In 2009, the book “The Help” was released and spent more then 100 weeks on bestseller lists. It chronicled the fictional stories of Aibileen Clark, a poor African American lady who works for rich, white families in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. The book was written by Kathryn Stockett, a Caucasian lady who was inspired by an African American maid who worked for her family when she was a child. This, of course, drew lots of controversy — what would she know about the experiences she’s writing about? Would this book and movie have gotten the same backing if a black person wrote it? All of which goes to show that questions of racial equality are still alive and well today, and though we have an African American in the White House we still have not only a lot of callous people . . . but also a lot of exposed nerves.The Help tells the story of three women who build unlikely friendships around a secret writing project which, if found out, would put them all in great danger.
The unfortunately named Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (played by Emma Stone in Shirley Temple curls) wants a career writing. When she lands a job writing a cleaning tips column for the local paper she seeks help from Aibileen (played by Viola Davis in a performance I hope will get her an Oscar nomination) her best friend’s maid. Along with Aibileen’s best friend Minny (Octavia Spencer) they begin to tell Skeeter their stories about what it’s like being a maid in Jackson Mississippi.As this is a Dreamworks film (and therefore, a Disney film) this film has all the spit and polish sheen you would expect from a Disney film — full of morals and morsels of quaint truths lying around for the picking. That’s not to say that it isn’t good, because I think it is. That’s to say that they played it very safe with the material they were given. This isn’t The Color Purple. Heck, this isn’t even Driving Miss Daisy. An incident of spousal abuse is played out off screen and racial fuelled violence is heard over the radio.
This is a piece of art finely tuned so that it would not offend anyone.This film passes the Bechdel Test (look it up) — not something I can type often so I take the chance when I can. Though most of the women in this film are portrayed as gossipy, bitter, shallow minded hens, it makes it that much easier to delineate the goodies from the baddies. The performances are the reason to see The Help, especially Viola Davis whose courageous acting — willing to be filmed in unflattering ways if it is in favor of the character — anchors this movie and really punches up the film’s most heartfelt moments. Her eyes can convey all the sadness in the world. Emma Stone’s Skeeter is the typical girl ahead of her time; the types put into these kinds of movies so that we can laugh at the backwards thinking of people at that time and pat ourselves on the back because we’ve come so far. She doesn’t want to be married? She doesn’t care about having children? Instead she wants a career and finds people of a different race to actually be people and not chattel?
Jessica Chastain (most recently seen in Malick’s The Tree of Life) is a revelation in this role as Celia Foote, the girl who lives in the outskirts of town and is shunned by all the socialites. She had quite a bit of heavy lifting and some on-a-dime turns to do, and Jessica more than succeeds. Side Note: Did the casting directors purposefully go after all the redheads (Stone, Howard, Chastain) in Hollywood? If so, Julianne Moore and Amy Adams are still waiting for their auditions.There are a couple of storytelling missteps in this movie. The Help begins in the middle of the story with Aibileen already telling Skeeter her stories though the first Act is Skeeter trying to convince Aibileen to tell her stories, which kinda takes the suspenseful wind out of your sails. Then there’s a subplot of Skeeter’s boyfriend which felt a little tacked on and ended very abruptly. That said, what the story did very well is convey the equality of all people. There were, as there are today, people on both sides of the racial divide that are mean and rude and spiteful.
Just as there were, and still are, people whose feelings are hurt because a mean, rude and/or spiteful person, regardless of race, age, creed or conviction, did not understand that hate affects everyone equally.On June 26, 1948, subscribers to The New Yorker received a new issue of the magazine in the mail. There was nothing to outwardly indicate that it would be any different, or any more special, than any other issue. But inside was a story that editors at the magazine would, more than half a century later, call “perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published”: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Though now a classic, the story—about a small New England village whose residents follow an annual rite in which they draw slips of paper until, finally, one of them is selected to be stoned to death—caused an immediate outcry when it was published, and gave Jackson literary notoriety. “It was not my first published story, nor my last,” the writer recounted in a 1960 lecture, “but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote and published, there would still be people who would not forget my name.”
Here are a few things you might not have known about the story. Jackson, who lived in North Bennington, Vermont, wrote the story on a warm June day after running errands. She remembered later that the idea “had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller—it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter, the stroller held the day’s groceries—and perhaps the effort of that last 50 yards up the hill put an edge to the story.” The writing came easily; Jackson dashed out the story in under two hours, making only “two minor corrections” when she read it later—“I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it”—and sent it to her agent the next day. Though her agent didn’t care for "The Lottery," she sent it off to The New Yorker anyway, telling Jackson in a note that it was her job to sell it, not like it. According to Ruth Franklin, who is writing a new biography about Jackson, there was only one exception—editor William Maxwell, who said the story was “contrived” and “heavy-handed.”
The rest, though, were in agreement. Brendan Gill, a young staffer at the time, would later say that "The Lottery" was “one of the best stories—two or three or four best—that the magazine ever printed.” Even Harold Ross, editor of the magazine at the time, copped to not understanding it. Jackson later recalled that the magazine’s fiction editor asked if she had an interpretation of the story, telling her that Ross “was not altogether sure that he understood the story, and asked if I cared to enlarge about its meaning. When the editor asked if there was something the magazine should tell people who might write in or call, Jackson again responded in the negative, saying, “It was just a story that I wrote.” The editors did ask for permission to make one small change: They wanted to alter the date in the story’s opening so it coincided with the date on the new issue—June 27. Jackson said that was fine. “The Lottery” appeared three weeks after Jackson’s agent had submitted it, and there was instant controversy: Hundreds of readers cancelled their subscriptions and wrote letters expressing their rage and confusion about the story.
In one such letter, Miriam Friend, a librarian-turned-housewife, wrote “I frankly confess to being completely baffled by Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ Will you please send us a brief explanation before my husband and I scratch right through our scalps trying to fathom it?” Others called the story “outrageous,” “gruesome,” and “utterly pointless.” “I will never buy The New Yorker again,” one reader from Massachusetts wrote. “I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories like ‘The Lottery.’” There were phone calls, too, though The New Yorker didn’t keep a record of what was said, or how many calls came in. Jackson later said that June 26, 1948 was “the last time for months I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic.” The New Yorker forwarded the mail they received about her story—sometimes as many as 10 to 12 letters a day—which, according to Jackson, came in three main flavors: “bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse.”
Jackson was forced to switch to the biggest possible post office box; she could no longer make conversation with the postmaster, who wouldn’t speak to her. Shortly after the story was published, a friend sent Jackson a note, saying, “Heard a man talking about a story of yours on the bus this morning. I wanted to tell him I knew the author, but after I heard what he was saying, I decided I’d better not.” Her mother wrote to her that “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker … [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?” “It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open,” Jackson said later. “[O]f the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends.”
Jackson kept all of the letters, kind and not-so-kind, and they’re currently among her papers at the Library of Congress. Jackson received a number of letters asking her where these rituals took place—and if they could go watch them. “I have read of some queer cults in my time, but this one bothers me,” wrote one person from Los Angeles. “Was this group of people perhaps a settlement descended from early English colonists? And were they continuing a Druid rite to assure good crops?” a reader from Texas asked. “I’m hoping you’ll find time to give me further details about the bizarre custom the story describes, where it occurs, who practices it, and why,” someone from Georgia requested. Franklin noted that among those fooled were Stirling Silliphant, a producer at Twentieth Century Fox (“All of us here have been grimly moved by Shirley Jackson’s story.… Was it purely an imaginative flight, or do such tribunal rituals still exist and, if so, where?”), and Harvard sociology professor Nahum Medalia (“It is a wonderful story, and it kept me very cold on the hot morning when I read it.”).
It might seem strange that so many people thought the story was factual, but, as Franklin notes, “at the time The New Yorker did not designate its stories as fact or fiction, and the ‘casuals,’ or humorous essays, were generally understood as falling somewhere in between.” It went something like this: “Miss Jackson’s story can be interpreted in half a dozen different ways. It’s just a fable.… She has chosen a nameless little village to show, in microcosm, how the forces of belligerence, persecution, and vindictiveness are, in mankind, endless and traditional and that their targets are chosen without reason.” “Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult,” she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 1948. “I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”