Black and White Thinking

Movies: The Help and Drive

The two movies couldn't be more different, yet Drive and The Help both say powerful things about race and gender in the movies. And they don't say very nice things.

Drive, an intense and violent thriller about a stunt car driver who moonlights as a getaway driver, has been receiving rave reviews among film critics. Ryan Gosling's performance as a taciturn lone wolf who descends to Travis Bickle levels of obsession and violence in order to protect a woman he loves (and barely knows) is without a doubt astonishing and terrifying. It's hard to believe this is the same kid who wooed Rachel McAdams in The Notebook.

The Help, for those who have been living under a rock for the past year or so, is a sentimental film based on the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett about black maids and their white employers in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi. Although the acting is excellent, the film is predictable and, to use a phrase that I overuse, "on the nose". It tells you exactly what you need to feel about each one of its characters (especially the white characters, who fall into two stark categories: noble, liberated hero and dastardly villain).



The Help has been enormously popular among mainstream audiences and has received fair to good critical reviews. However, various media outlets, both progressive and conservative, have taken their turn crapping all over The Help. Why? For more conservative thinkers and anti-PC police, The Help represents Hollywood Liberalism and reverse racism at its worst. To this group of haters, The Help paints all blacks as saints and all whites (save the main "women's libber" character, Skeeter Phelan) as terrible, horrible, no good, very bad racists. Ironically, the more progressive and PC factions are not much kinder, seeing The Help as condescending toward black people and implying that black people--both historically and today--need help from white people to overcome societal injustice and should be damn grateful for that help.

What struck me as interesting after seeing the two films was that although I enjoyed Drive more than The Help and my instinct is to say that Drive is the superior film, I can't help but notice that while The Help has a cast full of women, both black and white, and makes a good faith attempt to examine the lives of black, white, poor, and rich women during a turbulent time in history, Drive treats women like they barely exist at all. You've heard of the Madonna/whore complex? The erroneous and subconscious belief that women are either saintly mothers or filthy sluts? Drive is a laughably textbook example of this kind of thinking.

In Drive, there are two women with speaking roles: Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother whose husband is in jail and who catches the eye of Ryan Gosling's character. Gosling (his character is nameless) sees Irene as someone who needs protection. He ends up getting involved way too deeply in a number of crimes that lead him to basically kill his way out of trouble. The other female character is in two scenes and comes to a very untimely and unhappy ending. Oh, and there's a scene where Gosling beats the shit out of a bad guy in the dressing room of a strip club, while wide-eyed, bare-breasted strippers silently look on. Fortunately, this scene is very intense--otherwise, I would have not been able to contain my laughter at the ridiculous misogyny of the whole situation. I mean, featuring strippers in your movie is one thing--strippers can be smart and cool and sexy (see: Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler), but a room of voluptuous, nude women just freakin' sitting there as the men folk fight, curse, and all but whip out their penises for a measuring contest just makes me laugh at the sad obtuseness of it all. Maybe director Nicolas Winding Refn was actually trying to say something about the violent world of men and how women have no place in it (actually I'm sure he was on some level), but other directors have managed to pull this off far more successfully. Martin Scorsese's The Departed was all about the violent world of violent men and had very few female roles. However, Vera Farmiga's character Madolyn, was an educated woman with a successful career who could take care of herself. Note to Refn: if you're going to have only one or two female roles in your movie, at least make them dignified. kthx!


And let's not forget race/ethnicity! Yes, The Help may treat black characters with some benevolent condescension, and that's not OK, but at least there are some meaty roles for black characters in the film. And at least these characters are fully drawn. In Drive there are no black characters. The closest Drive gets to having any "ethnic" flavor are the two greedy villains who will kill for money and power--and who are Jewish. Nice. Oh, and Irene's ne'er-do-well jailbird husband who is Latino.

So while I enjoyed Drive, a film that kept me on the edge of my seat, and merely thought The Help was a pleasant movie, there's no denying that on a practical level The Help is a better movie for women and minorities. The cast is filled with women--white, black, old, young, conventionally beautiful and not so conventionally beautiful. These women have conversations with each other, and men are rarely the focus of those conversations (the film passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors). Sure, some of the characters are two-dimensional (like Hilly Holbrook, the sociopathic mean girl), but overall the characters are far deeper than the characters that populate Drive.

Neither movie is perfect, but what I found fascinating was the media (including my beloved liberal media outlets, like http://bitchmagazine.org/ and http://www.salon.com/ ) was so willing to jump on a movie filled with women and minorities for not being feminist and racially sensitive enough, while ignoring or even offering slavering praise to Drive, a film that offers women and minorities less than nothing.

My enjoyment:
Drive: 4 out of 5 stars
The Help: 3 out of 5 stars

Treatment of women and minorities:
Drive: 1 out of 5 stars
The Help: 4 out of 5 stars