Did any of you see the movie “The Help”? I didn’t. The black essayist Toure’ saw it, and despised it, for interesting reasons. Excerpt:

I don’t see any of The Help‘s journey as pleasurable for anyone: black women are oppressed and fight back in a passive-aggressive way. (Black men are all but invisible in this world.) Whites are mostly evil, or else sheep: soulless and brainless. It’s a Lifetime-y simplistic movie, a Disneyfication of segregation, with a gross and unintentionally comical stereotype parade marching through it. There’s the ditzy blonde who can’t manage to do anything but get dressed. There’s the callous ice queen who thinks blacks have special diseases that can be transmitted by sharing a toilet. There’s the undeterrable do-gooder. And then there are the blacks who are the latest iteration of that Hollywood staple: the magical negro. They are blacks who arrive in the lives of whites with more knowledge and soul and go on to teach whites about life, thus making white lives better.

Magical negroes exist so that the knowledge and spirit that comes from blackness can enlighten or redeem whites who are lost or broken. Think of Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance, Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile, Anthony Mackie in The Adjustment Bureau and Sir Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in The Matrix. In The Help, Octavia Spencer’s Minnie actually says to a white woman, “Frying chicken just makes you feel better about life.” I must be doing it wrong. Once the ditzy blonde learns to use Crisco properly, she does indeed feel better about life. Even though she has just learned that she’s probably infertile. Minnie helps turn her boss lady into a regular Martha Stewart, and what does she get out of it? The promise of lifetime employment as the family maid. Thank yuh, ma’am. Davis’ Aibileen tells the white kids she’s raising, “You is important,” while being constantly reminded that she is not.

The magical negro role is offensive because despite his or her wisdom and, often, supernatural power, the black character is subordinate to weakened whites. They are there only to help whites.

Read the whole thing.

Again, let me say that I didn’t see “The Help,” so I have no idea how fair this criticism is. But his general point about the Magical Negro strikes me as exactly right — and it reminded me of a comment a reader posted on an earlier thread today, in which he noticed that to a certain kind of person, the Oppressed are meaningful not as actual human beings (for better and for worse), but as symbols that confirm that person’s worldview, and make them feel good about themselves. In other words, they aren’t people, only therapeutic totems. A while back, when Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was just out, the black critic Stanley Crouch tore him to bits by accusing him of sacrificing art to ideology. Lee had remarked in an interview that blacks needed to “control” their images in film. That set Crouch off. He said rather than seek to “control” the ways blacks are portrayed on film, they should be trying instead to expand that range of images. Because that’s what real life is like. I can well imagine why a critic like Toure’ would find a movie like “The Help” to be patronizing and dehumanizing with its good intentions.

But it’s fair to ask: what is the alternative? Can you imagine a film that explored the more morally complex, even problematic, side of race in America, in which blacks are victimizers as well as victims? Would it not make a lot of people very squeamish, and find itself condemned for racism? What studio, which artist, needs that? Between the rigid racialism of someone like Spike Lee, and the do-gooder patronism of something like “The Help,” where is the middle ground for filmmakers who want to explore race as it is actually lived in America, as opposed to how bien-pensants wish it were lived, to set down their cameras and start filming?

I thought Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” was perhaps the best cinematic study of race, bigotry, and racial identity in America that I’d seen in ages. It didn’t deny that Eastwood’s character was a bigot, but it also showed his complex humanity — and that of the Asian kid he took under his wing. The film showed how racism can be overcome, but also how racism from within a minority community — the appeal to racial solidarity among the Asians that enabled the gang to prey upon weaker Asians — can cause oppression.

Eastwood could do this, I think, in part because he used a racial group (the Hmong people of Southeast Asia) that few people had heard of, therefore had not hardened their opinions about. Could you make something like that about American whites and American blacks? Could you make something like that about American Anglos and American Latinos? I don’t know. It would be an extremely risky proposition, artistically and financially. Eastwood also could afford to take that chance because he’s Clint Eastwood, and has nothing to prove, or to lose.

Hollywood, and American popular culture, went for so long demonizing blacks that it’s unsurprising to find it sanctifying them. When we all arrive collectively at the point where people are treated simply as people, not as therapeutic totems, then we will have gotten to a better place.