Huckleberry Finn -- For Stupid People

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2004)

At first glance this movie/book seems like an innocuous little HUCKLEBERRY FINN knockoff -- the pitch is seemingly the same, i.e. "cute kids battle racism."
But look a bit closer and you see a great deal of smug, fatuous hypocrisy in the way race and class are presented in this dreary, pious and interminable sermon of a movie.
Blacks are mistreated. Who's to blame? Why, those no-account white trash Ewells who live down by the dump. Who comes to the rescue? Why those affluent, civilized Finches.
You don't need to be a genius to figure out that whatever the Finch family has comes from generations of exploitation and racial as well as class privilege. They are the first family in Maycomb because their ancestors owned the most slaves. Whatever goodwill they feel towards blacks now does not require any self-sacrifice or self knowledge on their part. They have the luxury of doing what's right while holding onto all the privileges their ancestors won for them by doing what was wrong. The Finches don't make sacrifices to end racism, they just punish the Ewells -- the whites who have benefited least from racism do all of the dirty work and take all of the blame.
It is for just this reason that this movie/book is so popular with clueless types like high school teachers and liberal columnists. (Hello, Cynthia Tucker! Hello, Anna Quindlen! Hello, Kathleen Parker!) Unlike HUCKLEBERRY FINN, this book lets well to do white folks off the hook by reassuring them that it's only the white trash who will have to pay the price for racial justice.
The thing that keeps HUCKLEBERRY FINN controversial after 150 years is that it questions both race AND class privilege. (Wealthy Widow Douglas is just as brutal in her racism as ignorant Pap Finn.) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a tired, cynical attempt to defend the status quo while pretending to challenge it. As Aunt Maudie puts it (with no sense of irony at all) "it's the people of BREEDING who must do something to stop this." The unpleasant fact that it was people of "breeding" who promoted (and profited from) slavery in the first place is rigorously suppressed -- and that is why this book is a wholesome classroom favorite while bad boy HUCKLEBERRY FINN remains as dangerous as ever.