Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies
TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED: THE NOVEL AND THE FILM
(B.A. Major Thesis)
Anna Fischerová
Supervisor: PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr.
Brno, April 2006
Declaration
I hereby declare that I have worked on this B.A. Thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
28th April 2006 in Brno:
2
Acknowledgement
I would like to express many thanks to my supervisor, PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr., for his helpful advice and time that he devoted to supervising my thesis.
3 Contents:
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………. 5
1. THE BOOK – CONTEXT………………………………………….………... 7
1.1. MARGARET GARNER………………………………..……………... 7
1.2. TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED…………………………….………. 9
1.3. THE GARNERS: SETHE AND MARGARET……………………….. 11 2. THE FILM – CONTEXT………………………………………..…………... 14
2.1. BLACK FILMMAKING IN CONTEXT………………………….... 14
2.2. BELOVED AND ITS WAY TO THE SCREEN…………………….. 16 3. FILM AND LITERATURE: THE MEDIA COMPARED………………… 19
4. BELOVED : FILM AND BOOK……………………………………………... 24
4.1. THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE…………………………………. 24
4.2. SUPERNATURAL AND HORROR ELEMENTS…………………. 27
4.3. THE CHARACTERS………………………………………………... 33
4.4. OMISSIONS AND ALTERATIONS……………………………….. 38
4.5. CRITICS, AUDIENCES, THE RECEPTION OF THE MOVIE…… 42 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….. 45
WORKS CITED LIST………………………………………………………….. 47
4 Introduction
All of us probably know the feeling when we see a film version of a book that we have read and enjoyed. We have certain expectations and feel somehow protective of the book. If the film does the book justice, we are pleased (sometimes a film can even outshine a book). If, however, our expectations are too high or the film fails to match the virtues of the book, we are disappointed and, if the book is one of our favorites, even angry. It is therefore interesting to compare a film with its book source and explore the reasons of its possible success or failure.
As the topic of my thesis, I chose Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Beloved and its film counterpart for several reasons. Firstly, Beloved is one of my favorite books and I was curious about the film. When I first saw the movie, I felt puzzled, and did not know what to think. To be honest, I did not like it. However, I gradually realized that the more I thought about it the more I liked it. I came to understand the goals of the film, the good intentions and devotion with which the film was made and I realized that it is not a movie to make a quick judgment about. It is easy to criticize but putting forth the effort to give the film a chance can be rewarding. Secondly, I thought it a great challenge to make a film based on such a complicated book as Beloved certainly is and wanted to explore more about the process of making such a movie. Thirdly, I found it attractive and challenging to make some sense from a movie that received such conflicting reviews.
My aim is not to show and prove that either the book or the film is better than the other. I want to explore the possibilities and limits of both the book and the film in regards to their media. I also intend to point out the similarities and differences and their effects on the the story’s overall impression and to what extent the message stays the same. It is also interesting to consider the amount of the film’s dependency on the book and to what degree it can be regarded as an individual and independent work of art, and how much we depend on
5 the knowledge from the book. I also want to situate both the film and the book into their respective contexts of their origins, ties, and roles in their own media and genres.
In the first chapter, I will introduce the book in context of its historical background.
Although Toni Morrison did not write a historical fiction about Margaret Garner’s life, she was well-acquainted with the story and used it as a background to build her own story on.
The fact that the book is based on a true story renders it with gravity.
In the second chapter, I will try to do the same with the film. Firstly, I want to put it into context of the developments in Black American filmmaking. Although Beloved is not entirely a black-made film and was made by a white Hollywood director, it is remarkable for maintaining the distinctiveness of the source. The black experience that is conveyed in the book is not downplayed or made more accessible to the mainstream audiences in the film.
Beloved can therefore be regarded as one of the latest and more successful achievements in the struggle of African Americans for more fair and real depiction on screen that has lasted
th for the most part of the 20 century. Secondly, I will focus on the origins of the film itself.
The third chapter called “Film and Literature: the Media Compared” is devoted to a more theoretical background and is designed to explore and compare the two media. I will consider the means of expression of the two media and comment on the possibilities and limits of a book and its film adaptation.
In the final chapter, I will discuss the film itself and compare it to the book. The main concerns will be the narrative structure, supernatural and horror elements, the veridicality of the screen portrayal of the characters, the necessity and justification of some alterations and omissions in the script, and the reception of the movie by critics and audiences alike.
My intention is thus to present both the book and the film both in a wider context, so that their aims and choices are clear, as well as in their own terms.
6 1. The Book – context
1.1. Margaret Garner
Toni Morrison drew her inspiration and based the narrative of her Pulitzer Prize- winning novel on a true story about Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave from Kentucky, who killed her daughter rather than to allow herself and her children to be taken back to slavery.
The whole affair stirred emotions 150 years ago and has had the power of doing so even much
1 later, as Morrison’s book and several other publications prove . The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote right after the tragedy that the whole affair had “a tinge of fearful, although romantic interest”. It also observed that “the Abolitionists regard the parents of the murdered child as a hero and heroine, teeming with lofty and holy emotions, who, Virginiuslike would rather imbue their hands in the blood of their offspring than allow them to wear the shackles
2 of slavery, while others look upon them as brutal and unnatural.”
In January 1856, a group of seventeen slaves belonging to different farmers in
Kentucky decided to escape together. They used sleds and horses of one of their masters and fled to Convington, Kentucky. The Ohio River was frozen and they could cross it on foot.
When they reached Ohio near Wester Row, it was already daylight and they decided to split up so as not to attract attention. Margaret, her husband Robert, their four children, and
Robert’s parents went to find Mr. Kite, a former slave from a neighboring farm who was bought out of slavery by his father. The remaining nine fugitives followed a different route and made it safely to Canada. Kite went to Levi Coffin, a white Underground Railroad agent, to negotiate a hiding place and arrange the escape for the fugitives, but they were already
1 The first one who recorded this tragic story was Levi Coffin, a devoted abolitionist and President of the Underground Railroad, who wrote about the case of Margaret Garner in his Reminiscences (1876). More recent and profound is Steven Weisenburger’s Modern Medea: a Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder
2from the Old South (1998) “Stampede of Slaves: a Tale of Horror.” the Cincinnati Enquirer 29 Jan. 1856
7 discovered and surrounded in Kite’s house by their slave masters. Barred in the house, they were determined to fight and die for their freedom rather than to go back to slavery again.
Robert fired on the officials but was eventually overpowered. Margaret, determined to save her family from slavery at any cost, cut her little girl’s throat with a knife and attempted to do likewise with her remaining three children. Before she could do this and kill herself at the end, she was stopped by the officials. The Garners were arrested and put in jail. The trial full of sensation and emotions on the both sides lasted two weeks. A lawyer assigned to the Garners argued that because Margaret had been brought into a free state to work years earlier, she was, according to a law, which liberated slaves who were brought into a free state with consent of their masters, legally free. Her four children born after that should follow the condition of their mother and should have been free as well. This point was vital, because she had a chance of being judged as human, not as property. Nevertheless, no appeals and pleadings could divert the Garners from being judged as property and as such they were returned to slavery and sold down the river.
The tragic fate of Margaret Garner was not over and while on board of a ship heading south, with her youngest daughter in her arms, she fell (probably intentionally) overboard in an accident. Margaret was saved but her baby was drowned and she only regretted not
3 drowning herself as well. She died soon after in 1858 of typhoid fever.
3 the biographical information used draws from the following sources: Coffin, Levi. “Margaret Garner”
8 1.2. Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Toni Morrison did not plan on writing a historical book full of details from Margaret
Garner’s life. She was fascinated by the murder. The story that she wrote is full of symbolism and serves as a metaphor for the whole black experience of slavery. Her characters are products of the oppressive system and bear the marks of all the horrors they went through.
Morrison shows us what slavery did to their bodies and minds; what it meant for them to be owned by somebody else as well as the difficulties of claiming ownership of oneself. To explore the historical truth, Morrison uses supernatural elements of magic realism. Her novel is not just a slave narrative and historical fiction but also a ghost story. These two levels are in harmony since ghosts and supernatural events are deeply rooted in the African American folk culture and, after all, what else would fit the notion of the past haunting the present so perfectly? The ghost haunting the main protagonist of the story, Sethe, is not only an embodiment of Sethe’s traumatic and painful past, her guilt and shame that haunt her present, but also, in wider sense, a reminder of America’s greatest sin. The horrors of slavery are still as real as the manifestation of the ghost in flesh in the shape of Beloved that appeared in the novel.
Morrison’s narrative is very complicated and effective. Instead of following a linear storyline, it jumps back and forth in time and slowly reveals Sethe’s traumatic past. Most of the action in the book takes place in the past, which stresses the impact it has on the present lives of the characters. The same memories are repeated over and over again and every time something is added to it. The reader has to put the bits and pieces of memories together to create and realize the whole story. Morrison uses mostly the third-person narrative but she does not rely on it entirely. As the story goes on she switches the narrators and points of view so we have a story in a first-person narrative. This enables us to look at the events from a perspective of the individual characters and to understand their motives and actions.
9 Most of the story takes place in the past between 1855 and 1873 in the era
4 of Reconstruction and basically stresses the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law on the lives of thousands of black people and their families. Sethe, a former slave, lives with her eighteen- year old daughter Denver in her late mother-in-law’s house at the outskirts of Cincinnati.
The house is haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s older daughter who died short after her escape from a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home eighteen years earlier. Her two sons, Howard and
Buglar, ran away from the haunted house eight years earlier and the grandmother Baby Suggs who used to be a spiritual force and unofficial preacher of the community died soon after, as a broken woman. Sethe and Denver live in isolation, rejected by the local community because of Sethe’s past and her proud and independent attitude.
The novel starts with the arrival of Paul D. who used to be a slave at Sweet Home along with Sethe and her husband Halle who disappeared and never showed up again. Paul D. breaks the baby ghost’s spell and establishes himself into the household. A tentative and tender relationship develops between Sethe and Paul D. while Denver suffers from the loss of the only companion she has ever had – the ghost of her dead sister – and despises Paul D. for driving the ghost away. However, they still had a decent chance of a fresh start as a family, were it not for a strange young woman calling herself Beloved who one day appeared in their yard. Her voice is hoarse, she walks unsteadily and eats like a child. She stays in the house and Denver is happy to look after her and to have company. Denver soon recognizes in Beloved her dead sister. After being driven out of the house she came back in the flesh. She has the body of the woman she would have been had she lived, but her mind is that of the child she used to be. The only one who Beloved cares for is Sethe and hence seeks
4 Fugitive Slave Law was a part of the Compromise of 1850 designed to preserve balance between the northern “free” states and southern “slave” states and thus avoid the Civil War. Southern plantation owners complained about the lack of assistance from the northern states to seek and recapture runaway slaves. According to the Fugitive Slave Law state officials everywhere in the United States had a duty to arrest anyone suspected of being a ruaway slave on no more evidence than a claimant's sworn testimony of ownership. In addition, any person helping a runaway slave was subjected to a fine and imprisonment. Since officers capturing a fugitive slave were entitled to a fee, thousands of nothern blacks (both ex-slaves and freedmen) lived in constant fear of being kidnapped or losing their family members. (from Wikipedia )
10 her presence whenever possible. She manages to separate Paul D. from Sethe by moving him slowly from the house and seducing him against his will.
Paul D. and Sethe, who both have traumatic and painful pasts, are able to share their memories and help each other with them. However, when Paul D. learns Sethe’s deepest secret, that she killed her baby rather than to let them all to be returned to slavery when her master found her shortly after her escape, he is too shocked to stay on.
When Sethe finally identifies her murdered daughter who came back to her, she believes she was forgiven and given a second chance. Sethe’s closed memory begins to open after the arrival of Paul D. who brings new information to add to it. Beloved, always hungry for Sethe’s stories, forces her to go back and retell it all. By her endless demands “tell me, tell me” she sucks life and memories out of Sethe. In an attempt to compensate Beloved, Sethe gives up her work and completely loses her judgment but nothing seems to satisfy Beloved.
Their condition deteriorates rapidly and Denver realizes that it is up to her to leave the house and ask for help. She manages to overcome her fear of the outer world, dares to leave their yard and finds a job. The news about Sethe being tortured by her murdered daughter spread quickly. The black women in Cincinnati decide to take action and exorcize the ghost.
The ghost disappears but Sethe suffers from losing her child again and ends up a broken woman. Denver finds Paul D. And he returns to Sethe to look after her and help her heal her tortured soul. All of them have a chance to leave the past behind and start again by focusing on the future.
1.3. The Garners: Sethe and Margaret
Although Toni Morrison was not particularly interested in details of Margaret
Garner’s live, some similarities between Margaret’s and Sethe’s stories make it evident that
Toni Morrison was well acquainted with the history of Margaret Garner’s case. Dr. Peter A.
11 Muckley compares these similarities and divergences in his article “ To Garner Stories: Note on Margaret and Sethe in and out of History and Toni Morrison’s Beloved ”. In the next section I will point out some of the conclusion that Muckley has made.
Sethe is never given a surname in the book, however, Paul D. is. He is called Paul D.
Garner. It was a common practice that slaves were given their owner’s names. Sethe would thus be a Garner as well. Unlike Margaret, who fled in the party of seventeen with her four children, Sethe made it pregnant and alone. Sethe and Margaret both had four children the boys were older than the girls and both fled from Kentucky to Ohio. Margaret’s husband
Robert became both Halle and Paul D. in the book. Robert’s mother Mary might have been the source of Baby Suggs’ nickname “holy”. Coffin, the white abolitionist, is obviously
Mr. Bodwin and Kite, whose freedom stamp was paid by his father, served as Stamp Paid.
While Sethe enjoyed twenty-eight days of freedom, Margaret only had one day. Sethe’s twenty-eight might symbolize the month (February), which elapsed between the murder and
Margaret’s trial. According to Coffin’s description of Margaret she was approximately of the same age as Sethe and had two scars on her face. These scars became the “chokecherry tree” on Sethe’s back. Margaret was allowed to keep her remaining little daughter during the trial but her boys disappeared from all the chronicles. Howard and Buglar ran away and disappeared from the story as well. Levi Coffin wrote down that the murdered child was “of rare beauty” which is a description that fits Beloved perfectly. There might have been a model for Mr. Garner in one of the slave masters called Marshall. According to the Cincinnati
Enquirer from 1856 Robert’s father “bears the appearance of having been well cared for, in fact, young Mr. Marshall states that he has always treated him more as a companion than a slave”. Mr. Marshall also offers salvation for his slave: “If money can save him from
5 the effect of any rash act he has committed I am willing to give it to any amount.”
5 “Stampede of Slaves: a Tale of Horror.” the Cincinnati Enquirer 29 Jan. 1856
12 Muckley concludes that even though there are vast differences between Margaret’s and Sethe’s stories, Levi Coffin’s Reminiscences most definitely inspired Toni Morrison’s story in some ways. He points out that Toni Morrison shifts the story “from the public to the personal, from the legalistic/paternal to the familial/maternal, from the external/phenomenal to the intimate noumenal” (Muckley). She thus gave it a more intimate and touching dimension. Whereas Margaret’s story was utmost misery, Morrison is offering some hope for the future.
13 2. The Film – Context
2.1. Black filmmaking in context
Before dealing with the film adaptation of Beloved itself, I would like to put it into the context of black filmmaking in general. Beloved can be better understood and appreciated when put into context of developments in black filmmaking. The portrayal of black the experience on screen had been overwhelmingly negative throughout most of the twentieth century. Black artists who were fighting these old stereotypes faced a difficult task: to replace the old stereotypes with a more realistic depiction of the black experience and, at the same time, to appeal to the white audience. Beloved can be seen as one of the latest achievements in this field and in this respect quite successful.
Black stereotypes had been rooted in the American culture even before the motion picture came into being. Minstrel shows and vaudeville stage productions emphasized the inferior position of blacks who needed their white superiors to guide them. The arrival of movies only reinforced these stereotypes. Donald Bogle in his Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film described the main categories of black stereotyping. Most of the stereotypes were based on characters from the days of slavery; however, they represented black characters for the most part of the twentieth century. To name some of these
I shall include “Uncle Tom”, a faithful slave who is contended with his lot and is willing to sacrifice for his master; “Mammy”, generally happy, fat, black-skinned asexual domestic type; “Pickaninny” an animal-like negro child; “Coon” a wily character pretending idiocy and laziness to vex the whites; the “tragic mulatto” or the brutal black “buck”.
Early black independent filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux challenged the conventional negative portrayals with more realistic images of black character types.
The advancement of this development was unfortunately interrupted by high production costs, poor distribution, increased competition, and the Depression. Hollywood’s production
14 of the 1930s and 1940s used again the conventional stereotypes of the previous era. After the Second World War when more racially conscious attitudes prevailed, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People forced Hollywood major studios to reconsider some of the most dishonest stereotypes. However, these old stereotypes were for the most part replaced by new, more ingenious caricatures.
By the end of the twentieth century Hollywood production reflected the more complete assimilation of blacks into all sections of society. More attention was paid to the black experience. Filmmakers often turned to black literature as their sources to portray the black experience more fully and accurately. It is also true, as Barbara Tepa Lupack observes, that “when black novels are adapted as motion pictures, they are often reworked or popularized for mainstream audiences so that much of their cultural and idiosyncratic importance is lost” (xv). The problem with Hollywood black-oriented films is that they usually portray the situation from a white rather than a black point of view. This conventional depiction of black experience is successfully challenged by a new wave of black filmmakers such as Spike Lee or Mario Van Peebles. The breakthrough of their black-produced and black-oriented films is not only in more accurate and real depiction of black life but also appeals to black as well as white audiences. Lupack also notices that recently
“prominent black writers, performers, and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Bill and
Camille Cosby, concerned about conveying and preserving the integrity of black texts,
have gotten involved in film production, while black filmmakers, both commercial and
independent, are increasingly helping to challenge and change black cinematic images
by turning to black sources for their inspiration” (xv).
15 Beloved should be analyzed and judged in the context of developments and trends in black filmmaking in general. The strength and worth of the film lies in the careful approach to the source. Although made by a Hollywood director and meant for the mainstream audiences, it is not simplified, made more accessible, conversely, it tries to retain the distinctive features of the source. The seriousness of the message conveyed in the book is not deliberately downplayed on the screen. Beloved was made by white director Jonathan Demme, but the leading figure behind the whole project was Oprah Winfrey, one of the most prominent figures in popular entertainment. It can therefore be said that this film is neither black nor white but black and white. In the following chapters I will discuss how the film fulfils the expectations of film critics and the public. How it represents the black experience and to what extent it appealed to audiences both black and white.
2.2. Beloved and its way to the screen
As I already suggested it was Oprah Winfrey who was the leading force behind
Beloved ’s journey to the screen. Winfrey bought the film rights to the novel for her production company Harpo Films shortly after the novel’s publication in 1987 (Tibbetts).
Apart from starring in the title role, she was also one of the film’s producers. Winfrey was deeply impressed by the novel and was determined to bring it to the screen. She said, “I wanted to do with a movie what Toni Morrison had done with a book. She allowed us to see what slavery felt like, and never before had I seen a piece of work that allowed you to go into the interior of a person’s spirit, to understand what slavery did to their soul” ( Oprah Winfrey stars as a former slave in compelling drama Beloved ). And she continues, “I felt so strongly that the world needed to experience this book, to feel this sense of connection to what happened to us. It explains so much about why we are who we are and how that came to be”
(Cleage). It had taken her 11 years to complete her dream project. Notwithstanding her
16 tireless effort, the result is a highly controversial movie praised by some critics and reprobated by others.
The script is a work of three scriptwriters, Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese and
Adam Brooks; it took years to make a script that everybody involved could agree on. Winfrey admitted that when she started, she did not realize how difficult and challenging this work could be. She realized that “a novel is one thing, but the elements that make a successful film are so different that it’s almost like starting from a scratch” (Cleage). One of the biggest challenges for Winfrey was to find a director who shared her passion for the book. She said she “talked to a lot of them – Black ones, White ones, female, foreign. Some didn’t share the vision [she] had, some had other commitments, and some told [her] that they didn’t feel they knew enough about the Black experience to take on the project” (Cleage). When
Jonathan Demme, a director who won several Academy Awards including the Award for the best director, agreed to read the script and decided to take part in the project, Winfrey could not have wished for a better option. Demme is an acclaimed director who is well-known for the attention he pays to his actors and thus invests his movies with tremendous warmth and humanity. His most successful achievements so far have been the Silence of the Lambs
(1991) and Philadelphia (1993). However, Winfrey was well aware of the fact that choosing a white director to adapt a black literary source of such significance as Beloved , might be considered at least problematic (“It is no secret that Jonathan is a White male, and I know to some folks it raises a red flag…”). She praised his approach to the text and their collaboration: “He was able to embrace the material in such a beautiful way without ever sentimentalizing it. He understood that the miracle of the collaboration between us was that I am the descendant of slaves and he is the descendant of slave owners, and we could now do this together” (Cleage).
17 Winfrey was determined to do her best also as an actress playing the title role. As a preparation for her hole, she felt she needed to recreate the experience to “have a better understanding of how it would feel to be running for your freedom and not have any idea which way to go to get there” (Cleage). She thought it necessary in order to understand Sethe at the moment when she decided to kill her baby. As a part of this preparation she was blindfolded, given a different name and made to experience the feelings of a free woman from
Baltimore who was kidnapped into slavery. When the blindfold was taken off, Winfrey found herself in the woods and spent the next 24 hours like a slave trying to run away. She commented on this experience for the TV Guide: “They had this guy who was set up as a slave master who said, ‘You’re mine now’ and called me the ‘n’ word. And then there was a moment when it all clicked, when I connected the true meaning of slavery. It’s just the stripping of one’s humanity” ( Oprah Winfrey stars as a former slave…). Only then she was ready to tell Sethe’s story on the screen. She summed up this experience by saying: “To say that I thought I knew something about slavery – having lived in this country as a Negro, then a Black person, and now an African-American – this movie makes the difference between understanding it and knowing it” (Oprah Winfrey stars as a former slave…).
Winfrey also did her best in promoting the movie. She used her own talk show and her position of one of the most powerful people in show business to point out the significance of the movie. However, despite her enthusiastic promotion on television and adequate newspaper and magazine coverage, the movie was not a success. The audience somehow failed to make sense of it. The film’s box office was a failure. Beloved was produced at a cost estimated between 75 and 80 million dollars but in a month after its release it had grossed only around 20 million dollars (Lupack 504).
18 3. Film and Literature: the Media Compared
Before I discuss the merits and drawbacks of the film itself, some theoretical background is needed. In order to be able to compare the novel with its film adaptation, I will explore the two media alone. Film as a visual medium has different narrative techniques and means of expression than literature. I will discuss the possible problems that are inevitably encountered when a novel is to be adapted as a film.
First, I would like to point out that literature as a medium is much richer than film because of the power of imagination. Obviously, where the novel must describe, the film depicts. A reader is free to use his or her own imagination while reading a book. In general, it is also more demanding to read than to watch (although there are exceptions to the rule).
Apart of the fact that reading requires special abilities (i.e. literacy and, to some extent, imagination), a reader is also more active than a viewer. A reader has to picture the story for himself or herself, to imagine the settings, atmosphere, and feelings of its characters.
A viewer, on the other hand, is reduced to a mere witness of what is happening on screen. No space is left for his or her imagination. It can be therefore said that film in general is easier to grasp and no special knowledge is required.
Robert Scholes in his article Narration and Narrativity in Film discusses the techniques in the novel, the play, and the film. He explains that in a novel, “there is the language of the author at one level, and the representation of character, situation, and event at another” (392). The reader is therefore left to make the interpretive choices of his or her own. In a play one more level is added: the performance of the actor, which is interpretive. Scholes points out that whereas “not two performances make all the same choices” the fact is that “when the story is filmed, all choices are final. The achieved fiction is there with a specificity which the printed text alone can never hope to match. The price for this intensity is a reduction in the interpretive richness of the written text” (392).
19 The novel operates more on the internal level whereas in film the internal level is very hard to express and the medium operates mainly on the external, visual level. George
Bluestone expressed these conflicting tendencies in his essay Limits of the Novel and the Film : “…the novel has tended to retreat more and more from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from social to psychological realities” (381). Though film uses dialogue it is impossible to express some inner thoughts and mental states as sufficiently as literature can do. The problem with presenting a thought is that it is abstract and not visible. Moreover, as soon as it is said it is not a thought any more. Although a lot can be indicated by facial expression, thoughts are not easily grasped. Language can go beyond the possibilities of a picture. How can one picture a stream of consciousness? Bluestone explains that to present states of mind is so difficult because they “are defined precisely by the absence in them of the visible world” and he continues that film, however, “by arranging external signs for our visual perception, or by presenting us with dialogue, can lead us to infer thought… It can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings” (382). Mental states such as thoughts, dreams, and memories depend heavily on imagination and feel somehow different from the objective reality. Their representations on screen are usually disappointing.
The problem of screen depictions of thoughts, dreams, and mainly memories is particularly relevant to the film adaptation of Beloved . Firstly, the story takes place in
Cincinnati of 1873 but most of the crucial action took place in the past. The key concept in the book is a memory; a memory that is frequently repeated and gradually extended; a memory that haunts the present. In the film the memories are presented in a number of flashbacks but as I have already suggested, in the book it feels different than it looks in the film. Moreover, it is a question whether the flashbacks in the film are meant to explain anything or just to shock the audience with the brutality of slavery. I will get to this particular
20 problem in the next chapter in detail. Secondly, the book shifts narrators and points of view and is occasionally written in the stream-of-consciousness style. The film did not prove itself to be as experimental as the book, however, this formal characteristic did not seem to be relevant for the understanding of the story.
On the other hand, not everything can be expressed by words. There are instances when words do not seem to convey an experience in the right way. Howard Mumford Jones describes the major problem that has plagued modern novelists as “the verbal limitations of nonverbal experience” (qtd. in Bluestone 381). George Bluestone explains that “the formative principle in the novel is time” so it is very difficult to escape time to create time- flux or “timeless moment”. The novel “forms its narrative in a complex of time values” whereas the film takes time automatically and the “formative principle in the film is space”
(Bluestone 389). In the book is the “timelessness” of Beloved’s existence and memory predominantly expressed the stream of consciousness whereas the film uses mainly scary and mysterious scenes to achieve the same effect. The film has also the advantage of picturing the scenes and settings. A single shot can be more effective than a description no matter how good the description might be.
An element that is frequently underestimated is film music. Music can easily suggest various things. In a novel everything has to be described: the scene, characters, mood, etc., whereas film has more possibilities for how to achieve the overall impression without describing it. Apart of the picture, there is also music that further characterizes the scene.
Noël Carroll in his theoretical work on cinema Theorizing the Moving Image, points out that
“the music possesses certain expressive qualities which are introduced to modify or to characterize onscreen persons and objects, actions and events, scenes and sequences” (141).
Music raises emotions naturally, which is a considerable advantage in comparison to a written text. Aaron Copland summed up the function of music in film and suggested five broad
21 functions: “creating atmosphere; underlining the psychological states of characters; providing neutral background filler; building a sense of continuity; sustaining tension and then rounding it off with a sense of closure” (qtd. in Carroll 139). The music in the film version of Beloved made by Rachel Portman serves its purpose greatly and is one of the strongest points of the film.
As I have already indicated, the problem of how to narrate Toni Morrison’s Beloved on screen arises from the very structure of the book. From what I have already written about the structure of the book and the narrative technique, it is obvious that it is not easy material to read, let alone to make a movie from. The most serious problem emerges when we consider that most of the novel’s action takes place in the past. Film as a medium has considerable difficulties with presenting the past. As Béla Balász said, “pictures have no tenses” (qtd. in
Bluestone 386). A picture cannot express a past or a future by itself. The sense of a past or a future is usually added by dialogues and music. Morrison’s Beloved is full of memories, but how is a memory shown in a film? George Bluestone says that “to show a memory or a dream, one must balloon a separate image into the frame; or superimpose an image or clear the frame entirely for the visual equivalent”. Nevertheless, none of these cinematic techniques is entirely satisfying because “they cannot render the conceptual feel of dreams and memories” (Bluestone 383).
In our particular case, the situation is further complicated by the complex narrative technique that jumps back and forth in time. Generally, the film and any other visual medium tend to present a story in a direct temporal storyline; the events are in a cause-and-effect relationship, which is usually clear and comprehensible. Whenever the events are presented out of temporal sequence, the story is harder to follow. The viewer has to make sense of all the bits and pieces and put them in the right order. This is also true for the novel, but a reader is given more time and usually more evidence and details. A viewer, trying to make sense
22 of a complicated storyline and not paying attention carefully, puts himself or herself at risk of missing a crucial point in the film. In the film version of Beloved much of the past action was eliminated for the sake of brevity but the most crucial moments are brought on screen in the form of rather problematic flashbacks. They are problematic because they explain a lot but at the same time present new and confusing events. Again, I will get back to the problems with the flashbacks in Beloved in the next section.
23 4. Beloved : Film and Book
In this final chapter I will discuss the film adaptation of Beloved . I will focus on its assets as well as its demerits in connection to the novel. I will consider the narrative techniques of the book and the film, the overall impressions, and the response of the public and critics to the novel and to the film. My aim is not to decide whether a book is better than a film or vice versa, but what I want to do is to explore their possibilities and limits. I am aware that the film adaptations are usually taken as something secondary and inferior to the novels and, after all, they are copies of the books; only the medium is different. The book is therefore the source but it does not mean that the film cannot stand on its own. There are films that are more famous than their book sources but there are also films that for some reason or other do not do their sources justice. The film adaptation of Beloved , I am afraid, inclines more to the second category than the first one. At least, it will definitely never be more famous than the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved .
4.1. The narrative structure
So, what is the movie like? It is clear that it was made with the best of intentions by a group of artists paying homage to Toni Morrison’s work. And yet, the deep respect for Toni
Morrison and her work is rather harmful for the film. The film is remarkably faithful to the novel, which makes it confused and quite hard to follow. As I have already suggested, the novel is not easy to read due to its complicated narrative structure which, works with different time levels. Surprisingly, the film follows the narrative structure of the book.
The scriptwriters Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese, and Adam Brooks did not dare to change anything and they omitted only a little from the book (which was absolutely necessary for the sake of brevity, moreover, the film is already nearly three hours long). It is a question whether three scriptwriters can create a coherent entity as one can probably do. It is hard to
24 tell if it was “the slavish adherence to the novel” as Zelevinsky puts it, or the insufficient communication between its scriptwriters. It may be that the book is just not suitable to make a movie from at all. In any case the narrative structure is very confused. The book’s narrative can be described as a stream of consciousness running through three generations of African-
American women. To make a screen adaptation of such a book is a challenge indeed. It is true that without the specific narrative structure, that slowly reveals the traumatic past events,
Beloved would not be Beloved . “The complexity is not simply a stylistic device; it is built out of Sethe’s memories, and the ones at the core are so painful that her mind circles them warily, afraid to touch” (Ebert). Nevertheless, the creators of the movie maybe should have made an attempt at a more independent and clear approach even at the cost of sacrificing some of the distinctiveness of the original structure. On the other hand, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a very well-known and popular novel and who knows what the reaction of its readers would have been if the movie was made differently than the book suggests?
The problem with the film following the storyline of the book is that it is much too long and slow. Many of the scenes are beautiful and quite powerful, but sometimes, they do not fit and work together to make a coherent entity. In his review, Charles Taylor expresses the same idea and goes even further by pointing out “…the grindingly slow pacing, the sloppy, at times incoherent, story line and the straining grandiloquence of the tone” (5).
Especially the first half of the film is splintered and confusing. It sets the scene and gives us so much information that it is hard to catch it all. The second part is more balanced and stable; a viewer makes some sense of the first part only in the second one. The first part is frequently interrupted by flashbacks explaining Sethe’s past. Yet, in many cases they only further complicate the story by presenting unknown people and events whose connections to the story are not clear. On the other hand, this timeline-jumping structure can be taken as an advantage because as Michael Dequina in his review points out, it demands “an inordinant amount
25 of concentration from the viewer and very few films present such a fascinating challenge.”
However, the question is how many viewers are willing to rise to the challenge. In my opinion, it reduces the chances for success within general audiences considerably. At any rate,
Winfrey and Demme should be given credit for not surrendering to the mass audiences by sacrificing the distinctiveness of the source.
It is important to mention that there is a huge difference between viewers who have read the novel and those who have not. It is much harder to watch the film without reading the book; the film in many cases gives only hints, short shots that have the power to evoke the whole event in the mind of the viewer who has read the book. In another review Richard
Alleva says quite accurately that “to judge the film as a self-sufficient work of art is impossible.” One should know the book or see it couple of times to be able to fully appreciate the story. Kenneth Turan claims that the background information that is largely eliminated is critical for the film’s impact. He writes: “To read Morrison’s novel after seeing the film is frequently to say, ‘So that’s what that was all about’” (qtd. in Lupack 501). Alleva also strongly criticizes the narrative choices that had been made in the film: “Even someone who hasn’t read the Toni Morrison’s novel may sense that what’s on screen is misshaped, that important narrative material has been dropped or sloppily conveyed, that colorful details have been blown out of proportion.”
The movie opens with an image of a headstone with the inscription “Beloved” on it.
This silent and undisturbed scene is followed by a wild and noisy one from the haunted house.
We do not know why the house is haunted, who the boys are running away, why the inhabitants of 124 are isolated from the local community, who Paul D. is, or who the man smearing white stuff over his face in his dream is, etc. Richard Alleva summed it up and makes the following observation about the script:
26 Perhaps we could adjust ourselves to slower, more meditative rhythms if the script
weren’t so smudgy. Much of the talk between Sethe and Paul D. is about their past, yet
not much of it is drawn with vividness or even clarity, except the physical brutalities
of whipping and lynching. for instance, what was Sethe’s husband like? What were
the relations between him and Sethe? between him and Paul D.? Was Paul D. in love
with Sethe decades ago? Why was the slave owner called ‘Schoolteacher’? Why
couldn’t Sethe and her husband reunite after slavery was abolished? The answers may
be on the page, but they’re not up there on the screen or on the soundtrack. (Alleva).
4.2. Supernatural and horror elements
The supernatural elements in the film follow the narrative structure as one of the most problematic factors. Basically, there is hardly anything that is not in the novel, but especially the haunting scenes are overdone and exaggerated to the point of horror. One can argue that the very same scenes are described in the book. This is true, but on the page they do not look as horrid as they do on screen. After the opening scene with the image of Beloved’s headstone, a wild scene from the haunted house follows. This scene looks too scary and noisy to fit in the movie and yet, most of its particulars are described in the book as well but without having the same effect: the scary red lighting, a dog slammed against a wall so hard that its eye popped out and his limb was broken, a cake with baby’s hands imprinted in it, shaking floor, furniture attacking Paul D. etc. Richard Alleva in his review argues that:
Toni Morrison deployed and controlled the ghostly elements in her story with her
powerful and flexible prose style […] We see ghost only when her words allow us to
and, even then, only within the context of normal human activity. But horror on
27 the screen is both more immediately shocking and more combustible than literary
spookiness. (Alleva)
Another reviewer, Eric Pfeffinger expressed the same feelings. In his review for Sunday Herald-Times he confirms the above mentioned observation by writing:
As in the novel, the ghost in the house is literal haunt, but its poltergeist antics and
blood-red light are made believable and unremarkable by the indirection of Morrison’s
prose; her narrative camera only glimpses these phenomena on the periphery or
sweeps over them incidentally, as in a quick pan. On film, divorced from Morrison’s
language, reduced to their scary-movie elements, the fantastical phenomena feel
distanced and hollowly melodramatic. (Pfeffinger 2)
To the horror elements in the film I shall also include the character of Beloved. I believe that the problem of the haunting scenes looking too odd on screen and yet written in that way in the book applies twice as much for the character of Beloved. This character is rather problematic because she is not quite human. Beloved appears in a body of a 21-year- old woman (exactly the age she should have been had she lived) but her mind is that of a child that was killed years ago. According to the book, she had “new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands” (51), “baby hair before it bloomed and roped into the masses of black yarn under her hat” (52) her neck “no wider than a parlor-service saucer, kept bending” (50) she was “breathing like a steam engine” (53) and her voice was “low and rough” (52). In the film, she is exactly the same way and yet, the character looks so different.
Newton’s performance is astonishing and shocking at the same time. Her voice does not sound as if it has ever been used and yet later on it changes into a thin piping little voice, she
28 walks unsteadily, does not quite command her movements, stuffs her mouth like a child and is unused to civilized ways. Sometimes she is childish and innocent, sometimes scary and even off-putting. She is beautiful but lacks grace; she is innocent and evil at the same time. All the same, the overall impression she gives is that of a slightly idiotic girl with schizophrenic behavior. It is therefore a question whether Toni Morrison really wrote Beloved as a moaning, shrieking, wheezing, contorting, and vomiting monster or not.
When she first appears in the film, she is covered with bugs. It certainly introduces her grotesqueness but I could not think of any other reason why Demme and his team decided to show her first appearance in this weird way. There is no such thing in the book and the intention of this portrayal is not made very clear in the film. Ellen C. Scott makes an interesting observation about the sounds that seem to surround Beloved. Apart from
her heavy gasping breath, her slurred, moaning speech, her noisy, sloppy eating, and
her demonically low voice […] Beloved’s appearance also crucially ushers in another
sonic motif: the sound of buzzing (of bees or flies – we cannot tell which). Beloved
appears to be herald and source of these sounds: we see neither bees nor flies on
the image track in these scenes, although the soundtrack renders them swarms.
The ambiguity of the source of the buzzing may itself be metaphorically significant, as
bees are attracted to the sweetness of pollen and flies to its opposite, the stench
of death, both of which are characteristics associated with Beloved’s form. (Scott 9)
Alleva also argues that the horror effects “come on so strong and so soon that they put us in the wrong frame of mind for the subtle human relationships that follow.” The film calms down toward the second half but it is true that the first part of the film is close to the brink of horror film genre. In regard to the message the film conveys, a message too sincere to be
29 downplayed by elements from horror films based on thrills and reduced to mere “horrors of slavery” cliché, the wild scenes at the beginning do not really seem to be appropriate for what is going on later on in the film.
All the same, the film exhibits some elements of horror iconography that cannot be overlooked. The film was even described as a horror film by some reviewers. Ellen C. Scott discusses in her essay the Horrors of Remembrance the visual aesthetic of horror in Demme’s
Beloved . She argues that Beloved “disrupts horror’s narrative impetus” and “creates different iconography of fear […] By resisting the standard meanings of horror icons, Beloved articulates a vernacularized, gothically strange Black horror aesthetic” (Scott 1). This is clearly done to emphasize that “it is slavery rather than a monster or a spirit, that is the central horror of Beloved , but the film reveals slavery as both institutional and oppressive – as a horror machine, one productive of other horrors, many of which (ghosts, monsters, victims) are typical of the genre” (Scott 1). The story is horrific indeed. However, the fearsomeness of it does not depend on the physical brutality, but on the long-lasting psychological effects of slavery.
Scott identifies Beloved as a Gothic horror. After all, as Judith Halberstam observes,
“the gothic was crucially in its early literary beginnings, largely a ‘female genre’ because not only were women its principal consumers but also, quite often its chief protagonists” (qtd. in
Scott 5). Her conclusion is supported by the way the film was promoted. “Iconographically, the marketing materials also play up the gothic angle. Two of the three movie posters for the film picture Beloved when she first appears in Sethe’s yard, in her elaborate, black lace, gothic dress, leaning on the stump of the tree” (Scott 5). Scott compares Beloved’s tree stump with Sethe’s “chokecherry tree” – Sethe’s tree was alive and “in full blossom” whereas
Beloved’s is dead, cut down. Also Beloved’s posture is a scary allusion to a lynched body.
The gothic mood is reinforced by adding night settings, crows, and fog to the posters and film
30 advertising materials. These images are totally misleading since the gothic mood does not go that far in the movie.
The most powerful gothic icons in the film are the frequent long shots of Sethe’s haunted house on Bluestone road. The gothic house viewed from below at night is a powerful image of this genre. We can see such a shot in Beloved and it is repeated over in over again only the time of the day and seasons keep changing. Scott argues that like in gothic literature,
“Sethe’s home is also […] the site of murder, sadness, ghostly violence, and eventually, decrepitude” (6). The haunted home is described even more vividly in the film than in the book. The house is soaked with the past. For example, when Paul D. enters the house for the first time, he sees the “pool of red and undulating light” and “a wave of grief soaked him thoroughly” (Morrison 8, 9). In the film there is a more specific picture added: he sees glimpses of the tragic event in the shed years ago. Memory is preserved as images. Scott writes: “The notion of the past as ghost - as another presence animating and filling the home – is present in both novel and film versions of Beloved. ” And she continues with defining
“space and place as containers for memory and preservers of the past” (7). The notion of the haunted house is emphasized by the light reflected against the walls of the house. This technique is also used when Sethe and Paul D. fall asleep in bed and both of them have separate dreams about “Sweet Home”. The images from their dreams are projected against the walls of the room. This technique gives the house an impression of a place loaded with heavy memory. In the book it is the people in the house who are haunted by their own past not so much the house itself.
The notion of the past threatening the present is clearly demonstrated when Sethe tells
Denver: “if a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. […] Right in the place where it happened. […]
…if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again” ( Beloved 36).
31 Beloved is thus sometimes recognized as a horror film. Nevertheless the iconography and structure differs from standard Hollywood horrors. Scott explores and compares the classical horror film and Beloved . In Hollywood films the boundaries are usually fixed; their disruption causes the tragedy and return to normalcy is only possible through resetting the boundaries.
…the horror centers around disruption, transgression and violation of a variety
of socially enforced boundaries, between, for examples, living and dead, inside
the flesh and outside, good and evil, reality and fantasy.” […] In Beloved , although
the violation of boundaries (between South and North, Black and White, mother and
daughter) still plays a part in the story, not only are the borders transgressed,
the realms that they purport to separate are hopelessly contaminated with the ‘other’.
(Scott 10, 11)
Scott explains this feature as a subtle way of suggesting that the White and Black experiences are different. Black Americans have developed different spiritual and sociopolitical boundaries:
Although the white world may separate ghosts from man, North from South, slave
from free, African Americans have experienced both the fluidity and hypocrisy
of these distinctions and have drawn boundaries in new places (e.g. inside the home
versus outside, free public spaces of the Woodlawn versus the unfree public spaces
of the street and the market, etc.). (Scott 11)
32 As I have already mentioned, spiritual and supernatural matters are deeply rooted the in African American culture, so unlike “the traditional horror film, there is no inherent tension between the ghosts and people – between the two worlds – and communication between them is not seen as unusual” (Scott 11). Sethe (and probably everybody in the town) thus knows exactly who the ghost is and Denver is mysteriously interconnected with it because she “took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister ( Beloved 152). As a result they do not fear the ghost, after all they know very well that “it’s not evil, just sad”
(Beloved 8) and live in acceptance of the ghost.
Despite all the facts and arguments mentioned, I would not rate Beloved as a horror film. It certainly has some characteristics of the genre but it does not have others. It is interesting to compare the way we perceive and identify with characters in a conventional horror and in Beloved . In a horror film we are scared because the victim is scared. Moreover, we usually know more about the danger than the victim but we are only helpless witnesses of the events. The frustration lies in our inability to do something and save the victim. In
Beloved we can see the opposite. The viewer knows and sees less than the characters themselves (Scott 12). It is obvious that all the characters have their own painful stories but they keep them inside and they only let them out in bits and pieces that are bearable. A viewer is aware that when something is told, there is always something withheld too. We have to make up the story from the memories and flashbacks that are gradually extended and circled around until we know the whole story.
4.3. The characters
One of the most stable and strongest points of the film is its high quality of performance. The devotion and effort with which the film was made is backed by excellent performances. The main characters are remarkably powerful. Oprah Winfrey (Sethe), Danny
33 Glover (Paul D.), Kimberly Elise (Denver) and to some extent even Thandie Newton
(Beloved) do justice to the way characters are portrayed in the book.
6 Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) is maybe a bit too young for my expectations (considering that the real story takes place 18 years after her escape from slavery) but soon I come to terms with it. Sethe is a strong, independent and proud woman who is determined to “never run from another thing on this earth” ( Beloved 15). She was firm in her resolution to save her children from slavery at any cost and even after her horrific deed she contended that she was right. It is a woman whose love was said to be “too thick” but who argued that “love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all” ( Beloved 164). It was her pride, not so much her deed that was responsible for her isolation from the local community. The relationship between Sethe and the local community is best described when the local women gathered around 124 after
Sethe had killed her baby girl:
Holding the living child, Sethe walked past them in their silence and hers. […] Was
her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing
would have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the house on
Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her,
like arms to hold and steady her on the way. ( Beloved 152)
Unfortunately, these relationships on the community level are dealt with in the book but not so much in the film. The film focuses entirely on Sethe and presents us her story without any links to the local black community or outer world. I believe that the theme of community ties in black society, especially during Reconstruction, was vital. No matter how disrupted the ties were and how isolated Sethe was, her survival eventually depended on
6 Sethe as a young girl in the flashback scenes is very well realized by Lisa Gay Hamilton.
34 the help of the community and reconciliation of the hard feelings that existed between her and the community. After all, “they were simply nice people who could hold meanness toward each other for just so long and when trouble rode bareback among them, quickly, easily they did what they could to trip him up” ( Beloved 249). The film fails to depict the importance of the community. From the first “disapproving odor” that Baby Suggs smelled in the air after the feast in their yard (which actually meant that nobody warned them when Schoolteacher came to town and resulted in the tragedy) to the final redress and reconciliation, it is only skimmed on the screen. And yet, Sethe’s healing would not be possible without the healing of the complex relationships in the whole community.
In the film Sethe is portrayed as a strong, independent and yet vulnerable woman who immediately wins the sympathy of the viewer. Barbara Tepa Lupack claims that most touching is “the way that Winfrey’s Sethe responds to what little affection she is offered.”
Lupack continues: “She knows how to deal with hardship, because it is so familiar to her, but is ill-prepared to accept or acknowledge tenderness” (501). However, in the book she is not that likeable. She eventually wins our sympathy and understanding but we cannot identify with her the way we can in the film. Sethe is accustomed to the supernatural events around her; she is more afraid of her own memories. She keeps them deep inside because they are too heavy to let out and bear. Thus she attempts to find refuge in a normal domestic life.
Ironically the house where she lives in freedom eventually becomes her prison. Shortly, Sethe is a symbol for the devastating impact of slavery and I think that Oprah Winfrey embodied all this quite successfully. Oprah Winfrey as a famous celebrity should be given credit for losing herself entirely in her character. Seeing Oprah instead of Sethe on the screen might have been distracting.
The character of Paul D. (Danny Glover), Sethe’s old friend from “Sweet Home” plantation, was given a new dimension in the movie. In the book he seems to be more serious
35 and more loaded with his slave past while in the movie he is more open and bright. Although haunted and vulnerable, he embodies deep-rooted humanity. He and Sethe lived through unspeakable horror and though both are afraid to reveal their secrets and emotions, they can help each other with their pasts because they both understand. They developed a delicate and tender relationship built on their mutual support when dealing with the past. Sethe appreciated
“the mind of him that knew her own” and realized that “her story was bearable because it was his as well – to tell, to refine and tell again” ( Beloved 99). To share their stories is not easy even though they know the other would understand. Sometimes they reach the point when
“saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from” ( Beloved 72).
For Sethe he seemed to be way out (and he eventually was; he taught her how accept her past and live with it). His appearance was promising: “Sethe, if I’m here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you
‘fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. […] We can make a life, girl. A life” ( Beloved 46). However, when he heard Sethe’s deepest secret, their intimacy and understanding was gone. He could not understand and left the house.
Danny Glover renders his character with tremendous warmth, but Paul D. on screen looks somehow flatter than in the book. Unlike Sethe, Paul D. is not given any background information. We do not know much about him and his past. In the book his past is as important as Sethe’s so a reader knows and understands him better than a viewer. A character we are more familiar with has more dimension than a character that has been thrown into a story without any background information.
Kimberly Elise as Denver gave an extraordinary performance. She is the one who is to become the heroine of the story. Elise’s performance is astonishingly natural. Denver lives with her mother in isolation and she had very few possibilities of meeting other people. She is
36 absolutely unprepared for living in the outside world; she is shy, timid, and dependent upon her mother. At the end, when Sethe is totally broken and exhausted by Beloved’s constant accusations and demands, Denver is the only one who is able to find a rational solution. She manages to make her own way in the world despite the traumas of her family’s past, and becomes an independent young woman. Denver is the hope for the future, the “tomorrow”, as
Paul D. puts it.
Elise’s performance is most likely to be overlooked. “She doesn’t have a role as literally showy as Newton’s, nor does she have the star power of a Winfrey or Glover, but she is Beloved ’s steadying force. Denver has the most dramatic evolution of all the characters, yet remains the most stable” (Dequina). The actress herself says “she relied heavily on the novel to help her create the character of Denver.” And she adds: “Denver is an observer. It was a great challenge for me because I didn’t have words to depend on. I had to communicate the character non-verbally. I felt that the less I said with words and the more I said with face and eyes and body, the more true it would be to Denver’s character” ( Oprah Winfrey stars as a former slave…).
I have already discussed the character of Beloved in the above section so I can only conclude that despite the disputability of the way Beloved was presented in the film, her performance was equally strong.
From the minor roles I especially like Beah Richards as Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs,
Sethe’s mother-in-law, is a charismatic preacher and almost saintly figure that is healing souls of local black people by teaching them to love themselves. Because “slave life had ‘busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue,’ she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart – which she put to work at once” ( Beloved 87). Her open-air ceremonies are celebrations of love and humanity. She puts tremendous warmth and forgiveness into the movie.
37 4.4. Omissions and Alterations
Although the screenplay was largely faithful to the novel, it did not and possibly could not match the eloquence and distinctiveness of the book. The film manages to capture the central essence by presenting the main events and sketching many others but this is also its weakness. The film eliminated much of the background story, which is in many respects essential and thus complicated the story with number of unclear and unexplained scenes.
There is only very little from Sethe’s past at Sweet Home and virtually nothing from Paul
D.’s. We do not know anything about Sethe’s husband Halle except his name and a possible reason why he did not show up. We can actually see him on screen twice – once in Sethe’s flashback holding their baby girl, and the second time we can get a glimpse of him in Paul
D.’s dream where he smears butter on his face and body after he saw what Schoolteacher had done to Sethe – but in neither case do we have any idea who is he and what is going on.
The past and Sweet Home exist in the film only as something mysterious and unclear.
During the first half of the film we witness some of the most crucial past events in the frequent (and often quick) flashbacks. They differ from the rest of the film by their colors
– it seems that the flashbacks are more colorful, even over bright. The flashbacks should help the viewer to understand the story better, but in many cases they only complicate the story and do not explain anything. This is especially true for the quick flashbacks in the beginning.
In the very first flashback there is a fire around a tree and we hear a shot. A viewer who did not read the book cannot know that it was Sixo, one of the Sweet Home men, who was caught in their unsuccessful attempt to run away and killed. Later on we see Paul D. with a collar but we do not know why. The flashbacks in the film look as if their main purpose is to shock the audience by showing us horrors of slavery quite plainly (e.g. Sethe being brutally abused and beaten). However, despite the showy description, the film does not really capture the “real” horrors of slavery. It does not incorporate more subtle but also more heartbreaking
38 details from a slave life. As I already observed there is no allusion to Paul D.’s previous life: the beatings, iron collar and bit at Sweet Home where he was forced to see Sixo being burned alive and Halle driven mad, where his humanity and dignity did not mean a thing and where he suffered a crisis of masculinity. Even more brutal was his treatment in the prison camp in
Georgia where he worked in a chain gang and lived in a subterranean box. After all the hardships he had been through, Paul D. thought it best to close his feelings and emotions in a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” (Beloved 72).
Baby Suggs’ life was also full of misery. She had eight children with six fathers; Halle was “the last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see changed into adulthood anyway” ( Beloved 139). All her children were taken away from her but the last one, Halle.
When she was old, Halle bought her freedom but it did not mean much to her because her freedom was at the expense of her son’s freedom. Not even her free life was enjoyable, after seeing what Sethe had done to shield her children from slavery, she gave up and believed that
“they had won” ( Beloved 184). From her sixty years as a slave and ten years of free life, she concluded that “there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople” ( Beloved 104).
Other characters, such as Stamp Paid or Ella, the Underground Railroad agents, had equally traumatic past. It is therefore true that “past is never quite the past in Morrison’s
Beloved, it is always inextricably linked to the present, even if the film at times fails to depict that link” (Lupack 503). A viewer is very likely to miss many of the connections between people and events because many of them are not mentioned in the film: the Garners from
Sweet Home know the Bodwins and brought Baby Suggs to them, the Bodwins gave her the house, saved Sethe from being hanged, found her a job, and gave Denver a job after Sethe was fired. Similarly the character of Stamp Paid and his connection to Baby Suggs’s family is downplayed in the film. He is the one who delivered Sethe’s children to Baby Suggs and later
39 on he even brought Sethe with her newborn baby. He started the feast in Baby Suggs’s yard that resulted in the community’s disapproval and he saved Denver from being killed by her mother by catching her at the right moment. He showed Paul D. the newspaper clip about
Sethe and afterwards reproached himself for ruining her chances of a decent life. The events and characters are remarkably interconnected in the book and it is of course impossible to have all the details on the screen, but I missed at least some of the above mentioned facts, because they are quite important.
There is one passage in the book that deals with Beloved’s memories from “the place where she had been”. This part is written in the stream-of-consciousness style and practically tells us that Beloved’s memory equals that of the whole race. It stretches to the very beginning of the slave trade in America, the slave ships and the Middle Passage. Her horrifying description of “crouching” in the slave ships is encompassed in the film (Beloved tells Denver in her room), however, it loses its power because people can hardly notice it and if we do, we probably cannot fully appreciate it. There is one more allusion to the Middle
Passage in connection with Sethe’s mother and the place Sethe was born. Her mother and the women on the plantation survived the Middle Passage and brought with them their native tongue (the flashback showing Sethe as a little girl watching her mother being hanged is subtitled – again, for a viewer, it is hard to guess why).
It is interesting to note the technique Demme uses in dialogues: “most of the film’s conversations are shot not with the usual rhythm of two-shots and over-the-shoulder medium shots but rather with alternating straight-on close-ups, framing each speaker as in portrait and plunging the audience unapologetically into the characters’ subjectivity” (Pfeffinger). It almost feels as if the characters are addressing us. Charles Taylor in his review wrote that this technique “is crucial to the way Beloved (both novel and movie) works that we are witnesses who are not allowed to make judgments.” Not even the story itself makes any judgments. In
40 an interview Oprah Winfrey declares: “This movie isn’t about blaming anybody. It just shows you this is how it happened. This is how it was.” (Cleage)
I was quite surprised how visually beautiful the film is and, more importantly, colorful. It almost looks as if Demme tries to compensate the viewer – after seeing the most brutal scenes in the beginning the viewer is rewarded by visually beautiful and almost melodramatic shots. The camera often turns to nature; we see the seasons change and close- ups of various animals: foxes, deer, birds, butterflies, turtles, bugs, caterpillars, etc. Also the shots of the house on Bluestone Road against the dramatic Ohio sky are powerful images that create atmosphere to a great extent (haunted when we see it at night, relaxed in a bright summer day or that of silent sadness during winter when the women in the house were exhausted by hunger and each other). Demme plays with colorful details and, despite the heavy theme it contains, he makes his movie astonishingly beautiful. Morrison, on the other hand, seems to avoid colors in her book. Colors are scarce in the lives of the women in 124. When Baby Suggs gave up and retired into bed, she was “just grieving and thinking about colors and how she made a mistake” ( Beloved 109). She dwelled on colors because they were harmless, did not hurt anybody. The novel really gives an impression that it lacks colors.
The only colors frequently mentioned (and thus made the lack of color more visible) are the orange patches on Baby Suggs’ quilt and the red blood of Sethe’s baby.
Demme and his team, especially the designer Kristi Zia and cinematographer Tak
Fujimoto, should be also given credit for quite faithful and accurate recreation of the period.
Richard Alleva asserts that “Zia’s Cincinnati projects the hum and bustle of a real, growing city where life will continue long past the final credits.”
Last but not least, I want to point the attention to the film’s music. It was made by
Rachel Portman and fits the film beautifully. From the horror sounds to its angelic vocals, the soundtrack works together with the film to create a mysterious and haunting atmosphere.
41 It consists of traditional African rhythms mixed with modern tunes and supplemented with beautiful vocals. Sometimes elevating, sometimes deeply touching and sad, the soundtrack is simply one of the best achievements of the film.
4.5. Critics, audiences, the reception of the movie
It has already been said that the film was enthusiastically accepted by some critics, reprobated by others, and by no means can it be considered a success. The box office sales were poor and the audiences did not embrace it in the way Winfrey and Demme hoped they would.
The possible reasons for rejection of the movie were: the difficult-to-follow storyline, lack of action, length, exaggerated violence, and horror scenes that brought the film to the edge of the horror genre. For some, the film was too showy. Charles Taylor sums it up when he writes about “the grindingly slow pacing, the sloppy, at times incoherent, story line and the straining grandiloquence of the tone.” He continues, “nearly all directorial choices are showy” and “distracting”. Another reviewer, Vladimir V. Zelevinsky, reports that “it is simply a torture to sit through, unstructured, unfocused, and way overlong.” He admits that “a good deal of scenes make quite an impact” but “they absolutely refuse to work together to form any kind of a cohesive whole.” These critics can be in some respect justified but they all make one important mistake. They all treat Beloved as a mainstream Hollywood film (which actually Beloved is or tries to be but at the same time it tries keep the distinctiveness of the source). Beloved is a movie that is easy to condemn without thinking too hard about it, but if we do think about it a little more, we come to the conclusion that it deserves more understanding. Kenneth Turan acknowledges a similar idea when he writes that the story
“seems to be too large and too poetic to fit comfortably into a film of any length” and that
“the work that has resulted, strange, troubling, and powerfully imagined, is rough going at
42 first, but the more time you spend with it the more the strength of the underlying material exerts its will” (qtd. in Lupack 513).
On the other hand, many critics responded positively. To cite a few of them , Jay Carr from Boston Globe called Beloved “a strong, dark, tangled powerhouse of a film that comes to grips with the scars of slavery as no previous American film has” (qtd. in Lupack 502).
Edward Guthmann is his review for San Francisco Chronicle asserts that the film “runs bravely against the grain of market-driven Hollywood entertainment”. Guthmann considers the film a faithful and successful adaptation of the book. He continues: “Demme attempts the impossible here, not only doing justice to a revered complex book and its Nobel Prize- winning author, but in crafting a mainstream hit about slavery – an event that’s never been adequately resolved and that most Americans would rather not think about” (Guthmann).
Janet Maslin from The New York Times praises the “faithful yet inventive screenplay and Tak
Fujimoto’s visceral cinematography” and Eric Pfeffinger states that “what is surprising – given the novel’s occasional opacity and given Hollywood’s low tolerance for anything interesting – is how good the movie is”.
There was a discussion about the possible reasons for the commercial failure of the film. Barbara Tepa Lupack points out similar poor grosses for Amistad and Rosewood, which were released a year earlier than Beloved , and concludes “slavery and other serious topics related to blacks have not yet become easy or profitable subjects for feature movies”
(505). However, Lupack also cites a writer-producer Tina Andrew who believes that the problem with the commercial success of Beloved is connected to its medium. She writes:
“I really believe that Beloved would have done well if it had premiered on television.
Audiences don’t want to sit around with a bunch of strangers, spend all this money for popcorn, baby sitters and parking, to be browbeaten for three hours… I really think that the acceptance of these projects has to do with the medium” (qtd. in Lupack 505). People are
43 simply unwilling to go to the cinema and be tortured by the horrors of slavery instead of entertaining themselves.
And what is the reaction of the author of the book, Toni Morrison? Her evaluation of the film was highly positive. She said: “On the actors – a beautifully bejeweled performance, I was amazed and pleased – from the first showing, even when I was anticipating what was going to happen – it’s unprecedented. Spectacular – it has teeth and doesn’t bite its tongue” (qtd. in Randolph). However, Lupack noted that in an interview with
Michael Silverblatt, Toni Morrison also remarked on the “powerful difference” between the two mediums, which goes well beyond mere reduction:
You have a major void in a movie, which is: You don’t have a reader, you have
a viewer, and that is such a different experience. As subtle as a movie can be, as
careful and artful as it can be, in the final analysis it’s blatant because you see it. You
can translate certain things, make certain interpretations, create wonder, certainly there
can be mystery, but the encounter with language is private exploration. (qtd. in Lupack
506)
In the same interview, Morrison also comments on the inevitable brevity of the film: “On the other hand, there are whole areas that not only are not there, but they’re not even gestured toward. The mechanics of cinema doesn’t work that way” (qtd. in Lupack 514).
44 Conclusion
The aim of my thesis was to explore and compare Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize- winning novel Beloved with its film adaptation. My intention was to look at the book and the film in their own right as well as to put them into a wider context of their own media and circumstances of their origins.
When dealing with the context of the book, I focused on the historical background – the story of Margaret Garner – and its similarities to Morrison’s story. In the second chapter I tried to do likewise with the film. I looked at it as an important accomplishment in the context of black filmmaking and the portrayal of black experience on screen. Even though Jonathan
Demme is a white Hollywood director the film is remarkably stable; he does not try to downplay the distinctiveness of the original story and make it more accessible to the mainstream audiences. To watch the movie is thus a challenge indeed. I was also interested in the origins of the movie itself. The leading force behind the whole project was
Oprah Winfrey, one of the most prominent figures in popular entertainment in the US. It had taken her ten years to bring Beloved on screen; nevertheless the result was highly contradictory. The film was not a success and I examined the possible reasons of its failure in the subsequent chapters.
To be able to compare the book and the film as one story presented by two different media, I included some theoretical background. In the third chapter I therefore compared literature and film in general. I was particularly interested in their means of expression, their possibilities, and limits.
In the final chapter I compared the film with its book source. My aim was not to decide which one is better but (if possible) to judge the film as an independent work of art, yet in connection to the book. I focused on the narrative structures of the book and the film, discussed the supernatural and horror elements as they are presented in the book and in
45 the film, examined the veridicality of the screen portrayal of the characters, pointed out the necessary omissions and alterations of the film, and illustrated their impact on the clarity of the story and its message. Last but not least, I concentrated on the reception of the movie by critics and audiences alike. I tried to find possible reasons of the film’s poor box office sales and failure to attract the general audiences. To these might have contributed the film’s slow and, at times, confusing narrative structure, its length and lack of action. Maybe the book is too complicated to make a movie from; after all, as Toni Morrison repeatedly announces on the last pages of her book, “it was not a story to pass on” ( Beloved 275). The film is certainly not bad but compared to the book, it does not brink about the same feelings.
The medium works differently. Nevertheless, more probable possibility seems to be its topic: slavery. The audiences are not ready or willing to witness the horrors of slavery on the big screen (i.e. to pay to be tortured by their not very distant past).
I concluded that although the film is easy to condemn as not doing the book justice, it deserves a second thought. It is a demanding and challenging film even despite its knotty (and sometimes confused) narrative structure, exaggerated spookiness, and occasional showiness.
Once we are willing to rise to the challenge, we are rewarded by its subtle, yet deep message and devotion to, and respect for Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel.
46 Works cited list
Primary Sources:
Beloved. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Perf. Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton,
Kimberley Elise. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 1998
Morrison, Toni. Beloved . London: Vintage, 1997
Secondary Sources:
Alleva, Richard. “Beloved. – Review - movie reviews.” Commonweal . November 20, 1998.
March 5, 2006
Bluestone, George. “Limits of the Novel and the Film.” Film Theory and Criticism . Ed.
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 381 –
389
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: an Interpretive History of
Blacks in American Film . New York: Continuum, 1998
Carroll, Noël: Theorizing the Moving Image . Cambridge University Press, 1996
Cleage, Pearl. “The Courage to Dream! – Interview.” Essence . December 1998. February 15,
2006
Coffin, Levi. “Margaret Garner” (from Reminiscences , 1876). African American Literature
Book Club. March 12, 2006
Dequina, Michael. “Beloved (1998).” African American Literature Book Club. March 12,
2006
47 Ebert, Roger. “Beloved.” Chicago Sun-Times . October 16, 1998. February 27, 2006
60301/1023> “Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia . 18 March 2006 9453> Guthmann, Edward. “Ghosts of Slavery: ‘Beloved’ a Gorgeous, Mysterious Film that Deals with the Emotional Toll of a Tormented Past.” San Francisco Chronicle . October 16, 1998. February 26, 2006 Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: from Micheaux to Morrison . New York: University of Rochester Press, 2002 Maslin, Janet. “ Beloved : No Peace from a Brutal Legacy.” The New York Times . October 16, 1998. February 25, 2006 < http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/101698beloved-film-review.html> Muckley, Peter A. “To Garner Stories: a Note on Margaret and Sethe in and out of History, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved .” 2002. A nniina’s Toni Morrison Page . February 7, 2006. “Oprah Winfrey stars as a former slave in compelling drama Beloved. ” Jet . October 19, 1998. March 18, 2006 Pfeffinger, Eric. “Beloved is good.” Sunday Herald-Times . October 25, 1998. February 19, 2006 < http://php.indiana.edu/~epfeffin/beloved.html> 48 Randolph, Laura B. “Oprah and Danny sizzle in their first love scenes in the powerful film Beloved. ” Ebony . November 1998, March 12, 2006 Scholes, Robert. “Narration and Narrativity in Film.” Film Theory and Criticism . Ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 381 – 389 Scott, Ellen C. “The Horrors of Remembrance: the Altered Visual Aesthetic of Horror in Jonathan Demme’s Beloved .” Genders Online Journal , Iss. 40 (2004). February 27, 2006 “Stampede of Slaves: a Tale of Horror.” The Cincinnati Enquirer 29 January 1856. February 15, 2006 Taylor, Charles. “The Designated Martyr.” Salon . October 16, 1998. February 27, 2006 Tibbetts, John C. “Oprah’s Belabored Beloved.” Literature/Film Quarterly , Vol. 27, Iss. 1 (1999), 74 – 77. February 12, 2006 < http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_199901/ai_n8833306> Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia. 23 Oct. 2005. Wikimedia Foundation . 18 March 2006 Zelevinsky, Vladimir V. “Movie Review: Beloved.” the Tech , Vol. 118, No. 52. October 23, 1998. March 19, 2006 < http://www-tech.mit.edu/V118/N52/beloved.6.1.52a.html> 49