The Help, A Feel-Good Movie That Feels Kind Of Icky,: Movie Analysis

New worldly conflicts arise everyday and many of these conflicts make us question our morals as individuals and as a nation. In both “Flight Patterns” and “The Help: A Feel-Good Movie That Feels Kind of Icky” we are introduced into the conflicts that race bring about in everyday life. It is indisputable that race is hard to talk about and everyone seems to have a different stance on what is racism and what is not. In both stories, race is brought up and talked about in a way that is solely bringing truth to the issue. In Sherman Alexie’s story we see the thought process about race from someone who is not white, and in Dana Stevens’ story we see how a white woman sees controversy in a film that is supposed to be about black women. Both stories

In “The Help, A Feel-Good Movie That Feels Kind of Icky”, Dana Stevens discloses her thoughts on a movie that focuses on the civil rights movement. Stevens has a lot to say about the movie, good and bad, however the focal point of it is that in the media industry we like to sugarcoat the truth about times in history. This movie is about black-white relations in America and happens to end up being mostly about a white character and her journey to enlightenment. Stevens points out that in media it seems that we address issues but always have a dominant white character. The movie offers insight into what life was like during the civil rights movement but “the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient,” reinforcing Stevens statement about the media and it diminishing the ugly truth about race relations in America (Stevens 776). She also goes on to say that media does this to allow the viewer to not feel so guilty about racism in the past and to try while at the same time putting the viewer’s mind to rest about present day racism. Stevens believes that the movie is somewhat of a blurred line between what actually happened in the past and it being a feel good movie. For it to be historically accurate, Stevens would say it

In “Flight Patterns”, Alexie shows that many people can be ignorant in getting to know someone just because of a preconceived idea based on someone’s skin color. People look past all a person has overcome and dealt with in life just because of the color of their skin. Stevens also aids this idea by saying that the media helps people see race distinctly because of leading roles in movies being often white characters and how even history stories focus on the white race. Both stories bring these issues to light and want readers to understand that there is still a problem with race relations and that media and preconceived ideas play a major part in blurring history and allowing us to forget that skin color is not the only thing that defines a