Linda Williams as a source for the seminar paper

Building from an earlier blog post, I will use Linda Williams’ Playing the Race Card to analyze Taylor’s film The Help. This film is incredibly popular and has become recently critically acclaimed, yet Williams would argue that this acclamation is due to the films’ emotionality—as it embodies the traits of the popular melodrama that Williams asserts in her book. For example, she continually argues throughout the first chapter that melodrama modernizes and renews itself through new objects of sympathy embedded in new social problems. Though the issue of race and consequent social and political marginalization is hardly a new problem in the United States, The Help, as Williams’ asserts has provided us with a fresh medium through which to discuss this moral dilemma; however, it does so ineffectively and ultimately to the detriment of the African American population. Due to it’s sentimentality the institutionalization of racism in the southern states during the civil rights era is simplified to a matter of feeling and emotionality. This film, not only follows the narrative structure of the book, but adds to the sentimentality of the original novel through two extra scenes in which the marginalized African American heroine breaks down in despair. Furthermore, it makes this suffering relatable to white people by paralleling the maids’ suffering to the trails and suffering of a young white female protagonist. For example, near the conclusion of the film, the film’s villain Hilly Holbrook threatens to have the maid Aibileen arrested. In response, Aibileen tearfully asks: “Ain’t you tired yet Miss Hilly?” To which Hilly bursts into tears and flees the room. This emotionality is suggestive of the trope of the film which poses the simple assertion that if we could all simply look past skin color then, as exemplified through the friendship between Aibileen and Skeeter, then racism in America could be overcome.