I recently watched the movie The Help. I did so in part because I grew up in the Deep South and my mother worked as a maid for a lot of years.
She began by cleaning apartments and eventually parlayed that into being "the maid" for various wealthy families in town. So starting at age twelve, I constantly heard her complain to my father "When I married you, I HAD a maid. Now I AM the maid."
I think she was so vocal about that in hopes that her two daughters wouldn't waste their youth on an easy-button answer of marrying well only to find like she did that it has an expiration date and when your youth is gone, even if you still look good for your age and are energetic and hardworking, your best opportunity to establish a serious career is gone and never coming back.
I'm not Black. My mother wasn't Black. She was an immigrant who spoke English as a second language, another demographic that frequently works in service jobs or manual labor, sometimes in spite of being educated and having professional skills.
I knew someone who was using a cleaning service run by a Spanish-speaking immigrant. Back home, this immigrant had been a physician but couldn't pass the test for that job in English, so she started a cleaning company.
It's unfortunate this movie gets lambasted for being a White-centered story. It's a movie based on a book called The Help and it's a book about the writing of a book called The Help.
So like the movie Dances with Wolves, the title is a bit deceptive and that's a common practice for trying to hook your audience without giving away too much. Also like Dances with Wolves, it seems to be a good faith effort by a White American to respectfully include a demographic not treated respectfully in a lot of our stories or underrepresented, but "no good deed goes unpunished."
No, we can't hear "It's important progress and hopefully opens doors for future stories that are more centered on some other demographic." Instead of a "progress, not perfection" ethos, we get hatred for people trying to make a positive difference, in spite of being -- le gasp! -- White.
I'm personally tired of all White people being lambasted like every single White person is obviously a White Supremacist and evil incarnate and if it doesn't overnight cure all the social ills of thousands of years of history, we are clearly ALL Hitler and there's nothing whatsoever in between being Jesus or Hitler.
And if you aren't Jesus, you deserve a kick in the teeth. (If you are Jesus, they crucify you and claim you like being a martyr, contrary to what he actually said.)
FYI: If you are a person of color, this isn't exactly a means to win friends and allies over to your cause.
The title of the movie can be interpreted as being about the Black maids in the story but it potentially has more than one other meaning, including the price of trying to help in the face of a large scale social issue and different actions in the story you could describe as "help" or as "the help" like you might use the phrase "the cure" (for what ails you in a non medical sense) knowing this isn't really curative but does improve things.
The actual main character is a White woman who wants to be a writer and the book is the first book published by a White woman. In some sense, it's autobiographical.
It's the most respectful means possible for a White woman to try to write a story with substantial Black characters without it being cultural appropriation or pissing on people of color.
The story is about Skeeter who comes home from college and is told the beloved Black maid who raised her "quit" and also she doesn't approve of the catty, racist women around her and how some of them treat their Black household help. These things plus her aspirations to become a writer eventually lead to her writing a book of anecdotes as told to her by Black maids, even though this is illegal in the state of Mississippi at the time and a form of civil protest in which she and the maids are risking violence against them or jail time.
I don't recommend watching it in part because there is a fairly major plot point where a maid supposedly puts human feces in a pie as revenge against the White psycho bitch who mistreated her. I find this detail objectionable for multiple reasons, including the fact that it seems implausible to me.
When it is first alluded to without being explained, I figured she did something to make her sick or tried to poison her. There is a real historical incident where a Black cook tried to make the family she worked for ill because she was angry about how they treated her and -- oops! -- accidentally killed several people.
There's also a big focus on how awful some of the White women are and I hope the book was more focused on how some people are fond of the help and affectionate towards them. I found the movie unpleasant and stressful because of those details without me ultimately feeling it was justified.
World War Z was also a stressful movie to watch but ultimately left me feeling like there was a point to putting me through an emotional roller coaster and worth it. This movie didn't get there for me.
I feel compelled to write about it anyway because one character is a victim of domestic violence and that's been on my mind here lately. I'm trying to figure out how to address this difficult subject.
This character ultimately leaves their abusive relationship and the narrator frames the decision like "Someone did a nice thing that improved this person's self esteem."
That's mostly not how that works and the scene really did two other things that both add up to "This person was given reason to believe they had job security and a support system in place."
It's plausible she finally left the abusive relationship. It's not really plausible that "She previously stayed due to low self esteem."
She doesn't behave like someone with low self esteem. She does behave like someone who knows she has limited options in this shitty world.
Last, I will note that her decision to finally leave is mentioned like it was a casual and easy thing. The reality is that leaving is often a harrowing experience.
Abusers are more likely to kill you when you try to leave than at any other time. It's one of the reasons their victims often stay and endure the abuse for years or decades.
Footnotes
I'm not completely against hiring domestic servants, but I think if you do hire them, you should be good to them out of enlightened self interest. See Turning Slums into Basic Decent Housing.
I've never had a maid myself. If I were obscenely wealthy, I might need one and it would remain a pain point for me because of my medical situation. See To Maid or Not to Maid.
You may not know the name Hattie McDaniel, but you SHOULD. I've quoted her and talked a little about her at least twice before on this site.