Joffrey

Since we're talking about hauntology, we ought to have mentioned Beloved by now: not only Morrison's novel, but also Demme's astonishing film. It's telling that Demme is celebrated for his silly grand guignol, The Silence of the Lambs, while Beloved is forgotten, repressed, screened out. Hopkins' pantomime ham turn as Lecter surely spooks no-one , whereas Thandie Newton's automaton-stiff, innocent-malevolent performance as Beloved is almost unberable: grotesque, disturbing, moving in equal measure.Like The Shining - a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a decade - Beloved reminds us that America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World .... but here they are...Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of America's other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. No doubt the film's commercial failure was in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some IMDB viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassifed as Horror... well, so should American history... (lu sur le blog http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/)