Content provided in partnership with
Past perfect - Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven - Interview
ArtForum, Nov, 2002 by Geoffrey O'Brien
IN ANTICIPATION OF THE RELEASE THIS MONTH OF FAR FROM HEAVEN, TODD HAYNES'S MUCH-ANTICIPATED HOMAGE TO DOUGLAS SIRK, GEOFFREY O'BRIEN VISITED THE DIRECTOR AT HIS HOME IN PORTLAND, OREGON, WHERE THEY DISCUSSED HAYNES'S CANNY REDEPLOYMENT OF THE SYNTAX OF '50S CINEMA.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Seen from one angle, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven is a cunningly precise pastiche of a movie Douglas Sirk might have made in 1958--if, that is, Universal Studios had been prepared to release a movie bearing on homosexuality, interracial romance, and the civil rights movement. Right from the start--as the camera descends through autumn foliage toward an overview of a serene street in what is meant to be Hartford, Connecticut, to the sweeping, plangent accompaniment of Elmer Bernstein's score--we have the vertiginous impression of being dropped back into a past all the more welcoming for having never quite existed in the first place. As Haynes explains, the film is built out of "the language of '50s cinema, not the '50s." But if this point of departure suggests either a wan conceptual exercise or an attempt to satirize the foibles of a long-gone social order, the result is strikingly different: a movie whose period stylization taps into reservoirs of powerful emotion. Through an unexpected alchemy, Far from He aven ends up becoming the object it contemplates, and its path of conscious artifice leads toward a tragic sense of reality.
"Everything about film is always artificial," Haynes remarks. "You can come to something far more surprisingly real by acknowledging how much of a construct it is first. It always feels so much more false to me when you set out to be real." Far from Heaven signals its artifice at the outset by its unmistakable links to Sirk's 1955 masterpiece All That Heaven Allows (a work that, after Far from Heaven and Fassbinder's 1974 Ali--Fear Eats the Soul, should be recognized as not only a great film but the cause of other great films). Here it is not Jane Wyman but Julianne Moore who falls in love with her gardener, here not a Thoreau-influenced Rock Hudson but Dennis Haysbert as an African American intellectual who wins Moore's heart partly through his eloquent commentary--at a suburban art show where his mere presence creates ripples--on the religious implications of abstract art. Where Wyman in the Sirk picture is recently widowed, in the Haynes film Moore finds herself abruptly estranged from her business exec hu sband (Dennis Quaid) when his long-repressed homosexuality comes vividly to her attention.
The husband's sexual crisis is handled with an aura of hysteria and pseudoscience appropriate to the period--his anguish and shame call to mind Grant Williams as The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) angrily rejecting his wife when she attempts to comfort him for his mysterious loss of masculine pride. In these early scenes--a pickup in a gay bar, an interrupted assignation in an office, a session with a therapist offering the latest theories on curing homosexuality--one has the sense that Haynes is having fun by messing with the proprieties of '50s cinema, showing what could not have been shown, somewhat in the manner of those "Scenes We'd Like to See" that used to be featured in Mad magazine. Here is a way to reinvent the past, to travel back in time and insert forbidden episodes, taboo locations, into the history of cinema.
The sense of risk is palpable, since at any moment the movie might founder into the ridiculous or caricatural. But Haynes isn't interested in the kind of easy satire of suburban conformism encountered in a movie like Pleasantville (1998). "When most people see films set in the '50s today," he says, "there's an immediate sense of superiority. It's all about the myth that as time moves on, we become more progressive. Oh wow, they didn't know what sex was until we started to give it to them from our contemporary perspective. So the '50s become a sort of earmark point of oppressive politics and climate, which is very flattering to us as we look back."
Rather than imposing the enlightenment of latter-day opinions on its version of the '50s, Far from Heaven adopts the perspective of characters who can see no clear way out of the dilemmas their world forces on them. There are no villains here: "To me the most amazing melodramas are the ones where when a person makes a tiny step toward fulfilling a desire that their social role is built to discourage, they end up hurting everybody else. It's like a chess game of pain, a ricochet effect where everybody gets hurt but there's nobody to blame." To find pain at the heart of the lushest cinematic pleasures is the film's peculiar accomplishment.
Those pleasures are associated with a past as alluring as it is ultimately unreachable: the mythic '50s of precisely this kind of psychological melodrama, an era that (like the Old West, where sheriffs and outlaws play out their confrontations) starts as a historical period--after the depression and World War II, before the eruption of social unrest and personal liberation in the '60s--and turns into a region outside time, an operatic space where emotions, hemmed in, finally prove irrepressible. "I love these films," says Haynes, "because they were always more about the smaller domestic limitations of possibility and experience than the genres associated with men, like the western or the gangster film, which are about the limitless frontier that you can discover and take over." In the verismo of '50s melodrama, the climax comes not with an explosion of gunfire or the advance of cavalry down a hillside but through a blossoming of inner feeling, gently assisted by a full-bodied color palette and an orchestra al ert to every shift in mood.
