Pop Goddess

Sarah’s Key opens in 1942, with a young girl hiding her little brother in a concealed closet to protect him from French authorities rounding up Jewish citizens in their Paris neighborhood. Sarah locks Michel in, with a child-like belief that he’ll be safe as long as nobody finds him. She eventually escapes from a concentration camp and makes her way back to their home, still expectant and hopeful about finding her brother alive.

*SPOILER ALERT*  We, of course, realize that there’s no way Michel could have survived, and the tragedy of the film lies in the collision between Sarah’s hope and the horrific reality. The film heightens the tragedy through strategic restraint; we don’t see the little boy’s remains, only Sarah’s hysterical reaction. If the film had actually showed us Michel’s body, it would have shut down our imagination, allowing us to put the gruesome image in a box and shut it away. Instead, the film leaves it to our imagination, forcing us to actively visualize the horrific scene. Our active participation makes it impossible for us to neatly compartmentalize the image, so that we keep creating and re-creating the image in our minds for the remainder of the film.  This echoes Sarah’s own experience, as the horror and guilt constantly invade and disrupt the rest of her life.

The film’s narrative device also disrupts our voyeuristic expectations for the movie: we’re watching a Holocaust movie, so we’re primed for images that simultaneously horrify us and affirm our humanity because we’re horrified. Sarah’s Key robs us of that easy catharsis by making us accomplices in creating the horror ourselves, in our own minds. This complicity reinforces the film’s notion that we can’t just take the easy way out and blame the Holocaust on the evil Nazis; it asks us to recognize the complicity of everyday, ordinary people, and by extension, of ourselves in similar atrocities occurring around the world today.

The poster satirizing The Help on the website theshiznit.co.uk effectively sums up my reasons for not wanting to read this book or watch the movie: “White people solve racism. You’re welcome, black people.” I wasn’t interested in watching yet another story about people of color told by and through a white person (incidentally, this is why Slumdog Millionaire and even Red Tails, for all its weaknesses, are unusual – they don’t use a white character to draw mainstream audiences in). So my initial reaction when I got my SAG awards screener DVD for The Help was, “Ugh, I guess I need to watch it now so I can vote responsibly.” Viola Davis convinced me, too. In interviews she is clear-eyed about people’s possible objections to the film but also very proud of her own and her co-stars’ performances in the film. So I figured I can honor the work she, Octavia Spencer, and Aunjanue Ellis did by watching the film, even if I have qualms about it.

Overall, The Help is better than I expected it to be. The characters are fairly-well fleshed out, not just one-dimensional mouthpieces for societal/political pronouncements. I don’t really understand what makes Skeeter suited to hear and share the maids’ stories, their experiences of daily social discrimination and institutional racism – is it just because Skeeter has curly hair and wears ugly shoes and doesn’t fit the conventional expectations of femininity in her community? Is the film really drawing a parallel between Skeeter’s “outsider” status and the marginalization of the women of color she’s interviewing?

I also can’t figure out why we’re supposed think Skeeter is so brave. Aibileen, Minny, and Yula Mae are risking their jobs and their lives by talking to her, but what exactly is Skeeter risking? The film points out that it’s illegal in Mississippi to advocate for racial equality, but is she really doing that in her book? My impression is that her book chronicles the women’s personal experiences but doesn’t necessarily call for systemic changes to end racial inequality. Perhaps the novel has more details about Skeeter’s book, but the film is vague enough that its repeated claims of Skeeter’s bravery annoyed me.

I also think the film, as a period piece, allows us to separate ourselves from the reality of racism today, as though it’s simply an artifact of the past. While the civil rights struggle addressed overt systemic racism, issues of class, race, and privilege continue to shape our lives and society. While segregation laws may not be on the books, how different would a movie about present-day domestic workers really be from The Help?

*SPOILER ALERT*

Take Shelter is a harrowing examination of the multiple layers of anxiety plaguing Curtis, an average working class man in a small-town America. Curtis suffers from unnervingly realistic nightmares, in which apocalyptic storms threaten him, his own dog viciously mauls him, strangers and even his wife attack him. Michael Shannon (robbed of Oscar recognition) makes Curtis’s sweaty, disorienting panic disturbingly palpable for the audience. The film’s seamless editing ensures that we, like Curtis, question if what we’re seeing is real, waking hallucination, or dream.

Curtis’s nightmares reflect the personal and societal pressures that weigh on him everyday. First of all, he’s worried that his dreams signal the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, which afflicted his mother when she was his age. Curtis also faces the anxiety of a blue collar worker trying to provide for and protect his family. The film connects his personal anxiety to the broader context of our current economic recession, job insecurity, and financial instability: people keep telling Curtis that he better not get fired because new jobs are hard to find; the bank advises Curtis against unsustainable loans; his brother warns him about running up credit card debt (Curtis is trying to find extra cash to build a storm shelter to protect himself and his family from the tornadoes and toxic rain that appear repeatedly in his dreams).

Take Shelter also highlights the average family’s anxieties about health care and inadequate health insurance. Curtis deals with a lack of control in his own medical care – after the counselor he finally opens up to is abruptly replaced, he faces the prospect of repeating his history and trauma to an new counselor. He struggles with the vagaries of health insurance: higher than expected co-pays, difficulty getting approval for a surgery his daughter needs. When Curtis eventually loses his job because of his erratic behavior, he loses his health benefits and jeopardizes his daughter’s health care. The situation is an argument for a national health care system if I ever saw one.

Through Curtis’s apocalyptic dreams, Take Shelter even addresses global environmental fears; Curtis sees birds drop dead from the sky by the hundreds; the toxic rain resembles brown sludge he digs up at his construction work site all day, as he bulldozes the earth and tears down trees. The film suggests that Curtis has concerns, perhaps still subconscious, about the environmental legacy of his disruptive, invasive work.

So are his dreams prophesies of an impending apocalypse or his psyche’s attempts to process the myriad anxieties which plague him every day? The film doesn’t resolve the ambiguity for us. Even Curtis himself isn’t sure whether he’s going crazy or if he’s a prophet. It’s a testament to Michael Shannon’s skill that he enables his character to pursue both possibilities with equal conviction, and it’s a testament to the film’s strength that it allows us to draw our own conclusions from its compelling ambiguity.