Todd Haynes' Poison

Arousing contempt and scorn from the far right and the American Family Association, Todd Haynes' Poison was a groundbreaking film in 1991, and its controversy paved the way for the New Queer Cinema movement. While I'm sure the filmmaker wouldn't want to qualify his work in such a way, since it stands on its own as a brilliant film, it is an important film from a political standpoint. One can quickly see that this would mean nothing were it not successful on an emotional, intellectual and entertainment level, to which it achieves something few art house films can touch and all should aspire to.

Haynes was working at a time when you didn't need huge stars to make an independent film, or help it to find an audience. He was able to make risky, transgressive and challenging films like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which told the ballad of the anorexic pop icon using Barbie dolls and the superb use of stock footage to put this story in counterpoint to those troubled times.

Similarly, Poison was an experimental film largely funded by the now defunct National Endowment For the Arts, which fused questions of sexual and personal identity with overtly topical metaphors of AIDS, homophobia and coming out of the closet.

The filmmaker's clever approach is to tell three interwoven stories, each from an entirely different genre. The first is Hero, a mockumentary tracing the events which led a misunderstood boy to kill his abusive stepfather, and his subsequent mysterious disappearance. The second, Horror, is a black and white 1950s style monster movie following a scientist who attempts to purify and capture the "sex drive" but in the process accidentally drinks his unfinished serum and transforms himself into a decaying, pus dripping leper infecting the city with his disease. The third and most challenging is Homo, a Jean Genet inspired tale of two homosexual prisoners, one containing a childhood secret.

The three films play off of one another, despite their vastly different approaches. They all, in essence, are about how to define yourself, to stand up in the face of overwhelming hatred, bigotry, apathy or misconceptions. In Hero, we're allowed varying reactions from interviewees to the "miracle" of this boy, Richie Beacon. The talking heads include his wild eyed mother ("He was a gift from God..."), his neighbors, or a kid at school who struggles to articulate an encounter with Richie and a provoked spanking. These interviews are juxtaposed with long tracking shots of the blank, impassive houses of suburbia he grew up in. The approach is naturalistic, with a sensitive documentarian's eye, quietly evoking his characters' slow, stumbling outpour of thoughts and feelings.

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