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/