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The Help Starring Emma Stone

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Written by Jonathan Jacobs

The Help is a film about early twentieth century racial inequality. It is purportedly a "feel good" movie that will bring whites and blacks closer together in cultural harmony. Racial relations films are often heralded as brilliant and their directors are regarded as visionaries. The Blind Side blew critics away, too bad not literally (a joke people, I am a pundit myself). Once upon a time Higher Learning launched a thousand message boards. The Help is simply the newest and freshest feature film about racial divides.

A rough sketch of the plot is as follows; a young and beautiful southern woman has graduated college, a feat not achieved by the majority of her hometown friends. Her entire town seems mired in pre-Civil War antics and social policies. Blacks (Viola Hope, Cicely Tyson) are regarded as diseased and lowly. Black women are used to raise white girls because white mothers are unfit for motherhood or are too prissy to bother trying. These savage white employers prefer not to loan their "servants" money and try to keep separate toilet accommodations to prevent the spread of disease. These employers are so pernicious they try to prevent their recently returned friend/acquaintance from interviewing their workers.

Emma Stone is fantastic, of that there cannot be any doubt. Every man with hormones surely must think she is the cats pajamas. Having said that, this movie, The Help, is everything I reject in principle. I am not a fan of Caucasians being portrayed as southern backward rubes and hicks and dumbasses. Not every white person held down blacks or prevented them from earning a living or from being educated. Frankly, if a mother prefers not to have her maid use her toilet more power to her. That's why we rich folk have guest bathrooms. Furthermore, we elites really enjoy scripts in which the speakers use the plural of word not just the singular (catch my drift?).

While critics will likely tell unsuspecting audiences that The Help is the great movie of the year and suggest its story is boundlessly  beautiful and spans across all races and cultures they would be wrong. Sorry, I am honestly offended and borderline sickened. I am sick and tired of being portrayed (for being white) as some sort of a discriminating Neanderthal. Guess what ladies and gentlemen: I have never owned a slave, I have never employed a maid, and my grandparents are immigrants. Why on earth would a film such as The Help enlighten me rather than cast aspersions at me? Tell your sob story somewhere else, it does not resonate here, heck, it don't even vibrate.