The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees is a solid, well-made film that leaves audiences feeling great. I’d recommend it purely for enjoyment’s sake, its nearly flawless portrayal of girls and women aside. What makes me genuinely enthusastic about it though, does have to do with how females are presented and begins not in the world of film, but of politics.

When Hillary Clinton became a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, I read an excellent post by Marie Wilson, the President of The White House Project, about the perils of being a “one and only” – the only woman or minority trying to enter into a field previously dominatd by white males. You can read the entire post here.

In it, Wilson describes a study by The White House Project that shows how difficult it is to succeed as a “one and only,” and how as the sole representative of your sex or race (or both) you are expected to speak and act for others to an unfair and unrealistic degree. She ends by arguing that a “critical mass” of female and minority leaders is the only way to truly level the playing field and benefit from the diverse viewpoints new kinds of leaders bring.

Back to The Secret Life of Bees. The writer and director, Gina Prince Blythewood, is a black female. The five main characters are female, four of them black. Males play peripheral roles at most, and the ratio of black characters to white ones is high. This is exciting because females and African-Americans appear much less often than white males in big, important movie roles. A black female writer/director is even rarer. This film contributes to the overall “critical mass” in Hollywood.

Including five excellent lead roles for women, four of them for African-American women, allows The Secret Life of Bees to avoid the pitfalls of the “one and only.” It gives audiences a richer understanding of what it means to be female, and it gives girls and young women a variety of role models to choose from. Someone watching the movie doesn’t think, even subconsciously, “This black female character behaves in a certain way, so all black females must behave similarly.” She thinks something like, “This black female character behaves in a certain way, but this other black female character behaves differently. And this white female character behaves in some ways like the first black female character but in other ways like the second.”

I was really intrigued by this idea, so I did some more research. I found an NPR interview with Prince Blythwood. Her commentary made me realize that the audience reaction to having diverse role models has an actual parallel in the movie. Prince Blythwood points out that if you pay attention, you’ll notice that Rosaleen, one of the African-American characters, begins the movie with straight-ironed hair but as she spends more and more time with the confident, proudly black Boatwright sisters she adopts a more natural, curly style that looks a lot like June’s Afro. Likewise, Lilly, even though she’s white, asks for her hair braided like August and May wear theirs.

Lilly and Rosaleen take on less superficial qualities of their new role models as well. For example, Lilly learns beekeeping from August and becomes interested in her black godson. Rosaleen starts to speak like the cultured sisters do and eventually moves in with with, taking on the new name “July.”

Both Rosaleen and Lilly, then, meet three women who are unlike any they’ve never known before. They try on parts of their personalities and live happier, more fulfilling lives because of it. I really think that the same thing can happen to a member of the audience of this film. We encounter characters like we rarely see and end up more balanced people because we learned their story.



***Go to The Secret Life of Bees' Website***