Todd Haynes
Four decades of films about people being quietly disassembled by the rules they live under, shot in the visual language of the exact genres that once enforced those rules: that is the shape of the Haynes project. He came out of the New Queer Cinema of the early nineties with Poison, and from the start his method was pastiche used as an argument rather than as a joke.
Safe, in 1995, is still the most severe thing he has made. A Californian housewife develops an allergy to her own environment, and the film shoots her house like a horror set, wide and cold, with the character marooned in the middle of the frame. Nothing is explained, which is why it has aged so well.
The middle stretch is where the reworkings of classical Hollywood arrive. Far from Heaven rebuilds the fifties melodrama in order to say the things the originals could not. Velvet Goldmine treats glam rock as a form of biography that refuses to settle on one truth. I'm Not There splits Bob Dylan across several performers and lets the contradictions stand unresolved. Carol films longing through glass, reflections and reflections of reflections, and is the most controlled work in the filmography.
The late work has widened. Dark Waters is a corporate legal procedural, an apparent outlier that is actually his oldest subject: a body poisoned by its environment while institutions look the other way. The Velvet Underground is a documentary built like an experimental film. May December takes the melodrama he has always loved and lets it curdle into comedy, which suggests he has not finished revising his own method.
Movies (13)
TV (2)
Where to start with Todd Haynes
The easiest way in is Carol, which is also the most beautiful thing he has made, a fifties romance told almost entirely in glances through windows and car glass. If that lands, go straight to Far from Heaven, which uses the same period and the same borrowed style for something considerably angrier. Safe is the masterpiece and the hardest sell: slow, affectless, quietly terrifying, best watched alone. May December is the funniest and the most uncomfortable of them, and it plays better once you have seen the melodramas it feeds on. I'm Not There and Velvet Goldmine are the music films, both arguments about how badly biography fits a real life, while The Velvet Underground is the documentary version of the same suspicion. Dark Waters is the plain one, and still unmistakably his.