The Help, Live-In Maid, and The Oblongs: From Environmental Racism to Environmental Justice

The Help, Live-In Maid, and The Oblongs:

From Environmental Racism to Environmental Justice

Recently I screened both The Help (2011), a mainstream American adaptation of the novel of the same name, and Live-In Maid (2004), an Argentinian exploration of unexpected consequences of the country’s economic crisis. There is much to critique about The Help. Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal states the film “takes us on a pop-cultural tour that savors the picturesque, and strengthens stereotypes it purports to shatter.” According to Ben Sachs of The Chicago Reader, “As in many reductive period pieces, there are no real characters here, just archetypes, namely reactionary cretins and sensitive souls who anticipate modern attitudes.” While acknowledging its shortcomings, other critics note positive aspects of the film that make the film more palatable: For example, David Denby of The New Yorker notes that the film “is, in some ways, crude and obvious, but it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen, and parts of it are so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on.” And Lisa Kennedy of The Denver Post asserts, “Thanks to a talented cast -- starting with leads Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer -- the movie is often entertaining. But The Help should have been challenging too.”

Some of the weaknesses of The Help move beyond its focus on picturesque archetypes instead of well-developed characters, however, and may stem from the film and novel’s popularity and its implications. A statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) highlights some of the film’s problems. The statement responds to the popularity of the film adaptation, noting it “is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.” The ABWH provides effective evidence for its stance: Giving adequate examples, they demonstrate that the film and book “misrepresent African American speech and culture,” especially the portrayal of the black family and its supportive place in the black community, as well as “the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.” They also note the absence of “sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse” from white employers in the film, an historical misrepresentation that contradicts the facts. The film also disregards “the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi,” except the attention given to the assassination of Medgar Evers. Reactions to the assassination are “a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight,” however, according to the statement. 

Instead of an accurate portrayal of the life of “the help” in the Jim Crow South, the film is “a coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of their own.” Jorge Gaggero’s Live-In Maid, however, highlights a growing relationship between two women of differing classes, a friendship that is heightened by the consequences of Argentina’s 2001 economic disaster. According to A. O Scott of The New York Times, the filmmaker “invites you to contemplate, within the context of two perfectly ordinary lives, the paradoxes of friendship and the challenge of maintaining dignity in a world that conspires to undermine it.” The film centers on the changing dynamic between Beba (Norma Aleandra), a middle class divorcee who has now lost her money, and Dora (Norma Argentina), a rural working class “moral pillar” who leaves Beba to find work and complete the work on her house. Although Dora does have a partner, Miguel (Raul Panguinao), Dora and Beba share the strongest of connections, a friendship that continues and is demonstrated by small gestures: a cake for Beba’s birthday, a gift of furniture for Dora when Beba must move to a smaller apartment.

Live-In Maid is a stronger film than The Help because of its close attention to character instead of stereotype or archetype, but both films begin to illustrate the issue of environmental racism and its ramifications for environmental justice. In both The Help and Live-In Maid, social, racial, and economic classes are bifurcated not only by laws and mores of society, but also by their connection to either a rural or an urban sense of place. In both films, the maids must travel distances by foot and by bus to reach their employers’ homes. In The Help, that journey is wrought with danger from the KKK, as exemplified by Medger Evers’ assassination and its consequences. In Live-In Maid, Dora’s walk from the bus stop to her home goes through bare fields of mud and packed dirt, so Dora covers her shoes with plastic booties to protect them. In The Help, the rural homes these maids occupy are clean but sparse, with chipping paint and dusty lawns, even around Aibileen Clark’s (Viola Davis) house. In Live-In Maid, Dora’s home is also sparkling clean but unfinished, partly because Jorge did not buy or lay the rest of the flooring, partly because Beba could no longer pay her.

These few scenes begin to broach one of the problems thinly illustrated by the films: environmental racism and injustice. According to the EPA, “Environmental justice ensures that no population, especially the elderly and children, are forced to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the negative human health and environmental impacts of pollution or other environmental hazard.” Environmental justice breaks down into three distinctive categories: procedural inequity, geographical inequity, and social inequity. These categories serve as the basis for the UN Draft Principles on Human Rights and the Environment, which state

(1) Human rights, an ecologically sound environment, sustainable development and peace are interdependent and indivisible.

(2) All persons have the right to a secure, healthy and ecologically sound environment. The right and other human rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights, are universal, interdependent and indivisible.

(3) All persons shall be free from any form of discrimination in regard to actions and decisions that affect the environment. (Cifuentes and Frumkin 1-2)

Although Beba exclaims that the air is cleaner outside Dora’s rural home than in Buenos Aires, the home and its surroundings tell a different story, one that aligns with the chipped (lead?) paint on the walls in the rural Mississippi Aibileen’s home.  They struck me as hidden inequities that have a lasting effect on health and well-being, mirroring racial and class bias around them.

This glimpse of environmental injustice brings to mind a more blatant and instructive look at the effects of environmental inequities, The Oblongs (2001), a short-lived animated television series, which centered on the Oblong family. The Oblongs lived in a poor valley community called Hill Valley where everyone is physically deformed or disabled because of toxins in their air and water resulting from the lavish lifestyle of the rich community above them known as "The Hills.” The Hills’ residents exploited and harmed the valley community with absolutely no regard for their safety or well-being. Although neither The Help or Live-In Maid explicitly address the environmental injustices broached by the bifurcated sense of place in both films, they provide a glimpse of another form of racism and classism, environmental racism and injustice, a form of racism that continues near waste dumps, factories with toxic smoke and water emissions, mountaintop removal and natural gas fracking sites, and nuclear and coal-generated energy plants around the world.