James Morrison (ed.),
The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows.
London; New York: Wallflower Press, 2006.
ISBN: 978 1 904764 77 9
US$25.00 (pb)
224pp
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

Ordinarily a book of theoretically-besotted essays on the cinema offers little more than a long dull slog through the painfully obvious. You don’t have to have read Lacan on ‘The Mirror Stage and le peitit objet a’ to know that Hitchcock deals with sexuality at its most fetishized. In fact what the noted French mythomanic has to say may well work against any and all manner of understanding of Hitchcock’s art. But you can’t steer so easily away from theory when it comes to the works of Todd Haynes. Semiotics was his major at Brown university, and that fact informs every single one of his films – from his scarcely known debut short Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (1985), right on through to his new and most experimental work I’m Not There(USA/Germany 2007). And frankly Lacan would have his work cut out for him on dealing with any of them. The bottom line is there’s simply no formula for dealing with works as idiosyncratic as Safe (UK/USA 1995), Velvet Goldmine (UK/USA 1998) Far From Heaven (France/USA 2002), his virtually banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (USA 1987), and the almost as obscure television short Dottie Gets Spanked (USA 1993), as well as the more familiar Poison (USA 1991). In the notes to the many well-crafted essays about these films that comprise The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, you’ll find citations of everything from the American Psychiatric Association’s 1987 ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, to Dr. Frederic Wertham’s ‘Seduction of the Innocents’ (a famous piece of 50’s hysteria that claimed Batman and Robin would turn post World War II America’s children gay) to James Baldwin’s brilliant and sadly little discussed essay on African-American moviegoing, The Devil Finds Work, right on through to citations of such theoretical regulars as Jacqueline Rose, Laura Mulvey, and Mary Anne Doane. Add the queer likes of Wayne Koestenbaum and D.A. Miller to your footnotes and it’s clear you’ve got yourself a book worth reading – and teaching.

Born in 1961, Haynes found himself in the midst of an ideological firestorm in 1991 when his experimental feature Poison in which narratives involving documentary (‘Hero’), science fiction (‘Horror’) and a loose adaptation of Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose (‘Homo’) came under attack for having been ever-so-slightly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes were simultaneously blasted for doing things racist, hysteric and homophobe Jess Helms didn’t approve of. Many of them faced career difficulties as a consequence. But Haynes not only survived, he thrived. Poison was quickly followed by Safe, a still much-discussed drama of an upper middle-class housewife dealing with environmental allergies at a sinister desert treatment center. Both an examination of the San Fernando valley middle class from whence he came, and a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic and the ‘treatment’ offered by ‘New Age’ charlatans like Louise Hay, it proved that Haynes had moved beyond theory to practice. This was confirmed by his next film, Velvet Goldmine, a spectacular recreation of the brief Glam Rock era of the early 70’s and the impact it had on a culture ever-so-briefly seduced by the prospect of polymorphous-perverse sexual ‘fluidity’. Then came Far From Heaven – a scrupulously detailed recreation of the 50’s via an evocation of the plush melodramas of Douglas Sirk, complete with a lush period score (his last) by the great Elmer Bernstein. The kick was Haynes’ film revolved around subjects Sirk could never have touched, principally interracial romance and closeted gay sexuality. Its success suggested ‘the big time’ was the next step – a fact confirmed by Morrison who notes that Haynes was offered the opportunity of making a film of Wally Lamb’s Oprah-approved tearjerker She’s Come Undone. But Haynes didn’t take up the offer, opting for a totally original mediation on Bob Dylan (with six different actors playing different emanations of the singer-songwriter) instead.

Comparing Haynes to his contemporary, Gus Van Sant, whose career veered from the margins of Mala Noche to the mainstream of Good Will Hunting in a few short years, Morrison notes “Haynes’ career so far, at its still relatively early stage, has achieved such theoretical and artistic coherence that any similar departure would inevitably felt as a severe rupture” (6). As I’m Not There shows, Haynes isn’t about to rupture anytime soon. And as this volume demonstrates there is an equally remarkable degree of consistency and theoretical fortitude to Haynes from the very beginning.

“Assassins is less about Arthur Rimbaud the real-life boy-poet than it is about ‘Rimbaud’, a character we have largely constructed from his writings and from the legends and myths that have grown up about him” (25), notes Joan Hawkins in her essay ‘Now is the Time of the Assassins’, underscoring an aesthetic sensibility achieving full exotic flower in the Dylan film (where one of the Dylans calls himself Arthur Rimbaud.) In a way I’m Not There is Haynes’ first film about adults. As the book’s essays show, childhood as either a real or imposed state (ie. the child-like adults Julianne Moore plays in both Safe and Far From Heaven not to mention the Barbie dolls of Superstar which resemble her) is an obsession with Haynes. In ‘Mediating Queer Boyhood: Dottie Gets Spanked’, Lucas Hilderbrand makes mention of how “contemporary queer kids remain nearly unimaginable in our culture, except as the past lives of gay adults. . .” (43) This may well alter in light of the pre-pubescent very queer Justin on Ugly Betty – a post-Haynes show if there ever was one. Still the plight of little Stevie in Haynes’ film – attracted and repelled by a Lucille Ball-like TV comedienne named Dottie – asks the question that remains unanswered, that is, how do we deal with our radical queer selves?

So what comes next? In his essay ‘Relocating Our Enjoyment of the 1950’s: The Politics of Fantasy in Far From Heaven’, Scott Higgins notes “The image of the 1950’s functions as a key element in the contemporary conservative revival. . .Nostalgia today functions in a conservative way because we fail to recognize what we enjoy about it. By repositioning ourselves in this nostalgic fantasy and rethinking how we enjoy it, Far From Heaven marks a major political blow in the ongoing battle against the prevailing conservatism” (120). And in that same way I’m Not There resists the equally comforting liberal fantasy of a freewheeling and ‘turned on’ 1960’s. There’s always a psychic price to pay. And Todd Haynes has one of the best calculators of that payment known to man.

David Ehrenstein,
USA.

Created on: Saturday, 1 December 2007