My World is My Stage

See what I did there? lol.

Anyway, I saw The Help over the weekend and it evoked a lot of thought out of me. It’s really hard to talk about it. I have a menagerie of feelings. I’m proud to know that we, as a people, have endured the life of the home servant. It makes me SO sad to know that after that, we still have so far to come. It pains me that the movie was more about the white women and their lives than it was of the Black women. I know that the movie didn’t focus on the Black men of the day but I wanted to hear from them. I am both happy and pissed the fuck off at some of the relationships the maids developed with the kids and women they were paid to take care of. I’m saddened that Hollywood will turn anything into a fucking love story! THE ACTING (by some) WAS FUCKING AMAZING! There weren’t that many moments that I realized that I was, in fact, watching a movie, so the production value was good. I don’t love the movie but would add it to my personal collection.

If you know me you know I don’t go to the movies. Before I give you more detailed reasons know that my NUMBER 1 reason is that it costs too much for me. I don’t get paid a lot and I’d rather spend my little bucks on other shit. My other reasons is that I’m just overall dissapointed in what the movies offer. I got so mad while watching the previews (I tweeted, twice! and three times about it and will talk more about that experience later on) that it carried over to the first 20 minutes of the movie. Granted, the first 20 minutes also pissed me off. Those images of Black women having to acquiesce to every whim of these white women irked the shit out of me. It made me uncomfortable, in a good way. I was forced to face my history and I wasn’t able to turn away.

At my new job, I’m working on this play Neighbors that does a similar thing, only with blackface. It makes audiences confront our own complicity and doesn’t let us just shrug it off but makes us sit in it, like a baby who has to stay in their soiled diaper for hours.

Theatre, and art in general, should challenge us, make us think, make us feel, make us talk, inspire us to make change (in ourselves and in the world around us) and entertain. While I disagree, in some sorts with a lot of the plot pieces in the movie, I overall felt like it satisfied my aforementioned criteria.

If you are on the fence on whether to go see this movie or not, please do. If not only to give Viola Davis, Cicely Tyson, Octavia Spencer, Aunjanue Ellis and others credit for their hard word, but to have the experience of confronting your understanding of self in relationship to others, in the context of the experience of Black women working in the domestic service.

I have to do more research on the origins of the movie and the book and will come back on how I feel like the movie did in comparison to the book. I’ll also give my review of the movie. Look out for my post about the previews before the movie and why that adds to the reasons I don’t go to the cinema. Busy week. I hope to write it all…(current history says I won’t…)

If you’ve seen the movie (or read the book) what do you think about the movie?