Beloved Movie Comparison

It seemed that the film was considerably true to the original story, which was helpful in better understanding of the novel in some ways. The film described the story sequentially in general while the novel was made up of pieces of memories from many characters, which were too intricate to understand the flow sometimes. And the description of characters was also similar to the original. However, I found that the description of Beloved in the film was more distinctive than that in the novel. In the film, Beloved was described as if she was a physically or mentally handicapped girl at first and then later, almost an animal. For example, it seemed she was not able to move her lower lip and jaw easily in the film. Although it seemed she had some

Indeed the genre of the film was classified as drama and ‘horror’. However, there might be another possibility that the film suggested its own interpretation of the novel by animalizing Beloved in those ways. I guessed the film tried to describe Beloved as a product of profound, distorted and violent prejudice against black people. While she seemed to be disabled and animalistic, it was not because she was born to be but because she was rendered or forced to be, which meant the cause and the effect had been inverted. The violence of distorted views on black people not only made people perceive them as less human but also made black people animal-like in some aspects by blocking and disturbing their development of intact identities as human beings. Animalizing Beloved and visualizing her non-human features, the film might intend to show us how cruelly black people were affected by the mistreating and misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I am not sure whether the description of Beloved in the film was necessary to show the cruel and terrible effects produced by racism. While the baby-like, immature and instinctive features of Beloved in the novel also indicated the underdevelopment resulting from the violence of racism, there might be some other effects from not describing her as a handicapped girl or an animal and not confining the characteristic as it was in the film. For example, watching the film, I could not feel enough the occasional seriousness in her acts in the novel. Therefore, I thought the description of Beloved was a limitation of the film that was too much focused on some aspects of a character, covering the other aspects of it, to convey some messages to