Help with The Help

Last night the Feminist Film Night, hosted by our student association with a terribly long acronym, screened and discussed The Help. We chose the film because of its popularity, both at the Box Office and with the Academy, and because it generated such a surge of self-proclaimed anti-racist activism from many positions on the social justice advocacy spectrum. Activists fighting activists? Couldn't wait to sink my teeth in.


The production itself was, true to Disney, big-budget and expertly crafted. Nice lighting, pretty costumes, flawless sets, etc. Suspending of disbelief... check. But the film was horrendous. I went in with low expectations and they were met.


To summarize for any under-rock-dwellers who haven't seen or read this thing, the story is set in Jackson, Mississippi at the dawn of civil rights murmurings. It loosely tells of segregation by following a young white woman, who is outcast from her group of socialite wives because she has an education and career ambition, and her taboo encounters with "the help:" poor black women forced into the domestic work of white families. I won't spoil the finale, but suffice it, this is a Disney tale to the end.


Conversations following the film's release can be grossly simplified thusly:


"The Help is so great because it depicts how racist was the South and how far we've come with civil rights and how being nice to each other is good. We should keep being nice to each other."


vs. 


"The Help is a horribly racist misrepresentation of the violence of the segregated South that individualizes and masks systemic racism and sexual violence and serves only to make nice white people feel good about themselves for no longer segregating blacks as overtly."


...or something like that. Bias, explicated.


Our post-viewing debate was similarly polarized last night, though complicated a bit by our similar training in feminist critique and disparate training in theories of representation and art. One interesting question came from a literature student, who asked if the work of fiction has the responsibility to be historically accurate or ethical. Hmm. Upon hearing the film problematized by others in a compelling way, I asked if there is anything to be salvaged from the obviously flawed production. What do we do with works of fiction like this? Are they useful at all?


While utility and art slide into terrain unfamiliar to me, I ask this in the context of Hollywood films being produced for a particular kind of consumption. My question grew out of a creepy feeling that this film is going to be played in hundreds of high school classrooms across this continent. It's feel-good, not violent, loosely historical, and moral. Perfect for stimulating some conversation among students while not upsetting the parents.


I can hear some of my friends' voices now: "Stop being so critical, Amanda. It's a nice film about racism is bad." As one club attendee spoke up, maybe simply getting people talking about how racism is bad is good enough. Arguing against this view, other students urged that if the film is so clearly inaccurate, it does far more harm than good. I tend to side with the latter, since most of us have been exposed to "racism is bad" our whole lives, and instead require a better understanding of how systemic is the problem.


I guess the answer is reorienting humans to low budget films about real issues, created by and with the voices of folks who experience the impacts of issues. Sounds simple enough.

Happy International Women's Day

March 8 is my favourite day of the year. I treat it like a holiday. This morning, I relished in a long shower, picked out a magnificent blouse, baked myself a single cookie, and took a rainy stroll to my familiar cafe for an Americano, which I now savour. 

International Women's Day is one of those exceptional events that is marked by humans all over the globe. Spawned out of socialist movements in the US and Western Europe, it spread quickly to Russia and the UN and is now a recognized holiday in places of which we Canadians may have a narrow perception: Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Russia, Uganda, and several others.

But like any rip in time, the "celebration," as March 8 is touted, is a charged one. For me, it is for reflexivity, celebration and mourning. While I swirl in the luxuries of my privileged class and race position, I take up the emotionality that fuels my work and relationships. For one day, my unique power and disenfranchisement are of central focus.

During our celebrations here in Canada, I'm cautious of the slippery slope of universalizing language, and frightened by the potential for turning inward to eclipse the unliveability of many women's lives. It is a peculiar sensation to be all of joyful, grateful, enraged, and sad, while women and girls will lose their lives today because of their gender.

Strange as well is the way I feel contrastingly about my position as a Canadian woman under Harper's majority government. C10, C30, the baiting of citizens as enemies of the state (foreign radicals, child pornographers), the robo-call scandal, and a particular set of budget cuts suggest a new regime under which women's rights stand to be undermined. Our rights have been won and can be lost, and many of "us" over here on this putative liberated continent would like to see women's rights kicked back a notch (see Sandra Fluke is a slut).

The release of the Kony 2012 video at the beginning of this week is remarkably apropos for reflecting on our relation to our own and "Other" issues. There is much to say on both the video and its reception, but for now I treat it as an opportunity for us to be critical of our own sense of universal ethics. To recognize the video as a progressive tribute to human rights is to be normal and safe. To be critical of the Kony 2012 campaign, we dare for our thoughts of moral behaviour to be far away from our familiar sense of ethics. At the risk of sounding critical for the sake of critical thought, what is endangered by international campaigns like Kony 2012 and IWD?

Moral philosophers (Adorno, Butler) point that our collective ethos is invariably conservative, and only once an idealization (a sense of nationalism, for example) loses its credibility can we stimulate conversations about nonviolent behaviour. Flipping this idea around, universal ethics are violent in that they only become known as enforced as "universal" when they are challenged. We can think about burgeoning resistance to our government of the day in this light: we moved along without climate justice in our frontal lobes until someone called us radicals, and now moral behaviour and what is "Canadian" is called into question. Adorno's account is useful for today's commemoration, as we consider how in our focus on "women" as a category, we are both solidifying and dissolving problematic narratives, as well as experimenting with moral behaviour.

And now I'm putting Adorno in one pocket and pop music and butterflies in the other, to stay alive in critical thought and full of determination. Happy International Women's Day!