“Poison” (1991)
The fact that Haynes studied semiotics (at Brown University, where he also produced an early short called “Assassins” which was about Arthur Rimbaud, who would feature later in “I’m Not There”) was never more apparent than in his queercore debut, “Poison.” Part creative thesis, part university film school project, it has a more overtly experimental, non-linear structure than the more traditional narratives he would come to wider prominence with, yet it’s anything but amateurish or unpolished (Haynes’ almost immediate mastery of filmmaking craft, after just a few rough-diamond shorts, is striking). Chaptered up into three sections — “Horror, “ “Hero,” and “Homo” — none of which is spelled out until the closing credits, “Poison” is essentially three different films crosscut together in contrasting and colliding fashion, loosely united by thematic ideas around gay sexuality. “Horror” is an AIDS epidemic parable about an infected and murderous leper on the run, shot in a black-and-white psychotropic terror style right out of the Sam Fuller playbook. “Hero” takes the format of a docu-drama/tabloid television show set in a bucolic, Nicholas Ray-like suburban utopia in a story about a young boy who shoots his father and then physically flies away a la “Birdman” and comes complete with interviews with the boy, his family and schoolmates (reflecting a fascination with the role of TV in our lives that is also in evidence in “Superstar” and “Dottie gets Spanked” from around this same era). “Homo” is the mostly overly homoerotic segment (and it was here the film earned its NC-17, natch) and also its most theatrical: it’s a prison film, based on the writings of Jean Genet, about sexual repression, control and power which could now be a Julie Taymor production. Considered an early entry in the New Queer Cinema movement, “Poison” is a demanding but rewarding watch for the adventurous cineaste, and is that much more challenging for the casual viewer, but it’s a foundational document in Haynes’ canon and crucial for understanding the way in which his films have been critiqued on the basis of their sexual politics ever since. Anticipating the prismatic approach of “I’m Not There” by fifteen years, “Poison” is self-consciously arty and not a little alienating at times, perhaps closer to a formalist exercise than to the much more cohesive experiments he’d go on to make. But it is also a fascinating, transgressive and deeply intelligent piece of work, that is fundamental to the idea of who Haynes was as a filmmaker, and who he has become.
“Dottie Gets Spanked” (1993)
A 45-minute long film that aired on PBS in the ’90s, “Dottie Gets Spanked” is a terrific little film in its own right, but also represents a handy stepping stone between the Haynes of “Poison” and the Haynes of “Safe.” Formally less experimental than anything else to that point (stylized dream sequences notwithstanding), it is still profoundly personal, as Haynes mines his own childhood fascination with “I Love Lucy” to provide a sad, sweet meditation on being, as one of the unthinkingly cruel children call the film’s 7-year-old protagonist, “a feminino.” An early embodiment of another underappreciated aspect of Haynes’ talents —he always elicits perfectly naturalistic and endearing performances from his juvenile actors— ‘Dottie’ is the story of Steven (Evan Bonifant), a little boy obsessed with a popular TV program called “The Dottie Show,” and especially with its star, Dottie Frank (Julie Halston). Despite gentle paternal disapproval (offset by his mother’s fond indulgence —Haynes in no way suggests the parents are anything but loving toward their little boy), Steven wins a contest to visit the set of the show. Haynes brilliantly evokes the incremental way that a stray word or concept can worm its way into a child’s subconscious and become an odd fixation —in this case, it’s the idea of spanking, which a neighbor mentions within earshot of Steven (whose parents do not believe in corporal punishment) and which then occurs on the episode of the show that Steven gets to see taped. The dream sequences, clever semi-Freudian mishmashes of wish fulfilment, loneliness and glimmering sexual awareness, are part black-and-white Dali, part expressionist Welles, yet the rest of the film is relatively classical and straightforward in its narrative, nailing a mood of warm-toned, bittersweet childhood nostalgia, but putting that atmosphere in service of a narrative about an isolated, observant, imaginative boy learning to feel shame, and almost simultaneously learning how to literally bury it.
“Safe” (1995)
At the time, it perhaps was a natural progression, but “Safe” feels like a dramatic gear change retrospectively, almost a statement of intent. Having helped establish the movement later dubbed “New Queer Cinema” with “Poison,” Haynes proved with his very next film that his thematic concerns were too universal to be ghettoized. In this devastating, brilliant film, Julianne Moore’s type-A homemaker Carol becomes progressively more allergic to everything around her, leading to a paranoiac retreat from modern life as she moves from her perfectly prosperous upper-middle lifestyle to a new-agey treatment facility in the desert that essentially operates as a cult. And it isn’t just a thematic evolution: “Safe” has none of the aesthetic edginess and scrappy lyricism of “Poison.” Instead, it is clinically controlled, a work of intense repression, unfolding in unblinking, carefully composed long gazes, often in frames of almost Kubrickian symmetry (take, for example, the uneasy shot of Carol drinking a glass of milk while a pillar behind her visually bisects her head). And the filmmaker allusions don’t stop there: the ominous soundtrack from Ed Tomney —full of queasy Badalamenti-style synths— and the sense of festering decay beneath a pristine suburban surface recall David Lynch, while the film’s opening shot is a direct nod to Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s “Chinese Roulette.” It all combines to lend “Safe” a quasi sci-fi air, enhanced by an uncannily rigorous approach, which often sees Carol overwhelmed by her environment in huge wide shots or isolated from the pink-hued baby showers and Belinda Carlisle-accompanied aerobics classes that comprise her life. In addition to Haynes’ career-spanning involvement in ideas about social identity and self-discovery, “Safe” also reads as a damning indictment of the complacency and conformity of modern life, with Carol’s progressive withdrawal from it affording her (and us) an almost alien’s-eye perspective on its vacuity. Yet the film presents no easy solutions either —it retains its enigmatic, almost sterile remove (while Moore’s extraordinarily compelling performance keeps pulling us in) to the very last. In fact, Haynes deliberately problematizes any conclusive reading in the chilling closing moments: while Carol seems to believe she is healing and can look at herself in the mirror and declare her love for what she sees, what we see are lesions, pallor, physical decay: she is getting worse.
