Beloved and Killer of Sheep

Beloved and Killer of Sheep came in the mail at the same time. I had not thought there was such a strong connection, but watching Beloved first and then Killers of Sheep gave me a sense of a post-slavery experience immediately after the Civil War and then one hundred years later.

Beloved is powerful, both the book and the movie which I had seen when it first came out and shortly after reading the book. I wanted to see the movie again when the boys were assigned Huckleberry Finn in school and I found out that Toni Morrison intended a connection between her book and Twain's. Rereading the book is a better way to see the connection but the movie still remains something to see again.

Jonathan Demme, who gave us Swimming to Cambodia with Spaulding Gray which I loved and Caged Heat which is on my life list of movies never to watch, directed. He opens and closes with the same bookending method that John Ford used effectively in The Searchers. The framing of the headstone with the one word, Beloved, is dramatic. The movie doesn't explain what the book does, which is that Sethe, the mother (Oprah Winfrey), wanted to inscribe Dearly Beloved but only had time for one word. Interestingly, the cable TV show, 6 Feet Under, uses a similar headstone in one of its openings.

Watching this again, I was deeply struck by how people's actions can change through the power of grace, love, and compassion. Watch the townspeople throughout the movie and how they look at the house where Sethe lives. Then later, as the house and residents become more and more possessed, the townspeople start looking inward at their own imperfections. They start responding with gifts of food and kindness and end with The Thirty Women using massive amounts of prayer as a way to bring comfort and healing to Sethe. (look for Irma P. Hall; she's always great) I am still overwhelmed at the power of that sequence of scenes.

I loved Thandie Newton's performance as the title character. Her acting got trashed in the reviews but I think it needs to be looked at in the same stream of consciousness way with which Morrison wrote the book. As disturbing and mesmerizing as she is it is not as disturbing as her decision to act opposite three Eddie Murphy's at once in Norbit. That's on my life list to never see again.

Grace, love, and compassion enter as the translation in a morning prayer and really does describe for me what happens in the movie. The initials also happen to be the same as the model of the Mazda car that Linda owned when we first met and which we drove to Alaska on our honeymoon. It was a great little car which I think is what Mazda intended the initials to stand for. They're also the initials for godless, liberal communism which was getting a very funny reception at our Thanksgiving weekend last year.

Killer of Sheep takes place over a hundred years after Beloved. It is post-slavery, 1973 Watts. It's equally powerful but harder to watch as most of it was shot with a hand-held camera which, at my age, is like riding a rickety roller coaster. Not nearly as bad as the excremental Blair Witch Project but still too much for a second viewing right away which it needs to really appreciate. There is a wonderful sense of humanity that the director, Charles Burnett, draws from the scenes. At the beginning, it seems almost like the utter slowness of the movie is meant to portray the utter lack of humanity but I think that the difficult-to-watch scenes in the slaughterhouse and around the railroad tracks are meant to show how humanity perseveres. Also, the beautiful scene of the husband and wife dancing.

In one of the bonus shorts that Burnett made several years later, and which is included in the DVD, a character says that African Americans have survived slavery and discrimination and they will survive whatever else comes their way. That seems to be one thing that Killer of Sheep is saying but which could include any group of people whose lives are defined by extreme poverty and drudgery yet manage to find humanity in it.

There's a scene that only a nutcase like me could write an essay about so I will. The teenage son, or maybe preteen, is eating breakfast. I happened to watch this the same week as National Eat Breakfast Week which in the public schools means green eggs and turkey ham served for breakfast because it's also T. Geisel's birthday. Since my school is 95% free and reduced lunch everybody gets a free breakfast. Not everybody eats the green eggs. Yuck.

The teenager in the movie is pouring his second (at least) helping of frosted cereal. Not terribly bad given that some kids are eating that for dinner. But what happens next is horrific. He opens a box of Domino's sugar, the kind with the metal spout that you pull out. I went back and timed how long he poured out the sugar. It was almost two cups. Then he starts eating.

It is not too much of a stretch to connect nutrition to poverty. Wow, Bart, I never would have thought of that. Well, you should because I'm not going to write anymore about it. What I will write about is the Mom and Pop connection with Beloved and Killer of Sheep.

The daughter in Beloved talks about wanting to go to o'BERLIN College and the director of Killer of Sheep is named Burnett. Now what more reason could you need to watch them back to back?

Bart, are you OK?