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/
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org