Tasteful Tales: Todd Haynes’ Poison
[Sight & Sound, October 1991]
The first thing you see is a caption: “The whole world is dying of panicky fright”. Is this to locate us within the film’s plot, or is it a general statement about our underlying emotional condition? The first shot is a POV of police battering down your door. The POV rushes through a nondescript, 50s/80s apartment – utility furniture, shot in harsh black and white – before rushing to a window and dissolving into light.
Jump cut to an 80s news report, all flat US tape colour, about a Long Island boy who has flown away. But the voiceover – “Who was Richie Beacon, and where is he now?” is too rhetorical for the pawky certainties of most news reporters. Another cut takes you immediately into the title sequence, where another POV travels with a hand around a lush set design. It then unfolds into the more familiar territory of period costume and Genet homage.
Poison is written, directed and co-edited by Todd Haynes, a Brown University art/semiotics graduate. Costing, $255,000, it is his first feature proper; previous credits include The Suicide (1978), an examination of contemporary teenage life, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), where the story of the Carpenters is told through a dazzling variety of media techniques: vox pops, POVs, voiceovers, captions, simulations and reconstructions.
Superstar is famous for its central device: the reconstruction of Karen Carpenter’s life and death (from anorexia) is told not through actors, but mutated Barbie dolls. As Karen’s desperate fight for control over her life unfolds, the narrative reveals the emotions raging beneath the Carpenters’ blank facade. The formal shock posed by the dolls’ appearance forces you to concentrate on the film’s overt message: “As we investigate the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death, we are provided with an extremely graphic picture of the internal experience of contemporary femininity.”
As you might expect from Haynes’ previous work, Poison is a film full of ideas, aphorisms and deliberate perceptual tricks, all spinning around the montage of three separate storylines. As with all good montage, this placing together of disparate elements sets up a vortex of of ideas and feelings, not all of which my have been consciously intended by the assembler.
Containing explicit male homosexuality and funded by the NEA, the film fell foul of the American Family Association and was, as usual, boosted by the attendant publicity. This slots it into several easy matrices (America’s current moral spasm; homophobia; the public funding of the art; the sybiosis between censor and censored). Haynes is nothing if not a didactic film-maker, but Poison is most interesting, and moving, when seen as a film about perception and limits.
For instance, you could jump right in and say that the first sequence, Horror, is obviously ‘about’ Aids. Shot in the apocalyptic style of 50s science fiction films – with a voiceover that had the luxurious menace of a Vincent Price and tight close-ups on the lights, fans, grilles and vortices that were the staples of noir – the storyline follows a scientist, Thomas Graves, who synthesizes a distillation of the sex drive into liquid form. He drinks it by accident and develops a disfiguring, easily contagious disease characterised in the film as leprosy.
“Do I look like the pitiful, decrepit result of some indulgence?”, Graves hisses, parroting the Moral Right’s dismissal (both rhetorical and financial) of gay PWAs. There is much anger here, but as the sequence moves in the last third of the film into pure Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory, with a vengeful crowd of ‘ordinary people’ in pursuit of the outcast, a wider alienation presents itself. As David Wojnarovicz says in his searing account of seropositivity, Close to the Knives: “My rage is really about the fact that when I was told that I’d contracted this virus, it didn’t take me long to realise that I’d contracted a diseased society as well”. This is a magical conversion necessary for ‘deviants’ – that is, those described, not by themselves but by society, as ‘abnormal’ – to function with any sense of self worth. This treacherous odyssey is undergone by any of us whose sexual proclivities define us, both from within and without, as homosexuals.
The second storyline, Hero, concerns the agents of naming: the media, and in particular current affairs. With its intrusive, normative style – voiceovers, vox pops, name and status captions – Hero, like the worst of news journalists, bludgeons the story out of its protagonists; but then the story itself stats to slide. Most documentaries set up contradictions. In Hero, wildly varying opinions on the Bad Seed, Richie Beacon – the “perfect child” who “liked controlling people”, who had an infectious anal discharge, who killed his father – unfold to the point where the story in ‘understood’, but then this undestading is cut away by Richie’s magical disappearance. Here, the intensity of his mother’s awe cuts through the ‘objective’ faming of the documentary.
The power of naming
Naming is crucial here. As Poison‘s voiceover says: “A child is born and he is given a name. Suddenly, he recognises his position in the world. For many, this experience, like that of being born, is one of horror.” The consequences of naming can be disastrous, and have been at times for the homosexual communities. For instance, once the word ‘homosexuality’ was coined by the Viennese writer Koly Maria Bekert in 1869, it quickly came to replace all previous epithets and, as David F. Greenberg points out in The Construction of Homosexuality, makes a mid-nineteenth centry change in attitudes, the net effect of which was to ‘strengthen anti-homosexual beliefs”. Homosexuality was soon legislated against in the UK by the Labouchere amendment of 1885. And ten years later, this legal naming resulted in the archetypal homosexual scandal of Oscar Wilde.
While’s downfall gave a flippant piece of lawmaking the saction of legitimised social prefudice: a current in British and American public life that continues today. Like many who have been the subject of scandals after him, Wilde was punished for being ‘public’ (or ‘out’) with activities which were regarded as only conductible in private, if at all.
Yet for members of a putative ‘deviant minority’, what is in the ‘public’ sphere – the language of law, government, police, market research, media – almost always fails to reflects life as it is lived. The disparity between you individual sense of self worth and the pejorative estimation placed on you by society is often vast. The psychic consequences are considerable, and still ill-understood: they can be productive, or they can be annihilating.
The disparity between the public and the private is the area in which pop culture and subculture work so effectively – and is why they have both been targeted so heavily by the New Right. As Richard Davenport Hines states in Sex, Death and Punishment: “Gay men and lesbians cause doubt, confirm uncertainty, emphasize differentiation, symbolise contradiction and confront normality. The vagrant impulse which characterises homosexual desire, the insolent language and camp gestures and above all doubtfulness are all horribly threatening to authority and authoritarian personalities”. In the conversion of values necessary for empowerment, gestures and objects become talismanic. In his crystallisation of subcultural theory, Dick Hebdige focuses on Jean Genet’s tube of vaseline: “We are intrigued by the most mundane objects – a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle – which, nonetheless, like the tube of vaseline, take on a symbolic dimension, becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile”.
Genet’s writing centres on this magical conversion. His is a world of pure insult, a world in which society’s values are turned on their head. And this is the subject of Poison‘s third narrative, Homo, an adaptation of The Thief’s Journal. If Richie Beacon “was always doing these private things”, then John Broom, the hero of Homo, flourishes in his own, private world within prison: a microsociety in which privacy is well nigh impossible.
Broom is named ‘homosexual’ on his entry into prison, but this public definition is so far away from his experience that he shrugs it off. His love affair with Jack Bolton is played out within the normative public/private dichotomy. Whatever their ‘private’ feelings for each other, when others are present, Broom and Bolton bark at each other and collude in the ritual humiliation of the one out, femme homosexual prisoner. Although set in prison, Homo plays down any sense of public activity. All the encounters are set within enclosed spaces, yest even here, volcanic feelings are barely to be admitted in a private language.
Broom and Bolton have internalised society’s hostility, and the raunchiness of the climactic penetration sequence in not enough to dispel their implicit and self-hating equation of sex with violence. This is how oppression works: not just overtly, but covertly; in the subconscious as well as in the everyday. As Broom says in voiceover: “All night long I built an imaginary life of which he was the centre. And I always gave that life, which was begun over and over, a violent end.”
Back in the 50s
Since the onset of a “gay cinema”, gay skinheads and prison toughs have appeared ad nauseam in the films of Fassbinder and Derek Jarman. The relief of seeing confident gay imagery cannot be over-emphasised, but the very success of these and other directors had resulted in a new erotic shorthand, and it is in this hand that Homo writes. Admitting a particular kind of sexiness is a good idea, but in the case of Homo it also places a third of this ground-breaking statement about how it feels to be homosexual into more familiar definitions. The attempt here by the village Voice to equate Poison and Salo is unfortunate; in place of Pasolini’s fundamental smash up, Poison seems like an end-of-term paper.
Part of the problem lies in the film’s sourcing of 50s imagery; although both Homo and Hero source different periods (an idealised 40s; a flat 80s) it is Horror that provides the dominant look. Poison uses the blurred 50s/80s aesthetic that in the hands of directors like David Lynch has defined pop post-modernism during the last five years. But it then transgresses it: unlike Lynch, Haynes had a sharp sense of progressive politics and the interaction between his narratives throws up fundamental questions about our psychic state.
It has been the project of the New Right of the 80s in both the US and the UK to erase the wildness and progressivism of the 60s and restate the 50s ideal of suburban, materialistic conformity. Pop culture has played its part in this: beginning with punk/new wave fashions, which re-emphasised the 50s shape, that decade’s style has proved dominant. Films like Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Demme’s Something Wild define this blur of 80s values with the stylistic trappings of the 50s. Yet the return of the decade in which pop culture was young and vigorous is a mockery: the 50s flawed but powerful ideal of democratic consumption had been reneged upon. Now it is enough, as Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, for fewer to consume more.
The result is the exclusion of those ‘minorities’ for whom pop culture brought visibility and power. It is impossible to speak about pop culture without the minority subcultures which have given individual artists, groups, stylists and writers their strength. Yet in the 80s, subcultures have become style and style has become the preserve of the rich or right wing. In this, as Hanif Koreishi has noted in the last issue of Sight and Sound, Blue Velvet and Something Wild portray the deviant roots of pop culture as something dangerous, other. In the terrifying abyss that suddenly opens up beneath the suburban ideal, non-conformists are demonised in order to be excluded.
Poison speaks defiantly from the other side. The paranoid, apocalyptic air of Horror reminds you that consumerism was as much a product of the Cold War as it was a liberation. It also rams home the point that we are now living in the future predicted by those paranoid 50s science fiction films: the vortices that once suggested a near-terminal loss of control are now the staple of pop videos.
Queer Planet
“The world is dying of panicky fright” and Poison makes all too clear the disastrous impact of Aids and exclusion on the psyches of queer men: horror, loss, pain paranoia, self-hatred, and an all-pervasive sense of the world closing in. Poison concentrates on periods inimical to queer culture – both the 50s and the 80s – and while it makes the point that queer life comes out of these periods, it presents this life against an environment that is uniformly hostile; despite moments of transcendence, it internalises much of the decade which it pastiches. One way though this would be to move the time frame forward. To source that brief period between 1966 and 1982 that was more supportive of homosexuality would be to dispel the internalised message of self-hatred and doom which, in the hands of the New Right, Aids has appeared to reinforce.
Unlike Salo, or another film from the 60s’ widest outreach, Performance, Poison is a film of limits. In this respect, it is a film of its time. This is not a period when the public discourse of media , law and government is tolerant of wildness and experimentation. After ten years of the assiuously promoted ascendancy of the New Right, the freedoms of the late 60s now have to be regained, and then extended.
Like Jarman’s Queer Edward II – the book of the film – Poison is an explicit engagement with the onset of Aids and the bigotry which has grown in its wake. In this climate, a scene as (let’s face it) tasteful as the climax of Homo becomes scandalous. “Sex is the only way to infuriate them”, wrote another master of insult, Joe Orton. “Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in no time”.
Poison taps into the new, hostile homosexual politics, the very name of which is a conversion: Queer Nation, Queer Planet, Queer Queer Queer. Just like the captions in Queer Edward II, which turn around the slogans routinely used to chastise homosexuals – “If you must be heterosexual, please try to be discreet” – Poison is a deliberate, stinging slap in the face.