"The Help" movie

pugmadkate
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:51:01 +0000

I really wanted to like The Help, but in the end I just couldn’t. It’s just one in too long a line of books written by white people trying to capture the black experience in the South. There is a lack of authenticity to it that I could not get beyond. Even the author of the book says she has no real idea what the experience was like for her family’s black maid but the book was her attempt at imagining it.

Yet I love “To Kill a Mockingbird” which, of course, was written by Harper Lee. I think it’s because I believed Scout’s perspective, which, of course, was Harper Lee’s own life experience as a child during that time in the South.

Which is not to say that one must have lived what they write. But in the case of “The Help”, I just didn’t buy into it.