The-Help

It’s time to look at the most popular posts on the blog over the last year. I was a little more apathetic about updating this year and my traffic suffered accordingly, dropping off by ~4,000 hits. The top posts haven’t changed too much, but here goes: Top Posts Remixed Objection, No Yakuza 3?, L4D2 (Again), and Pokémon Cosplay [Game Overview] (402) I know precisely why this link is top of the list. It features a stunning picture of Jessica Nigri very liberally cosplaying a Pikachu. It seems sex sells. Surprise! ...

There was no real-life book similar to Skeeter’s magnum opus; it’s a fictional flourish that feels like a college-educated white liberal’s wish-fulfillment fantasy of how she would have conducted herself had she been time-warped back to the civil rights era. I wouldn’t have just stood by and let it happen. I would have done something! Something brave! This silliness reminded me, perversely enough, of an old Eddie Murphy routine tweaking macho black males’ fantasies of how they would have behaved if they’d lived in the pre-Civil War South: “Brothers act like they couldn’t have been slaves back 200 years ago … ‘I wish I was a slave! I would f— somebody up!’” ...

Listen, this isn’t going to be a detailed, well-researched piece on white guilt. Heck, it isn’t even slightly researched at all. I have neither seen the movie nor have I read the book, but I find this kind of thing troubling, so I’m gonna speak on it for a few seconds. The Help is being advertised in such a way that it appears to be about a bunch of mean old racist ladies in Mississippi who are enforcing segregation and keeping black women down. Yes, something like this probably happened in Mississippi and, hey, perhaps enlightened women like Skeeter did exist in the 1960s South. Regardless, I still can’t get over how movies like this exist to show how wonderful white people are for helping black women. ...