The Butler

Abstract

The depiction of African Americans in movies over the last seventy-five years has been a susceptible issue. From Gone with the Wind's Academy Award-winning role of Hattie McDaniel as a house servant to Octavia Spencer performing the same role of a maid during the civil rights era in The Help, arguments persist on whether or not these slave like characters are supposed to be depicted any longer. Thus, The Butler, a determined biopic featuring a White House butler's life during the period of eight presidencies, confirms that they should. At the same time as the movie is far from perfect, it is one that takes pleasure in its story and does well in honoring a profession considered stereotypical by some. Thus, in this paper, we will critique different aspects of the movie “The Butler” released in 2013 and directed by Lee Daniels.

Abstract2

Introduction4

Discussion4

The Background4

The Critique5

Conclusions6

References8

The Butler

Introduction

"You hear nothing. You see nothing. You only serve." These are the instructions received by Cecil Gaines while he starts his frightening new job at the White House in the movie called The Butler (Noveck, 2013). This new film by Lee Daniels was beleaguered by hardship long before the viewers rushed to the movie theaters to watch Forest Whitaker playing the role of White House butler who served in the course of eight administrations for the period that was politically the most important one in the history of America, counting the crucial Civil Rights age. Initially there was the controversial lawful battle between the studio of the project, Warner Bros. and The Weinstein Company, which in the end caused Lee Daniels, the director of the movie to attach his name to the movie's title to evade losing The Butler title. After that appeared the critics who charged the movie of being a harm to Black populace, by making them look excessively passive and submissive in the movies (Scott, 2013). Paradoxically, such resistance is the very essential topic in Lee Daniels' The Butler, a story about Cecil Gaines, who breaks away from slavery at the age of around twenty in the Deep South and moves to Washington to turn into a White House staff butler.

Discussion

The Background

By means of the standpoint of Cecil, director Lee Daniels relates the struggle of Black America to triumph over civil inequality and racism. In his childhood, Cecil witnesses his father get murdered on a cultivated area. Mariah Cary performed his mother's role who was raped by the slave master, and then bore immense psychological disorder (Scott, 2013). His distressing and hurtful determining years in slavery turn into the structure for his unique job, wherein he turns a humiliating labor into an ingenious and adroit discipline.

The Critique

Generally speaking, The Butler is a cinematic book of history full of extremely insensitive and ruthless realities. The film in a short span of two hours drags your feet through more than thirty years value of the Presidents and the political and social challenges they came across. At the same time as such speedy movement would in ...