The rear-projection as post-modern antiqueing device: Haynes actually borrowed this one from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows
Far From Heaven
One
Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting
foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like a witch’s
trick – and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is always an
apparatus of reproduction, related by [Walter] Benjamin to the uneasiness
before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror.
Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, in Simulations
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 153
These observations on the nature of representation from the late grand jester of postmodernism might be recommended as handy carry-on luggage for anyone setting off to explore the films of Todd Haynes. They resonate even in Far From Heaven, seemingly his most straightforward film to date, yet one which, as we shall see, is also bound up in the notions of the counterfeit, implicit anguish and disquieting foreignness, unease before the photograph, and the sorcery already at work in the mirror – here that of the cinema screen.
The premise of Far From Heaven at first appears quite simple: a perfect suburban Connecticut housewife, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), discovers that her perfect suburban Connecticut husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), has two profound problems: he’s a closet queer, and is hitting the bottle with his morning coffee at the office to dull the pain. The very first time we meet Frank, he is sitting in the local police station wadding a handkerchief in his hands while the cops call Cathy to come and bail him out. Frank has been busted, mistakenly, he claims, for ‘loitering’. Cathy is as adamant as Frank that he is innocent, but as we will see, this is not his first adventure into the shadowy underworld of the mid-century North American homosexual, nor will it be his last. Similar to the narrative of a John Cheever story, this event will have ramifications for everyone around him, and ultimately leave Cathy, and us, wondering if she is doing the wifely thing of standing by her man, or is perhaps the victim of a far more profound social malaise.
As their perfect 1957 Hartford Christmas celebrations start to unravel around her, Cathy finds solace in the friendship offered by their African-American gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). Both relationships – marriage and friendship – are heading for a collision with the mores of the era, in a tiny, almost Joycean (vide Dubliners, and in particular his ‘The Dead’) story of domestic ‘paralysis’, where the hypocrisy and small-town spite of period and place are laid bare. All three leading characters – Cathy, Frank, Raymond – are about to commit acts of betrayal or abandonment, or be abandoned or betrayed themselves, but only we the audience understand the full import of their actions.
One of the many strengths of Far From Heaven is that it works and can be appreciated on any number of levels. (Incidentally, it was the director’s choice to use all upper case in the title, which, along with the hysterical italic typography typical of the film posters of the era, in a logo and typeface designed by Haynes himself, is perhaps one of the many sly conceits packed into this film.) Ostensibly, it is a bizarre love triangle, and one from which all three parties will emerge damaged. Set in the late 1950s, it sports the appurtenances of the classic ‘women’s film’: marriage, fidelity, infidelity, love across race and class barriers, and love within gender constraints. It is cast in the mould of the classic films of Douglas and his era, and even alludes to specific Sirk films, notably in its borrowings from All That Heaven Allows (1955). The crucial difference, however, is that the taboo subjects that Sirk was forced to keep implicit, because of the morality of the times or simply the rulings of the Production Code (which explicitly forbade any references to adultery, homosexuality, miscegenation, and more), are made blazingly explicit in Far From Heaven. However, even here, as Haynes himself explained, there are two distinctions in the film between the treatment of race and the treatment of homosexuality. This distinction between the implicit and explicit spurred its most perceptive British reviewer, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, to declare, perhaps a little rashly, that Haynes had in fact invented an entirely new genre of film. It is the purpose of this book to explore Bradshaw’s claim, and those of others who saw a great deal more going on in Far From Heaven than initially meets the eye.
Far From Heaven could have been a very different film if Haynes had pursued an earlier idea for his next project after Velvet Goldmine (1998). In a public discussion with David Schwartz, chief curator at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, Haynes revealed that his first idea for the film was a melodrama about a married actor who falls in with a group of gay Hollywood actors who help him up the career ladder but in doing so create tensions between him and his wife. Only the wife’s primary point of view and the subtext of bisexuality or unacknowledged homosexuality would remain as the project developed.
After the critical and, with the latter at least, financial disappointments of [safe] (1995) and Velvet Goldmine, Haynes took the best part of a year off, during which time he painted, read the whole of Proust and pondered his next step. The New York Times wrote that Haynes went into ‘a deep funk’ in this period, reporting a friend as saying ‘Velvet Goldmine almost killed him.’ As Haynes has revealed in a number of interviews, after fifteen years in New York he had grown tired of living in the city, and at the beginning of 2000 got in his car and drove across the country to Portland, where his sister had found him a house. Rejuvenated by the city’s alternative culture (it is home to, variously, a thriving rep/indie cinema scene, a lively LGBT community and more post-punk bands than you can shake a stick at), Haynes settled in to write. He finished the first draft of Far From Heaven in just ten days. ‘The script poured out of me,’ he told the LA Weekly. ‘Which of course made me completely mistrust it. I thought, “This must be crap.”’
Undeterred, he and longtime producer Christine Vachon began work on a production plan for Far From Heaven with a budget pitched at $14 million, more than double that of Velvet Goldmine. Even with admirers such as George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh aboard as executive producers (a largely nominal credit, there to sprinkle some stardust on a film proposal), it only managed to pull together $12 million from assorted backers (chiefly Miramax), a figure that would exercise Vachon’s budget-juggling skills and earn her assembled crew the warning, ‘We have more ambition than money.’
Faced with a $2 million dollar budget ‘haircut’ (Vachon’s simile for the funding problems with Velvet Goldmine), filming of Far From Heaven was fraught. Shooting began in New Jersey just after the 2001 World Trade Center attack, which took two weeks out of a planned six-week pre-production schedule. As is commonplace, scenes were shot out of sequence, as and when cast and crew could be assembled (Dennis Haysbert commuted between New York and Los Angeles, where he was simultaneously filming the television series 24). In the last two weeks of its two-month shoot, the film’s bond company, which insures a film against unseen financial problems, took over production, concerned that Haynes would run over budget (director and crew worked eighteen-hour days instead). At one point, Haynes and Vachon had to play a game of hide-and-seek with their backers, filming crucial later scenes first to ensure that others would have to be shot for the sake of narrative cohesion. Cast and crew sometimes worked until five in the morning in freezing conditions that took them some way beyond any contractual and union obligations, which makes Far From Heaven’s look of unhurried elegance all the more remarkable.
Critics, admirers and not a few enemies – the blogosphere seethed with vitriol directed at both film and director at the time – have pursued Haynes for a ‘definitive’ reading of Far From Heaven since its release, but it may well be that the film ultimately eludes any single definitive interpretation beyond its ‘surface’ reading as a period romantic melodrama. It is this reading that kept audiences around the world (it was promptly dubbed into Spanish, as Lejos del cielo, for the sizeable global Hispanic market) alert for its 103 minutes of doomed love, small-town intrigue, strange weather, fabulous frocks and a sumptuous full orchestral score from Elmer Bernstein. It is probably the same reading that inspired its nomination for four Oscars, four Golden Globes and led to Julianne Moore winning the Best Actress award for at the Venice Film Festival in 2003.
Yet, as Peter Bradshaw and others were already intuiting, this was not simply another period romantic melodrama. Haynes himself had planted enough seemingly ‘intertextual’ references in the film, in scenes, situations and techniques that alluded to earlier films and genres, to suggest that there was more going on below the surface reading, and film buffs and cineastes were quick to pick up on the allusions to Sirk and other film-makers besides.
Then the cinephiles and academics set to work, dismantling the film shot by shot, frame by frame, angle by angle, and sometimes even word by word, to mine a deeper film than the one we thought we’d seen at the cinema. This ‘new’ film did not contradict the ‘first’ film, but rather augmented it with new, if unconfirmed, layers of possible meaning, and certainly a multitude of interpretations.
Haynes has at times played a rather fey game of denial when interrogated about the film, quite adamantly refuting, for example, that it was either ironic, or pastiche, less still a paean to a particular genre. At one point, Haynes and Julianne Moore explained this in a public Q&A filmed for a ‘making-of’ short to accompany the DVD release, the latter insisting ‘There is no irony’ in Far From Heaven, although Haynes allowed there might be ‘some’ subtext at work in the film. Numerous critics and academics have weighed in with their theories elevating it to the level of allegory, postmodern parlour game, even a deconstructionist marvel.
After all this rough critical manhandling, Far From Heaven has become a floating text – that is, one that has set itself adrift from conventional reading, association, comparison, even the conventions of film-making themselves, a sui generis work that has to be taken on its own terms. It is entirely possible that, the closer we look, Far From Heaven may in fact turn out to be what Roland Barthes would have called an ‘empty sign’, that is – and Haynes the semiology graduate quite clearly brought his library of Critical Theory to the making of Far From Heaven – what might be crudely described as a semiotic cocktease, a sign appearing to contain signification, but in fact empty of the signified. This is not, in itself, necessarily a bad thing, and may indeed add to our enjoyment of the film. Certainly, Haynes has left enough evidence lying around in the movie for the sign hunter to have a lot of fun and not a little mischief with Far From Heaven; perhaps as much, in fact, as Haynes had when planting the evidence there in the first place.
The key question, of course, is whether or not you need to pick up on the allusions and references to fully appreciate Far From Heaven. As Mary Ann Doane pertinently asks in her essay ‘Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes’ (in the Camera Obscura collection of scholarly essays, A Magnificent Obsession), ‘is it necessary to know the source in order to grasp the work of citation? Is the perfect spectator for these films the alert cinephile with a specialized and somewhat arcane knowledge?’ The answer, of course, is no. But if Haynes has booby-trapped his film with references, allusion and devices borrowed from Brecht’s idea of ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ (the ‘alienation effect’ that makes the viewer step back and reconsider exactly what they are watching) and probably also Barthes’s observation that ‘realist’ art in fact relies on artifice, then we owe it to ourselves, to Haynes and to the film itself to go looking for them.
Far From Heaven is available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk