Far From Heaven
posted to www.marxmail.org on July 4, 2003
Recent decisions by the US Supreme Court defending
affirmative action and striking down sodomy laws have been described as
"centrist". In reality, the court was simply reflecting the sea
change that has transformed American society. If anybody needs a reminder of
the dreary status quo ante, I recommend Todd Haynes's brilliant "Far From
Heaven", now available in video/dvd.
For anybody growing up in an affluent small town or suburbia
in the 1950s, the film will create a strong sense of déjà vu. Though "Far
From Heaven" takes place in Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, it suggests any
municipality that upheld the kind of "traditional values" that so
many youth rebelled against a few years later.
When we first encounter Cathy and Frank Whittaker (Julianne
Moore and Dennis Quaid) in their spacious home, they seem to be poster children
for the Eisenhower-era. Indeed, they seem to be exactly the kind of couple that
George W. and Laura Bush style themselves after. In this household, Frank
Whitaker wears the pants. After arriving at home in the evening, Cathy is sure
to attend to his every need while their two children obey their mother's every
word. As Engels pointed out, within the family the husband is the bourgeois and
the wife represents the proletariat. If this is so, the Whitaker children are a
subproletariat. In nearly every exchange of dialog between husband and wife, or
parent and child, authority is on display. The Whitaker home is a gilded cage.
As Tolstoy said, "All happy families resemble one
another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The
unhappiness that is visited upon the Whitakers is a function very much of the
issues that came before the Supreme Court recently. Despite Frank Whitaker's
square-jawed, hyper-masculine image, we (and his wife) soon discover that he
has a sexual preference for other men.
After a chance encounter at his office, where she sees him
in the arms of another man, they go to a psychiatrist in order to cure his
"problem". This might involve electroshock and other forms of
"aversion" therapy. Quaid's performance as the anguished closeted
husband is masterful, as is Moore's as his loyal but despairing wife. With
little understanding of his underlying desires or any ability to see a road
back to "normalcy", the two characters command our pity. Ultimately,
the only solution to the kinds of contradictions they faced would come in the
form of the gay liberation movement, which once and for all legitimized alternative
sexuality. Once this genie was out of the bottle, all attempts by the likes of
Rick Santorum to put it back in are doomed to fail.
As Cathy Whitaker finds herself feeling more and more
isolated and abandoned, she finds herself drawn to their African-American
gardener. Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert) is a handsome and well-educated man
who is the one character in the film who seems capable of self-awareness.
Perhaps it is his immunity from the sham values that pervade white Hartford
that attract Cathy Whitaker to him above all. After agreeing to a drive in
Deagan's pick-up truck to get away from the sorrows at home, they drop into a
restaurant in the black section of Hartford, where they share a cocktail and a
slow dance. In her own way, she is demonstrating the longing expressed by Jack
Kerouac in "On the Road":
"At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching
among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section wishing I
were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough
ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough
night."
Since Cathy Whitaker is not really able to leave bourgeois
society behind her as the beat generation did, she is doomed to suffer. Todd
Haynes has crafted a film very much in the tradition of Douglas Sirk, who made
a series of "weepers" featuring women in conflict with the phony
values of bourgeois society. In his 1959 "Imitation of Life", Sirk
explores the same sorts of themes. Lana Turner stars as a young widow who
struggles to make it on Broadway. Meanwhile, the light-skinned daughter of
Turner's black maid is tempted to pass for white.
Despite his affinity for material that bordered on soap
opera, Sirk was active in the German theater of the Weimar Republic and
frequently staged the works of Brecht. He fled Germany with his Jewish wife
after the rise of Hitler.
Along with the late Rainer Fassbinder who consciously
emulated Sirk in films such as "Martha" (the heroine lives on
"Douglas Sirk Street"), Todd Haynes has chosen to make a film in the
Sirkian mode. In a November 10, 2002 NY Times article by J. Hoberman, we
discover that "Mr. Haynes, a graduate of Brown University with a degree in
art and semiotics, first encountered Sirk in college in the 1980's at a moment
when academic interest in his movies was stimulated by a feminist reappraisal
and radical rereading of so-called women's pictures." Although this could
have led to a dry, academic approach to the material in "Far From
Heaven", his overall skill as a director and story-teller yields not only
one of the finest American films of last year but one that repudiates all the
attempts by conservative America to turn back the clock to a desperate and
unhappy past.
http://farfromheavenmovie.com/