The Invisible Counterpoint

"This isn't about me." That's what eager, well-intentioned and lily-white aspiring writer Skeeter tells the nervous African-American maid Minny in "The Help." It's her pitch to try to get Minny to open up about her experiences as a domestic, and her feelings on the roiling racism of Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s. But it's also one of the most telling moments of what's shaping up to be one of the most controversial and surprisingly divisive movies of the year. Because novelist Kathryn Stockett wrote a book that wasn't just about her. And that has a made a lot of people very uncomfortable. [. . .] On Monday afternoon in Times Square, the audience for "The Help" was surprisingly packed and unmistakably diverse. For a few hours, a variety of young people and older matinee goers, men and women, black and white, sat down together and watched a movie about what happens when black and white people sit down together. Then, as Vio...

American historical films are forever refighting old wars, congratulating themselves for being on the right side, and encouraging viewers to pat themselves on the back for being on the right side, too. They view the war from the general's tent up on a distant hill and imagine that they're right in the thick of it. That's how Paul Haggis' "Crash" swept the Oscars in 2006 -- by serving up a contemporary story of Los Angelenos who said and did brazenly racist things in public constantly, as if it were 1967 and everyone was wearing love beads, Afros and hard hats. The characters seemed crude and primitive, lacking in self-awareness, unenlightened; this made them easy to label, judge and dismiss. A variation on this strategy has enabled another race drama, "The Help," to become an instant hit , a likely Oscar contender, and yet another reminder that when mainstream cinema depicts discrimination, it tends to ask the same two questions: "How did this...

As a book and a movie and a social phenomenon, "The Help" functions as a kind of Rorschach test that measures how you feel about the history of racial inequality in America. [. . .] Stockett herself was not born until 1969, and drew on her own experiences being raised by African-American women who worked for her parents in the '70s and '80s. Her book is set in the dramatic context of the early '60s, when the civil rights movement was just beginning to capture national attention, but as she has said in interviews, relations between affluent white Mississippians and their black hired help really hadn't altered much between that time and her own childhood. And for all the cultural shifts America has experienced since then, the fundamental economic disparity between whites and people of color has hardly improved, if indeed it hasn't gotten worse. A recent study by the Pew Research Center suggested that the current recession -- and can we stop pr...