Beloved

National Review, Nov 23, 1998 by John Simon

AT a PEN conference years ago, Toni Morrison complimented me on my Italian overcoat. This alerted me to her sartorial acuity but did not elicit regard for her scriptorial acumen. In fact, her Nobel Prize for Literature made me wonder whether the members of the Nobel committee were perhaps more readily dazzled by praise for their wardrobe. But from close observation of Scandinavian literary outerwear, I concluded that her award must have been based on some other kind of blindness.

I have not read Miss Morrison's Beloved, but having seen the movie that I'm informed follows her book faithfully, I'm prepared to give it even wider berth. It is the story of Sethe, who at the end of the Civil War escapes from Kentuckian slavery but kills her daughter, Beloved, to prevent her from falling into the hands of the slavemasters who raped, flogged, and murdered, and even wantonly squirted black mothers' milk into their own mouths to prevent slave babies from being suckled.

But Sethe does not get around to killing her two sons or her unborn daughter, Denver, stopped as she is in Medea's res. Pregnant, she manages to flee to Ohio. As the film opens, her by now grown sons decamp for good, for reasons that, like so much else in the movie, are unclear. But unlike so much else, their reason does become clear: the ramshackle house on the outskirts of Cincinnati has been haunted for years by a poltergeist that hurls dogs clear across the room and tirelessly breaks the crockery.

Sethe's household economics, like many another's here, cannot be decoded, but she surely cannot afford such depredations on her dinnerware and her sleep. Yet she and Denver remain put. In 1875, a black-clad young woman rises from the river and staggers into Sethe's home. She speaks in a hideous croak derived from The Exorcist, which I'm still trying to figure out where she could have seen. Later, the croak changes into a childish falsetto, suggesting that she died early. She gives her name as Beloved. This puzzles Sethe, especially since the girl says she came on foot, yet her shoes and tootsies are in mint condition. As Beloved was scarcely a name popular among slaves (or, I sincerely hope, anyone else), it shows a certain inability on Sethe's part to put two and two-or even one and one-together. Only much later does a long cicatrice on the girl's throat clue her mother in.

Oh yes, quite a bit earlier Sethe's household was enriched by the coming of Paul D., who, despite his monicker, was not a rapper avant la lettre but another escaped slave and a friend of Sethe's late husband who spent 18 wanderyears tracking the woman down. You'd think that such detective work would either take much less time or be wholly impossible, but in Beloved the natural is as illogical as the supernatural. Why, for instance, would a poltergeist wait a decade to materialize, and then ascend from the waters as a sort of mermaid in mourning? Beloved claims to have come out of a yearning to reunite with Sethe and yet seems to prefer Denver's company, but then, I suppose love-hate for a mother who murdered you might elicit some ambivalence even in a revenant. In any case, the materialized Beloved is not a whit less destructive than the former invisible one. She even manages to rape Paul D., her mother's devoted lover, if I follow things correctly despite the filmmakers' concerted efforts to make following well-nigh beyond one's reach.

Jonathan Demme's film uses any number of ingenious devices to facilitate noncommunication, perhaps out of the altruistic motive of forcing viewers to buy the book. There are the frequent near-subliminal flashbacks to the horrible past that convey spicy brutality, but leave one otherwise confused. There are scenes in the present so vague and brief as to evade apprehending. There are frequent scenes in such extreme closeup-usually, but not always, of feet-as to seriously impede comprehension. And there are countless non sequiturs in human (never mind ghostly) behavior, especially as to when, where, and how something happens, notably certain departures and returns of principal characters. Thus Denver knows exactly when her future employer will come to fetch her in his carriage, though nothing has been agreed on beforehand-unless perhaps by invisible telephone.

And, of course, he turns up just as a chorus of thirty-odd women, with Carnegie Hall precision, are chanting an exorcism for Beloved, who displays herself naked and pregnant to the concertizing ladies. Succubas do not as a rule conceive, but this one is gibbous as all get-out, and promptly does get out, leaving behind only the lovely quilt of Sethe's mother-in-law, the charismatic preacher Baby Suggs (a quizzical name for a crone), which Beloved, in a farewell gesture, vandalizes.

After that, Sethe, instead of evincing appropriate relief, sickens incurably and takes to her bed. This is precisely when Denver chooses to take on both afternoon and evening jobs, leaving her mother unattended, were it not that Paul D. preposterously resurfaces just then, with providentially free afternoons and nights for the tending of Sethe, whom he previously abandoned.