Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...street names in Morrison's novel are invented in response to white officialdom, the characters, who are all black, spend their lives reacting in one way or another to persistent discrimination. Macon Dead, a successful black slumlord, will always be warped, both because he must live with a name given his father by a drunken Union soldier who filled out the form wrong, and because he will not be any more accepted by the white banks than he will be by his black tenants. His wife, the doctor's daughter, will never be part of the city's black community...
During the course of the novel, Milkman must come to recognize Pilate's essential healthiness. But the process is slow, and the realization that Pilate's kind of freedom is won at the cost of a normal life comes painfully. First, Milkman must rediscover his family's roots, and try alternate paths to liberation. For a while he works in his father's office, collecting rents; then he tries a love affair with Pilate's not-quite-crazy granddaughter. These routes are not satisfying, but neither is his friendship with Guitar, a violently angry man who retaliates against murders...
...sterility, and Milkman's recognition of that fact alters his view of the world. The apparent perversity of Milkman's mother is the natural outgrowth of her solitude; his father watched his own father die, and he cannot free himself of the bitterness. None of the characters in this novel are completely normal, but Morrison's presentation of how they have been warped by their world is compelling and beautiful...
Judith Rossner, the author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, clearly understood the appeal of this kind of masochistic allegory, as the best-seller success that greeted her pulp novel demonstrated. That Richard (In Cold Blood) Brooks-should decide to bring this trash-posing-as-fiction to the screen also shows at once a keen eye for the commercial and a readiness to pursue his art within the constraining framework of a depressing narrative. In taking on a character like Theresa Dunn as the focal point of his film, Brooks has confirmed an affinity for the dark underside of the individual...
Brooks altered the structure of Rossner's novel in only one instance--by placing the murder at the end of the movie instead of at the beginning--and the film on balance suffers as a result. The director undoubtedly made this change for a specific reason; by saving the murder of Theresa until the final scene, Brooks was able to exploit the effective technique of timing a flashing strobe light in her bedroom with the rapidly mounting and then slowing heartbeat of the victim. In so doing, however, Brooks traps himself in to the quandary of suddenly thrusting the murderer...