Transcendent Transgression: Looking Back at Todd Haynes' Poison

By Nick Joyner

Todd Haynes's Poison is a vision of unrelenting, febrile darkness. Thus opens Hal Hinson's 1991 damnation of the film in The Washington Post. Hinson was right - sort of. The film is about darkness, but that's hardly negative. Perhaps darkness is Poison's guiding light. Darkness and its attendant themes do not poison a film's glow, but rather they add the contrast necessary to see its contours of desire. One wishes Hinson might have plumbed the depths of this gloom to discover Poison's otherworldly logics, where there is hope in suffering and pride in shame.

Poison is a formal and political triumph, and over 30 years later, it remains the most audacious film to win the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival. Today, its luminance is often overshadowed by the controversy surrounding its federal funding and the historiographic conversations about New Queer Cinema, conversations that would rather relegate the film to torchbearer status than recognize it as an arrival in its own right. Viewed today, Poison still retains its same power to shock and awe, especially given how much of modern queer cinema has doubled back on the trails that Haynes blazed for them.

Released in 1991, writer-director Todd Haynes' first feature was a formal exercise in upending traditional straight film language. It features three non-overlapping storylines - Hero, Horror, and Homo - told in chronological order and intercut every few minutes. The threads themselves explore different pathologized outsiders who are grappling with forms of interpersonal or societal violence. They are victims of citizen surveillance, suburban mistrust, medical injustice, carceral punishment, and the like.

Hero appears to be a straightforward television documentary about a patricidal schoolboy named Richie Beacon, whose disappearance turns into a cerebral Freudian tale. His ditsy, fundamentalist mother maintains that Richie shot his father and flew out the bedroom window, while his classmates and school administrators mutter about a perplexing child who seemed to provoke and enjoy physical harm. Horror is black-and-white sci-fi schlock la Carnival of Souls that follows a scientist - Dr. Thomas Graves - who mistakenly drinks the essence of human sex drive. This mini monster movie can most clearly and obviously be read as an allegory for the AIDS crisis, as it follows a leper sex killer whose kisses leave deadly lesions. It is perhaps the least subtle of the three, but a fun genre play nonetheless. And then there's Homo, an elegiac look at the life of lifelong convict John Broom. The present timeline follows his admission into a penitentiary in the 1940s, where he encounters an old acquaintance and slips into an obsessive r verie about their homoerotic years in child detention.

As the film progresses, the boundaries within the triptych blur, the subjects begin to interlace, and new meaning is created between each of the stories. It conjures incompletion; as the narrative strands intercut more frequently and converge in the film's back end, the audience is encouraged to read across - rather than within - each thread for meaning. This was Haynes' experiment: to call into question the conventional modes of heterosexual filmmaking itself, freely rejecting causal relationships, narrative closure, and inherent objective meaning, those age-old guides that critics like Hal Hinson would cling to. It is a film that staunchly believes that the political is inseparable from the aesthetic, that the two are mutually constructed.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/transcendent-transgression-looking-back...
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