom outside of the main house, and coping with her grief. Magic, magic, magic. At the end of the movie, Aibileen offers her inspirational incantation to young Mae Mobley even after she is fired for an infraction she did not commit because that’s what the magical negro does—she uses her magic for her white charge and rarely for herself.

  Spencer is also formidable as Minny Jackson, the “sassy” maid (where “sassy” is code for “uppity”), who works, at the beginning of the movie, for the petty, vindictive, and socially powerful Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), president of the Junior League. Hilly Holbrook’s claim to fame is, among other cruelties, proposing an initiative ordering all white homes to provide separate bathrooms for the “colored” help. After Minny is fired from her job where she uses her negro magic to look after Hilly’s elderly mother, she goes to work for Celia Foote. The women of the Junior League in Jackson ostracize Celia because she was pregnant when she married, is considered white trash, and has committed other petty social sins. Minny uses her mystical negritude to help Celia cope with several miscarriages and learn how to cook, and at the end of the movie, the narrative leads you to believe that Celia indirectly empowers Minny to leave her abusive husband, as if a woman of Minny’s strength and character couldn’t do that on her own. Then Celia cooks a whole spread for Minny and allows the help to sit at her dining room table just like white folk, aww shucks. Minny asks, “I’m not losing my job?,” and Celia’s husband says, “You have a job here for the rest of your life.” Minny, of course, beams gratefully because a lifetime of servitude to a white family, doing backbreaking work for terrible pay, is like winning the lottery and the best a black woman could hope for in the alternate science fiction universe of The Help.

  Emma Stone plays Skeeter, who has just returned to Jackson after graduating from Ole Miss. She gets a job as an advice columnist for the local paper, but she has bigger aspirations and a whole lot of gumption. We know this because she sasses her mother and doesn’t make finding a man her first priority. Her first priority is to give grown black women a voice. Being back in Jackson forces Skeeter to confront many of the social norms she has taken for granted for most of her life. While her friends baldly treat “the help” terribly, Skeeter sits silently, rarely protests, but often frowns. Her frown lets us know that racism is very, very bad and that good southern girls should be nice to their mammies.

  Skeeter gets the bright idea to tell the stories of the maids who spend their lives cleaning white people’s houses, raising white people’s babies. Stone is charming and believable even if the character she plays is willfully ignorant. The charm, though, grates because it is fairly obscene to imagine that this wet-behind-the-ears lass would somehow guide the magical negroes to salvation through the spiritual cleansing of occupational confession. When Aibileen reminds Skeeter they shouldn’t be seen together, Skeeter briefly educates herself on Jim Crow laws and then ignores whatever she learned, imposing herself on Aibileen’s bewildering goodwill, urging her to share her story about what it’s really like to be a maid in Jackson, Mississippi, as if the truth were not plainly obvious. At the end of The Help, Skeeter offers to turn down her dream job in New York City so she can stay and “protect” Aibileen and Minny. We’re supposed to see this as a heartwarming gesture, but it only brings the movie’s overall condescension into bitter relief.

  The Help is, in the absence of thinking, a good movie, but it is also an unfairly emotionally manipulative movie. There are any number of times during the interminable two hours and seventeen minutes of running time when I felt like my soul would shrivel up and die. I was devastated by all of it. Everyone around me cried openly throughout most of the movie. My eyes were not dry. I am certain we were often crying for different reasons. Every transgression, injustice, and tragedy was exploited so that by the end of the movie it was like the director had ripped into my chest, torn my heart out, and jumped up and down on it until it became a flattened piece of worn-out muscle—cardiac jerky, if you will.

  The movie is emotionally manipulative but in a highly controlled way. The Help provides us with a deeply sanitized view of the segregated South in the early 1960s. There are many unpalatable moments, but they are tempered by a great deal of easy humor and contrived, touching emotional moments. The movie gives the impression that life was difficult in Mississippi in the 1960s for women, white and black, but still somewhat bearable because that’s just how things were.

  The implausibilities in the science fiction universe of The Help are many and wild. Certainly, that happens in most movies, especially these days. What makes these implausibilities offensive in The Help is that most of us know better. We know our history. There is not enough height in the atmosphere for us to suspend our disbelief.

  If you do bring your brain to The Help, the movie is worse than you might imagine. Seeing The Help through a critical lens is excruciating. At one point, while teaching Celia Foote to make fried chicken, Minny says, “Frying chicken tend to make me feel better about life.” That a line about the solace found in the preparation of fried foods made it into a book and movie produced in this decade says a great deal about where we are in acting right about race. We are nowhere. That line was one of many that made me cringe, cry, roll my eyes, or hide my face in my hands. To say I was uncomfortable is an understatement.

  Little things also grate. The overexaggerated dialect spoken by the maids evokes cowed black folk shuffling through their miserable lives, singing negro spirituals. In Aibileen’s home, for example, there are pictures of her recently deceased son and a portrait of white Jesus. After Medgar Evers is shot and JFK attends his funeral, the camera pans to the wall where a picture of JFK joins the other two, not, say, a picture of Medgar Evers himself or another civil rights leader. In another subplot, of which there are many, Skeeter’s childhood nanny, Constantine (Cicely Tyson), is so devastated after being fired by the white family for whom she worked for more than twenty-seven years, she dies of a broken heart. The gross implication is that her will to live came from wiping the asses and scrubbing the toilets of white folks. This white wish fulfillment makes the movie rather frustrating.

  Men, black and white, are largely absent from the movie. White men are apparently absolved from any responsibility for race relations in 1960s Mississippi. The movie is devoid of any mention of the realities of the sexual misconduct, assault, and harassment black women faced working for white men. We see nary an unwelcome ass grab. I don’t think lynching was brought up once. We don’t know how Aibile
en came to have a son, so we’re left to assume, because she is magical, that her child’s conception was immaculate. Minny’s husband, whom we never see, is abusive. We hear her being abused during a phone call, and toward the end of the movie, we see Minny’s bruised face, but we never see Leroy, the man who has committed these acts of violence. There is also the bizarre subtext that the woman with sass is the one who has to be kept in line through brutality. As in most popular portrayals, black men are dealt with in depressing, reductive ways when they are addressed at all. This movie shamelessly indulges in the myth of the absent black man. The actual consequences of black men consorting with a young white girl are glossed over as merely inconvenient instead of mortal. The white women are portrayed as domestically tyrannical while living highly constrained lives as desperate southern housewives, so we can sympathize with their plight.

  Race is regularly handled ineffectually in movies and fiction. I have become accustomed to this reality. And yet. I have struggled with writing about The Help because there is something more to my anger and frustration.

  At first I thought I resented the fact that a deeply flawed book has sold more than three million copies, spent more than a hundred weeks on the bestseller list, and is a major motion picture. But books I don’t like do well all the time. I don’t lose sleep over it. I also cannot deny that the book and movie have their moments. There were times when I laughed or was moved, though certainly, those instances were few and far between.

  I think of myself as progressive and open-minded, but I have biases, and in reading and watching The Help, I have become painfully aware of just how biased I can be. My real problem is that The Help is written by a white woman. The screenplay is written by a white man. The movie is directed by that same white man. I know it’s wrong but I think, How dare they?

  Writing difference is complicated. There is ample evidence that it is quite difficult to get difference right, to avoid cultural appropriation, reinscribing stereotypes, revising or minimizing history, or demeaning and trivializing difference or otherness. As writers we are always asking ourselves, How do I get it right? That question becomes even more critical when we try to get race right, when we try to find authentic ways of imagining and reimagining the lives of people with different cultural backgrounds and experiences. Writing difference requires a delicate balance, and I don’t know how we strike that balance.

  I write across race, gender, and sexuality all the time. I would never want to be told I can’t write a story where the protagonist is a white man or a Latina lesbian or anyone who doesn’t resemble me. The joy of fiction is that, in the right hands, anything is possible. I firmly believe our responsibility as writers is to challenge ourselves to write beyond what we know. When it comes to white writers working through racial difference, though, I am conflicted and far less tolerant than I should be. If I take nothing else from the book and movie in question, it’s that I know I have work to do.

  I don’t expect writers to always get difference right, but I do expect writers to make a credible effort. The Help demonstrates that some writers shouldn’t try to write across race and difference. Kathryn Stockett tries to write black women, but she doesn’t try hard enough. Her depictions of race are almost fetishistic unless they are downright insulting. At one point in the book, Aibileen compares her skin color to that of a cockroach, you know, the most hated insect you can think of. Aibileen says, staring at a cockroach, “He big, inch, inch an a half. He black. Blacker than me.” That’s simply bad writing, but it’s an even worse way of writing difference. If white writers can’t do better than to compare a cockroach to black skin, perhaps they should leave the writing of difference in more capable hands. In The Help, Stockett doesn’t write black women. She caricatures black women, finding pieces of truth and genuine experience and distorting them to repulsive effect. She makes a very strong case for writers strictly writing what they know, not what they think they know but actually know nothing about.

  Surviving Django

  I was as tense about seeing Django Unchained as I was seeing The Help. It doesn’t help that so much of the black experience, particularly in movies, is mediated through the vision of white writers and directors (as if they are the most qualified to speak to black history) who then want to be congratulated for their efforts, no matter how mediocre those efforts might be. This mediation, its constancy and impoverished quality, gets old.

  As expected, I was the only black person in the audience during the screening I attended of Django Unchained. When the movie opens, five male slaves are being herded, on foot, wearing little to protect them from the elements. Their backs bear the evidence of their torment—thick braids of scar reaching from their shoulders down to their lower backs. Most movies about slavery reveal the camera’s (director’s) predilection for depicting the broken bodies of slaves as if only through such visual evidence can a viewer truly understand the horrors of human bondage.

  It is night when these shivering, suffering slaves and their overseers run into Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a dentist he calls himself. He talks real fancy as he explains that he’s looking for a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who, Schultz hopes, can identify the Brittle Brothers he is looking for. Schultz is charming and suave in the ways of the European, showing up the American slave dealers as the ignorant men they are. It’s easy to laugh during these early moments, despite the men, practically naked and bound together by shackles, shivering in the frigid night cold. It’s a relief to laugh because then we can forget that just beyond the verbal sparring there is a deeply uncomfortable history waiting to be told.

  After a negotiation, of sorts, Schultz buys Django and frees the other slaves, who dispatch the remaining slave dealer before heading, well, who knows where. This story isn’t about them. Schultz and Django head to a Texas town where everyone stares, agog, at a black man on a horse. The unlikely pair soon install themselves in a saloon, the owner having run to get the sheriff because slaves are as unwelcome in drinking establishments as they are on horses, and thus begins the first of several plots throughout the movie. There is action and humor and an anemic love story. There is no shortage of killing, with elaborate blood spurts arcing through the air, accompanied by the moist hollow sounds of bullets landing in human flesh. At the end there is, we are lead to believe, a happy ending, and through it all we’re supposed to believe that what writer-director Quentin Tarantino has created is art.

  From the beginning, the audience around me laughed, quite heartily. What was particularly disconcerting is how they were laughing at the wrong times. Some of the laughter was nervous tittering during the first instances of the N-word being bandied among characters. As the word’s usage became ubiquitous, that laughter grew heartier while there was silence during the movie’s subtler and far funnier moments, like when Django explains to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) that Django’s business partner, King Schultz, offered to pay for a runaway slave because he was not used to Americans. When the movie’s dark humor focused on people who looked like them, the audience was silent. I became paranoid—were the people around me gleeful because they could enjoy hearing the word being used without consequence? Were they, like moviegoers during The Help, longing for a different time?

  But there might be a better way to start this conversation. Any offense I take with Django Unchained is not academic or born of political correction. Art can and should take liberties and interpret human experiences in different ways, even if those interpretations make us uncomfortable. My offense is personal—entirely human and rising from the uncomfortable reality that I could have been a slave. There’s no denying I would have made a terrible slave, either in the big house or in the fields, which means slavery would have been extra unpleasant for me. I can’t debate the artistic merits of Django Unchained because the palms of my hands are burning with the desire to slap Tarantino in the face until my arms grow tired.

  Or I could start by saying that “offense” isn’t even the word to best des
cribe how I felt while watching Django Unchained, which I have now seen twice. “Offense” is far too mild. Most movies these days offend me with their very mediocrity. Django Unchained disappoints, irritates, and at times angers and inflames.

  It’s also impossible to discuss Django Unchained without discussing the N-word, used so ubiquitously in the movie. Tarantino seemingly believes the N-word to be a new conjunction—a part of speech that connects two words, phrases, clauses, or sentences together. To be fair, I hate the N-word and avoid using it because the N-word has always been a pejorative, a word designed to remind black people of their place, a word to reinforce a perception of inferiority. I have no interest in using the word to describe myself or any person of color, under any circumstance. There is no reclamation to be had.

  There are 110 instances of the N-word in nearly three hours, something Tarantino seems to believe is historically accurate and therefore justified. Had Tarantino used historical accuracy as a guide in every aspect of Django Unchained, one might take his weak explanation seriously, but this is a movie that also includes, among other oddities, a moment with a slave merrily enjoying herself on a tree swing on a plantation run by a man named Big Daddy while nearby, another slave is about to be beaten. When Tarantino suggests he is trying to achieve verisimilitude by infusing his script with the N-word, I cannot help but feel he is being disingenuous or, at the very least, rather selective about how and where he chooses to honor historical accuracy.