Coming around again: The queer momentum of Far From Heaven

GLQ

Volumn 13, Issue 2-3, 2007, Pages 249-272

  Luciano, Dana ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248595596     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2006-033     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. While Far from Heaven most closely recalls, from its title onward, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), in which a middle-class, middle-aged widow scandalizes her small-minded town by beginning an affair with a younger man who happens to be her gardener, the influence of other Sirk films, particularly Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959), surfaces intermittently throughout the film. Its cinematic archive also includes Max Ophuls's "women's films" of the late 1940s as well as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 remake of All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and nods to Haynes's own earlier films.
2. Todd Haynes, "Far from Heaven: Director's Statement," in Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story: Three Screenplays (New York: Grove, 2003), xiv.
3. For recent work on Haynes that addresses issues of temporality and revisionist historiography, see Marcia Landy, "The Dream of the Gesture: The Body of/in Todd Haynes's Films," boundary 2 30, no. 3 (2003): 123-40;
4. Michael DeAngelis, "The Characteristics of New Queer Filmmaking: Case Study-Todd Haynes," in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 41-52;
5. Edward O'Neill, "Traumatic Postmodern Histories: Velvet Goldmine's Phantasmatic Testimonies," Camera Obscura, no. 57 (2004): 157-85;
6. and Elana Gorfinkel, "The Future of Anachronism: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons," in Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 153-68.
7. See Tamara K. Hareven, "Synchronizing Individual Time, Family Time, and Historical Time," in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 167-82;
8. for a queer perspective on hetero synchronicity, see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
9. Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 197.
10. O'Neill, "Traumatic Postmodern Histories," 160. For a review of Far from Heaven that underscores its commentary on the present,
11. see Amy Taubin, "In Every Dream Home," Film Comment 38, no. 5 (2002): 22-24, 26.
12. On gay men and melodrama, see Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 151-97. Although lesbians have not historically been known as aficionados of domestic melodrama, the question of whether this indicates a lack of attachment or a lack of visibility remains an open one; lesbians, and especially femme or feminine lesbians, watching melodrama do not figure as the kind of flaming signifier that a man taking pleasure in a "woman's film" constitutes. For a provocative reading of lesbian attachment to classic Hollywood "femme films," including melodrama,
13. see White, Uninvited.
14. Hudson's homosexuality, of course, has long ceased to be merely subcultural knowledge; see Barbara Klinger's discussion of the potential homophobia that lurks within mass-camp responses to Sirk in Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 149-51.
15. Mark Finch arid Richard Kwietniowski, "Melodrama and Maurice: Homo Is Where the Hel Is," Screen 29, no. 3 (1988): 73.
16. White, Uninvited. 1-2, xv. For a critique of sentimental politics,
17. see Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 42-62. I discuss Far from Heaven's reading of the limits of sentimental identification later in this essay.
18. Farmer, Spectacular Passions, 176.
19. Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning, 24.
20. Roger Hallas, "AIDS and Gay Cinephilia," Camera Obscura, no. 52 (2003): 93. Though Hallas's essay focuses specifically on gay male filmmakers, his claims here draw on both lesbian and gay scholarship on film spectatorship, including that of White and Farmer.
21. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," reprinted in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFT Books, 1987), 61-62.
22. Haynes himself describes their relationship as sororal; see Haynes, "Three Screenplays: An Introduction," in Far from Heaven, Safe, Superstar, viii.
23. Geoffrey O'Brien, "Past Perfect," Artforum International 41, no. 3 (2002): 152.
24. For a historical overview of the religious implications attached to the changes in time created by industrialization, see Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York: Viking, 1990), esp. chap. 1.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
26. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 192.
27. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987);
28. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
29. In No Future, Edelman does not specifically address whether black children can figure the sacred Child. Given the asynchronous status historically assigned to both black individuals and the black family, however, it seems that black children are unlikely to signify this way in the American national imaginary even though, as Edelman asserts, "diversity's child" may do so. For an analysis of the pathologizing of the black family in white America,
30. see Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81.
31. For a consideration of gay male narratives of distraction and delay, see Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
32. Doane, Desire to Desire, 94. Doane's argument here is based on a reading of Max Ophuls's 1949 The Reckless Moment, which is, as I show, an important intertext for Far from Heaven.
33. Sharon Willis, "The Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk," Camera Obscura, no. 54 (2003): 149.
34. Willis contends that the film's "overarching project aims at restoring maternal plenitude" ("Politics of Disappointment," 144).
35. For takes on queer maternal attachments in relation to melodrama, see Farmer, Spectacular Passions, and White, Uninvited.
36. See Willis, "Politics of Disappointment," 164-65.
37. Deleuze, Cinema II, 172. Landy identifies Deleuze's insistence on restoring belief in the world as central to Haynes's work overall (Landy, "Dream of the Gesture," 139-40).
38. Tania Modleski. "Time arid Desire in the Woman's Film," in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 336. Modleski uses the language of sex difference to designate spectatorial positions (citing "female" vs. "male" responses); given Hélène Cixous's more capacious take on femininity and my own critical stake, however, I have used the adjective feminine as one more easily transposed across sexes.
39. Hélène Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1981): 54, emphasis in original.
40. This construction is recognized by John Paul Ricco, who suggestively links the notion of open memory to a more ethical queer (male) relation to the time of AIDS. See Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 36-37. In line with Ricco's comments, I would propose that the notion of open memory, as a nonlinear and antiteleological (non)mourning, redirects and furthers recent attempts, particularly in queer and postcolonial studies, to reframe melancholia not as the sign of a failure in the subject but as a strategic gesture of resistance by minoritized and queer subjects.
41. See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
42. See also Elizabeth Freeman's recent consideration of the way an unexpected politics of pleasure might emerge from the less phallic model of the ego conveyed in Abraham and Torok's rethinking of melancholia (Freeman, "Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," Social Text, nos. 84-85 [2005]: 57-68).
43. Lynne Joyrich, "Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven," Camera Obscura, no. 57 (2004): 203.
44. Mary Ann Doane, "Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes," Camera Obscura, no. 57 (2004): 12.
45. Cf. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 240.
46. See White on the servant-mistress relation in Uninvited, esp. 152-54.