Beloved is about a woman, Sethe and her daughter, Denver (played by Kimberly Elise) who live in a house that this haunted by the ghost of the baby Sethe murdered. The ghost takes a physical form and comes to the house. Through flashbacks we learn that Sethe murdered the baby and attempted to kill her other children to keep them from being taken back into slavery.
This film is an interesting example of intersectionality that is not lost on Ms. Winfrey. In an interview with Roger Ebert she said:
"It is important to understand why a woman would be so driven by the slave experience that she could kill her own children. Toni spoke to me of `that iron-willed, arrogant Sethe.' And I had trouble with the term `arrogant.' And Toni said, `When I tell you she's arrogant, believe it. She's arrogant.' Arrogant, in her unwavering confidence, without one moment of doubt, that the decision that she made to take the life of her children was the right decision."
In that same interview she speaks of the challenges of playing Sethe and the passion with which she plays this character is clear. She discusses how she used bill of sales from real slave auctions to prepare and inspire her performance and how lines like "Look like when I got here I love my children more because as long as I knew we were in Kentucky they really weren't mine to love" were difficult to deliver.
The film Beloved as well as Ms. Morrison's novel tackles the question that Maggie Humm poses for readings of women's films "How do women authors manage the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards". Both Ms. Morrison and Ms. Winfrey subvert the Madwoman in the Attic trope by taking us inside the experience of Sethe. We watch her actions without judging nor condoning them but rather with understanding.
This movie being considered a failure troubles me. Tommy Lott touches upon bad black films and successful ones in his essay A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema.
"Although audience reactions may vary from film to film, black people have a deep-seated concern with their history of being stereotyped in Hollywood films, a concern which provides an important reason to be skeptical of any concept of black cinema that would include works which demean blacks. Some would seek to abate this concern by specifying a set of wholly aesthetic criteria by which to criticize bad films about black people by both black and white filmmakers. Unfortunately, this approach contains undesirable implications for black filmmaking practices. We need only consider the fact that low-budget productions (e.g., Bush Mama, Bless Their Little Hearts, and Killer of Sheep) frequently suffer in the marketplace, as well as in the eyes of critics, when they fail to be aesthetically pleasing, or the fact that a film's success will sometimes be due largely to its aesthetic appeal, despite its problematic political orientation (e.g., Roots or Shaka Zulu)" (222, Lott).
With this in mind a beautiful, complex film like Beloved produced and written by black women should be the best of both worlds in terms of political orientation and aesthetics.
However, the topic of discussion of the movie's failure has become an anecdote about her gaining 30 pounds, and binging on macaroni and cheese which she confessed in a Piers Morgan interview.
Works Cited
A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema
Author(s): Tommy L. Lott Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2,
Black Film Issue (Summer, 1991), pp. 221-236
Humm, Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film,
Links
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001856/ http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/winfrey-confronts-the-strength-and-the-spirits-of-beloved
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1998/BELOV.php
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