The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All that Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far from Heaven

This essay investigates identity politics in Todd Haynes’s 2002 film, Far from Heaven, and in two of its precursors, Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It takes as its starting point two puzzling features of Haynes’s film: the oddity of setting a remake in the same time and place as its original, and the film’s banal representation of racism and homophobia. The essay proposes a reading of Far from Heaven in which the film questions the ability of melodrama to plausibly address contemporary forms of social injustice.