For three straight weekends, the race relations drama The Help has dominated the North American box office. For a bit of perspective, the last movie to top three weekends in a row was Inception. Last weekend The Help actually saw a 36.8% appreciation from the week before, which is almost unheard of. Although it was budgeted at a modest $25 million, The Help will probably outgross X Men: First Class, Super 8, Captain America, and many other summer blockbusters that were supposed to become embedded in the national consciousness the way it effortlessly has.

So what makes it so successful? It stars the ascendant Emma Stone, but her Crazy, Stupid Love* didn’t break any records. It’s based on a best-selling novel, but that didn’t help Water for Elephants or One Day, two properties that shot for the exact same audience with disappointing results. Should we consider The Help an aberration?

Or should we look at it in the light William Goldman considers a similar “aberration,” On Golden Pond, in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade? On Golden Pond became one of the biggest hits of 1981 by serving an under-served audience at a time when they needed service the most. For studios, its quiet story with veteran actors could be written off; to middle-aged and older women at the time, it was a godsend.

Considering that example, the most telling box office figure to explain The Help is its twenty-five straight days at number one—a feat which has not been accomplished since The Sixth Sense. Who goes to movies at 11:30 AM on a Tuesday? Middle-aged and older women. And this audience was starving for an adult drama after three months of aliens fighting humans, apes fighting humans, and robots fighting robots.

That being said, it would be naive to think that any film with human emotions will experience this type of success. The Help is far from groundbreaking, but it presents a genre of film that we haven’t seen on this scale in years: the melodrama. Overstuffed with two and a half hours of murder, betrayals, racial strife, and dying mothers, The Help could have been directed by George Cukor but is presented to a crowd that can’t pronounce Almodovar. If you squint enough, the frizziness of Emma Stone’s liberated woman makes her look like a Barbara Stanwyck to the cold sleekness of Bryce Dallas Howard’s Joan Crawford.

Every time it feels as if the plot’s mechanics could not possibly support more intrigue, Yule Mae steals a ring or Minny gets beaten by her husband. Stone’s character Skeeter wades into a romance seemingly because the story hasn’t covered that base yet. (Or because she had no stakes in the arrangement without something to lose, which means she shouldn’t be the protagonist, but anyway.) The heart palpitations and ulcers that The Help’s characters get are no different from the brain fever characters contracted in 19th century Russian novels. The setting provides for maximum conflict, and the men in the film barely even get names.

My mother used to watch Imitation of Life every couple of Sunday mornings while she cooked, jumping in at any point and watching it until the end, understanding that every ten minutes presented enough scandal, tragedy, and chicanery to fill an entire movie of a more subtle vein. Someone will inevitably watch The Help in the same way. I don’t like the picture or its condescending White guilt or its audience talking over it in the theater.* I feel as if it should humble White people, but it ends up making them feel secure (since the protagonist is a charitable example that “not all Whites were like that”) and superior (since it downplays Black people’s roles in their own struggle, making it seem as if we have civil rights because White people relented, not because Black people fought.) But I feel as if I understand and appreciate it as a film that wears its exaggerated passion on its sleeve. It has become a hit not despite its heavy-handed emotional manipulation, but because of it. Don’t blame me when it gets nominated for Best Picture.

*- It’s bizarrely punctuated Crazy, Stupid, Love. on the poster, but I refuse to give into that nonsense. It’s actually a very good film, despite the title.
*- Old women are the worst moviegoers. Why doesn’t anyone talk about that?