Beloved Dreams?

English Lit. and Film

3/13/06

Beloved Dreams?

In movies, it is crucial to understand that objects and images that are portrayed in films are always up for interpretation by the audience. The movie “Beloved”, starring Oprah and Danny Glover, gives wonderful, and at sometimes confusing images that exercise the minds and raises many question of audiences that have witnessed this movie for what it is worth. Interpretations of the images within this movie are profound as well as thought provoking when one thinks about what is really happening in the movie, and if it’s even happening at all. Interpretations within film are up to the audience when one wants to figure out and decide what is happening. Artistic license and the interpretations within film by the audience is one of the most important aspects of movies for it is many times the reason why they are so revered and related to so well by audiences.

Living in the past is something that every person has been known to do in one-way or another. So, when living in the past is put in context within a film it is easy to relate to. “Beloved” does this extremely well. Though all of the audiences that see contemporary movies where not enslaved in the southern United States, it is still an issue that is portrayed in films all other the world, and, subsequently, is the subject matter in “Beloved.” Though no one living today knows first hand exactly happened in the south in the last quarter of the 1800’s, there is a formulated idea of what it was like by audiences everywhere. The main character, Sethe (played by Oprah), was a slave in this movie and her past haunts her throughout the movie.

Horrible memories of the past can make a person go mad. The life of an African-American slave (if you can even call it thus) is a life that no person is known to live in the world (or at least to the public knowledge) and would lead anyone to live through such atrocities would have severe mental problems. The lives that they lived were traumatic to say the least. To think that the horrific situations they witnessed, did not follow them through out there lives is ridiculous, and to think that such appalling happenings didn’t take a toll on the psychological network of the brain is preposterous. Such ghastly memories are those of which contaminate the mind of Sethe so much so that it makes her see things that are not there. This is an interpretation that one can find in the movie, “Beloved.”

However, with all due respect to the interpretation in question, it is not clear in the movie of whether or not Sethe is insane, schizophrenic, or otherwise mentally disturbed. At times she seems quite sane and seems completely reasonable if not completely coherent in a given social situation. Yet, there are multiple examples in which it, her sanity is thrown into question. In the movie, it shows that a strange young girl named, Beloved, who cannot talk well at all, makes her way into the household that Sethe, her younger daughter, Denver, and her lover, Paul D share, and eventually becomes, or seems to, a resident of the house they live in. It is alluded to, in the film, more than once, that Sethe has lost her mind, and that Beloved is a figment of her imagination,