Far from Heaven: The surface of things
Todd Haynes' vivid take on 50's melodrama critiques repressive social structures.
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Todd Haynes’ new film, May December, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week to strong reviews and a substantial sale to Netflix. I’m a fan of Haynes and I’ve written about his work before, so I’ve been following this film with interest. It’s a drama inspired by tabloid scandal—an actress (Natalie Portman) prepares to play a former middle school teacher (Julianne Moore) who had a sexual relationship with a student she later married, and she imposes herself on their family as research for the role. Critics have pointed out that it has a strain of surprising humor and described it as “camp,” an analysis which Haynes responded to in the New York Times:
“That was never, ever a term I applied to the script or style of shooting,” he said, though he understood why writers might be tempted to use the word: “‘Camp’ is maybe a too catchall term these days for an excited state of reading things, where you’re encouraged to read something against itself at times. And that’s exactly what I hoped would happen, especially with a sense of pleasure involved, and amusement.”
I find myself “reading something against itself at all times” whenever I watch a Haynes film, and I’m fascinated by how many of Haynes’ preoccupations across his body of work appear to be present in May December—his concern with the domestic lives of women and how cinema frames these lives, his use of irony and distancing formal techniques, his casting of Julianne Moore as a figure of domestic femininity which becomes irretrievably compromised. As I wait to see May December, I’ve been reflecting on Far from Heaven, the first Todd Haynes film I saw, and one where all of these characteristic elements are on display.1
Far from Heaven, released in 2002, is an homage to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas of the 1950s, in narrative and in style—its drama centering the social repercussions of a suburban housewife’s marital turmoil is told with meticulous set decoration and expressionistic use of color. The source material is Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, where a widower is rejected by her family and friends after falling in love with her gardener, and then must choose between a comfortable social and domestic life or a meaningful relationship.2
Haynes’ contemporary intervention in this studied genre experiment is to address problems that went unsaid in Hollywood films of the 1950s—in effect, un-closetting the melodrama. Perfect housewife Cathy Whittaker’s (Julianne Moore) life is thrown into turmoil when her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) can no longer restrain his long-repressed homosexuality, and she turns to her Black gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) for the affection and comfort she no longer receives at home.
Sirk’s films were as socially critical as they were emotionally engaging—he placed the repressive institutions of mainstream American life under subversive scrutiny—but the films’ commercial demands and the industry’s enforcement of the Hays Code limited what could be portrayed, so that the forbidden romance in All That Heaven Allows could only be contentious along the lines of age and class.
Haynes’ homage to Sirkian melodrama, decades later, walks the fine line of recreating an outmoded genre while inserting a contemporary point of view. Tellingly, critics at the time had diverging views on whether the film was “ironic” or not—Andrew Sarris wrote that “Mr. Haynes is too much the ironist to satisfy my craving for full-bodied romanticism,” while Roger Ebert argued that “because the film deliberately lacks irony, it has a genuine dramatic impact; it plays like a powerful 1957 drama we've somehow never seen before.”
I think both of them are right: Haynes’s approach to genre is rigorous and analytic, placing his audience at enough of a remove that they can consider the film as a construction, yet he also takes the genre seriously on its own merits, so that it also has the capability to provoke deep emotional responses. As Haynes commented at the time, “Everything about film is always artificial…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.” The artifice of melodrama doesn’t preclude the possibility of emotional engagement; rather, it provides a space for deep feeling that can be less accessible in cinematic “realism.”
Haynes’ embrace of melodrama’s artifice means that the critiques of racism and homophobia, rather than representing an invasion of “honesty” into the tightly-plotted narrative, in fact are integrated seamlessly into its schema. Cathy and Raymond’s relationship proceeds similarly to the central couple in All That Heaven Allows—they unexpectedly connect in routine interactions, then grow progressively closer in a series of spontaneous meetings. Cathy learns about the difficulties of being Black in their predominantly-white community, while also learning that the true connection she feels with Raymond is more meaningful than her manicured domestic life. Their ultimate separation is the result of unilateral social oppression: the town’s white and Black communities are equally opposed to Cathy and Raymond’s relationship, causing Cathy to endure isolation and Raymond to experience harassment.
This narrative is clearly not a vérité document of racism and segregation in the 1950s, rather, it is a portrayal of an interracial romance as it would have been portrayed in the era’s films, had they the capability—the characters play archetypal social roles designed to clash with one another in inevitable ways, and the narrative is designed to illustrate the uncrossable chasm between Cathy and Raymond’s pure love and its social unacceptability with maximum emotional impact.
Haynes uses the same narrative tools for Frank and Cathy’s conflict over his repressed homosexuality. This plotline begins when Cathy decides to bring Frank dinner while he works late one night, and she walks in on Frank with another man in his office. Frank decides to attend conversion therapy, and after hitting a low point—he drunkenly hits Cathy in a fit of self-hatred—he seems to shore himself up to be the ideal husband and head-of-household he thought he was before. Yet on an idyllic New Year’s trip to Miami, Frank meets a younger man who he begins an affair with, ultimately divorcing Cathy and moving in with him, because he realizes he’s truly fallen in love for the first time. It’s a plot characterized by coincidence—Cathy’s accidental discovery, Frank’s chance encounter—and with a neat arc of repression, struggle, and a bittersweet resolution.
By adhering to melodramatic narrative codes, Haynes smooths the inherent tension between the film’s period setting and the social critiques it introduces. The film encourages a heightened awareness of the schism between the film’s genre and its subject matter at first, yet its serious and consistent treatment of its content incrementally induces the viewer to ride its emotional current. So, too, do Haynes’ and the creative teams’ uncanny visual and sonic evocation of Sirk’s films—the high-contrast colors in lighting, costumes, and production design, and the sweeping score, create a lush, heightened state of sensorial pleasure that immerses the viewer in a constructed world. (The cinematography was by Edward Lachmann, costumes by Sandy Powell, production design by Mark Freidberg, and score by Elmer Bernstein.)
Haynes’ creation of a Sirkian melodrama that frankly addresses gay and interracial relationships is impressive, but what intrigued me the most about Far From Heaven on my most recent watch was how, by bringing previously unspoken elements of society to the forefront, Haynes generates new implications. The genre relies on unspoken tensions, anxieties, and hopes running under the surface of an emotionally operatic narrative—returning to All That Heaven Allows as an example, Sirk threads in critiques of commercialism and suggests the possibility of transgressive sexual relationships hold utopian potential, though these function at the level of symbol and subtext. What Haynes threads under the narrative, what the characters can’t express themselves, is the rage and despair at being trapped in the hegemony of suburbia, and the potential for a radical removal.
Much of this occurs at the level of performance. While each actor in the film projects a glossy, placid surface, akin to the studio stars populating Sirk’s films, both Moore and Quaid reveal depths of anguish that they fight against expressing. Moore plays Cathy as a woman whose anxiety and despair at the dissolution of her marriage and her social isolation bubbles up and spills over as the film progresses, and Quaid does the same for Frank’s repression and rage at himself. Showing the viewer the fight to repress one’s true feelings, allowing inner conflict to manifest in a furrowed brow or a quivering voice, is more of a hallmark of modern, Method-influenced acting styles than the performance of personality encouraged by studio filmmaking. An unspoken tension, then, is created through acting styles that are often anachronistic. (Though it spoken, exactly once: Frank swears in Cathy’s face after she asks him questions about therapy, a jarring break in form that momentarily brings these tensions to the forefront of the viewer’s mind.)
Haynes’ use of visual symbols is another way he expresses a subtextual narrative. Haynes, who studied semiotics at Brown University, deftly arranges visual signifiers throughout each of his films, Far From Heaven included. Some of the most prominent symbols in this film are sartorial, particularly for Cathy. In an early scene, Cathy stands outside her home with a few girlfriends, each of them wearing shades of orange and red pairing with the rich autumnal colors of the scene. Yet Cathy is singled out—discussing her liberal tendencies, her best friend jokes that she used to be called “red,” which leaves her friends amused and slightly incredulous. Even when attempting to blend in with a crowd, Cathy’s symbolic “redness” is pointed out and marked as a sign of difference: it’s a joke now, but to take a step further into social activism would mark her as a rebel and an outcast on par with a member of the Communist Party, the ultimate sign of subversion in Eisenhower’s America.
Soon after, a lavender scarf Cathy’s wearing blows away, only to be caught and returned by Raymond. In the final minutes of the film, after Frank has left her and Raymond has decided to move to escape harassment, Cathy fastens the scarf, a physical reminder of their love, around her face before leaving to see him one last time at the train station. She wears a bright red coat. A lavender scarf and a red coat: Cathy has dressed herself in the two colors signifying homosexuality and Communism, both of which were marked as such threats that they needed to be systematically removed from the nation’s halls of power.
Haynes makes Cathy’s inability to conform to the social structures of suburban American life explicit in the narrative, yet he and Sandy Powell implicitly portray her as a figure more transgressive than she consciously realizes through her costuming. Cathy’s resistance to the repressive norms of her society, implicitly, marks her with a difference that she confidently wraps herself in, despite her community’s fear and rejection. Like a Sirk heroine, Cathy becomes a vehicle through which we can project our hopes and fears for our own differences and subversions; her rebellion becomes our own.
Up next: An essay on Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta.
A note that Far from Heaven doesn’t center queer relationships or identity to the same extent that many of the other films I write about here do, yet the interweaving of queerness into the narrative and subtext, and Haynes’ stature as a leading queer filmmaker, made this a film I was eager to tackle.
I also recommend seeking out Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, another moving take on All That Heaven Allows by a pioneering queer filmmaker.
Great write-up as always. I've yet to see Far From Heaven but love Todd Haynes, and after spending two whole semesters learning about Sirk's own use of irony in films like All That Heaven Allows, I'm glad to hear it's a quality Haynes kept in his adaptation and look forward to watching it soon even more now!