Coming Around Again: The Queer Momentum of Far from Heaven

In a key scene from Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven (2002), Cathy Whitaker, an affluent white housewife and the film's protagonist, arrives, slightly late, at a modern art exhibition organized by the Ladies Auxiliary of Hartford, Connecticut. There she runs into Raymond Deagan, her black gardener. While Hartford's high-society matrons whisper and stare at the unseemly interracial pairing, Cathy loses track of the minutes while chatting pleasantly with Raymond about Miró. Finally, when her friend Eleanor pulls her aside to wonder why she is on such "familiar terms" with her gardener, Cathy extracts herself by looking at her watch and exclaiming, "Jeepers! Will you look at the time!" Moments like this ensure that Far from Heaven's spectators will never quite be able to look away from the time as it manifests on-screen: a lush, painstaking reproduction of a distinctly cinematic 1957. Inspired by Douglas Sirk's later Hollywood work, Haynes's film restores the machinery of those midcentury domestic melodramas in lavish detail, from its quaintly restrained dialogue to its shamelessly expressionistic use of light and color to its overdetermined plot, which plays Cathy's growing interest in Raymond against the protracted demise of her marriage as her husband, Frank, a successful television-sales executive, struggles with his long-ignored and increasingly irrepressible homosexuality.¹ But if the borrowed time that Haynes's film discloses is impossible to look away from, precisely how it should be seen is far less evident. Far from Heaven resists classification in terms of either of the stances toward the cinematic past—unabashed nostalgia or arch parody—that dominated mainstream cinema at the moment of its release. Instead, the film unfolds an unpredictable play of distance from and intimacy with the matter of its own time. While it pointedly underscores the conceptual and historical limits of midcentury melodrama's tendency to sentimentalize social conflict, it goes on to reproduce the framework of the genre's appeal to emotion; its most affecting scenes are rendered in a melodramatic style deliberately "played straight."²

This "straightness" is, ironically, the key to the queer force of Haynes's return to classic Hollywood form. Eschewing the set of "disruptive" effects (forking narrative streams, temps morts, jump cuts, etc.) used by postmodern cinema to demarcate film time, Far from Heaven instead lovingly embraces the rules of classic cinema. Consequently, the familiar sequencing of time is disrupted not in the film so much as by the film, by the outmoded feel of its melodramatic pacing and style—a dated feel that nevertheless successfully produces an intimate response in many of the film's viewers. The regressive disruption of both anticipated sequence and expected response points us toward the film's usefulness for exploring what it might mean to mark queer time in a time-based medium. Far from Heaven's (re)turn toward a picturesque past allows Haynes to sketch, through his film's outmoded style, the usually occluded biopolitical time-patterns that hide behind our naturalized sense of the present. Yet the film's belatedness also offers another prospect, bodied forth in the way the placidly normal lives of both Whitakers are thrown off course by the reemergence of earlier, abandoned ways of life. Frank's repressed tendencies initiate this narrative movement; however, the film's queerness fails to stop there. Instead, drawing on and displacing the pathologized view of homosexuality as psychosexual regression with perspectives from the queer spectator, Haynes's film proposes using the sensory caress of the past to move through time otherwise.

Looking at (Queer) Time

Far from Heaven is by no means the first of Haynes's films to flaunt its untimeliness; indeed, perverse temporal occupation is the unifying tendency of the gay American director's work.³ Beginning as early as the banned 1987 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a biopic using Barbie dolls to explore the life and death of the 1970s pop singer, through Velvet Goldmine (1998), a glam-rock fantasy drawing on both Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, USA; 1941) and a scattering of late 1960s and...