Pathos and pathology: The cinema of Todd Haynes

Camera Obscura

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 1-20

  Doane, Mary Ann ^a,b  

^a Department of Modern Culture and Media ^*

^b BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949601974     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-19-3_57-1     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. Sigmund Freud, "'Child Is Being Beaten': A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 17:5-204.
2. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 38-39.
3. See also Jacques Goimard, "Le mélodrame: Le mot et la chose" ("The Melodrama: The Word and the Thing"), Cahiers de la Cinémathèque: Pour une histoire du mélodrame au cinéma, no. 28 (1979): 51.
4. Kathleen Woodward, "Statistical Panic," differences 11 (1999): 181.
5. Larry Gross, "Antibodies: Larry Gross Talks with Safe's Todd Haynes," Filmmaker Magazine, Summer 1995, www.filmmakermagazine.com/ summer1995/antibodies.php.
6. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995).
7. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 13-14.
8. Roger Caillois, "The Image," in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. and trans. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 317-18.
9. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 394.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 25-26,
11. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 201. Nietzsche's use of the phrase the pathos of distance is quite different and involves a distance of social rank or class and a different inflection of the concept of pathos. I invoke it here only as a striking oxymoron that seems particularly apt to describe Haynes's films, with the understanding that there is no claim to fidelity to Nietzsche's text.
12. Todd Haynes, "All That Glitter Allows," interview by Rob Nelson, City Pages, 14 November 1998, citypages.com/databank/19/935/article6475. asp; emphasis in original.
13. Stuart Klawans, "Heaven Can Wait: Far from Heaven," Nation, 11 November 2002, 36-37.
14. Haynes has stated, with reference to Far from Heaven, that "the term irony has become too worn out to be useful. It's become bastardized into an easy cultural catchphrase that doesn't really apply to this film, although a certain distance does. When we think about distance we think about the cutting off of emotion, and it's not that. It's a distance that brings with it a greater emotional reservoir of feeling." Todd Haynes, "Interview with Todd Haynes," by Nick James, Sight and Sound, March 2003, 14.