TKM's Contexts: Watching The Help!

Our last classes in school have been centered in the book we've been reading, "To Kill a Mockingbird". To learn more about its context, we spent two classes watching a movie called "The Help", which is based on a book wrote by Kathryn Stockett and shows the racial differences in the United States in the 20th century.

Personally, I don't watch movies very often. They commonly bore me and it's hard for me to enjoy them. For example, I saw Batman last week and I found it not fun and too long. However, I loved "The Help". It's strange, because I wouldn't expect to have fun watching a movie for educational purposes, because people tend to think that everything related with learning is boring. The way they combine the reality and social problems in the US with an intriguing story about a young and white women who wants to stop discrimination and writes a book with the unfair stories of black women is awesome.

However, one thing that I would reject about the movie is how they stereotype people. This is because the movie shows black women as wise, intelligent and poor people, while they represent white women as superficial, stupid and immature persons. I found this difference too extreme and I can hardly think it was really like that in those times. By this I mean that I'm sure discrimination was strong in those times, but you can't expect people that watches the movie to believe that every blond is dumb.

Although the drawback expressed above affected my opinion about the movie, I still liked it a lot and had lots of fun watching it. Also, it helped me to understand in a better way the reality people lived in those times and how some rules, as the Jim Crow Laws, influenced in people's life.