James Morrison (3) (1960–)

When the subject of Todd Haynes arises in conversation--and I have this funny way of forcing the subject to arise more frequently than one might imagine--I tend to get all crazy and arm-wave-y and hyperbolic. (For example, I say things like the following: "He's the only American filmmaker who's done anything interesting in the past fifty years" and "Todd Haynes is smarter than all of us put together, so you just take back what you said about Velvet Goldmine being a mess because Todd knows what he's doing.")

But I'm going to try to control myself for a minute so that I can write this review without, like, rushing off to watch Safe for the millionth time.

It's obvious that this collection, like all other collections of criticism about a single director, takes auteur theory as its point of departure. What's interesting, though, is that it's criticism about works that are already drenched in theory, that are already engaged with the very concerns that criticism usually attempts to tease out.

This is a director whose short film Dottie Gets Spanked isn't just about a young boy's fascination with spanking--it actually quotes Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten." Far from Heaven isn't just a melodrama that borrows some visual and narrative cues from Douglas Sirk's films; it plays with Sirk and with Fassbinder's takes on Sirkian melodrama, and it's not just indebted to Fassbinder's films but to Fassbinder's essay about Sirk's films. I mean, come on, this isn't Quentin Tarantino-style fanboy pastiche auteurism--Haynes is a different beast entirely.

So what I like about this collection is that it attempts to deal with its subject by pushing beyond the obvious connections to the theories (postmodern, feminist, queer, genre, etc.) that are embedded in the films themselves. I particularly enjoyed Marcia Landy's "Storytelling and Information in Todd Haynes' Films," both essays about queer childhood, and especially Nick Davis' "'The Invention of a People': Velvet Goldmine and the Unburying of Queer Desire," which is going to be the thing that forces me finally, at long last, to read Gilles Deleuze.

I haven't yet read the other collection of essays about Haynes (the Camera Obscura one) so I can't compare the two, but this is a pretty exciting collection for anyone who's into his work, or into contemporary cinema in general.… (meer)