"The Dream of the Gesture": The Body of/in Todd Haynes's Films

From Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) to Poison (1991), Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and Far from Heaven (2002), Todd Haynes's films have introduced and relentlessly complicated connections between the young and adult human body, the cinematic body, and the body politic. His films destabilize normative responses to the world that conventional forms of cinematic representation produce. Through the cinematic medium, and particularly through forms of theatricality, his films exceed positions that guarantee stable and conventional forms of representation. The subjects and objects of his films suggest forms of seeing—gestures for engendering thought through exploring the misappropriation of images of illness and health, normality and pathology, to "diagnose" the "crisis" of contemporary society. Haynes's films locate symptoms and present clues about the body consonant with contemporary critical writings that link power to bio-politics. His cinematic texts challenge clichés about representation, sameness and difference, and identity. An investigative form is central to Haynes's films. He predicates them on questions connected to discursive conceptions of the body but quickly reveals their profound concern to critique prevailing social conditions circulated in the media.

Superstar is a multifaceted exploration of connections among physical illness, celebrity, consumerism, and U.S. politics. The film focuses on performer Karen Carpenter's death from anorexia in the 1970s and begins with a question intoned in voice-over: "What happened? Why, at the age of thirty-two, was this smooth-voiced girl from Downey, California, who led a raucous nation smoothly into the seventies, found dead in her parents' home?" "What happened?" is the same question, tailored to specific circumstances and asked in all of Haynes's other films, his major strategy for challenging cinematic realism. As Superstar progresses, this question focuses on the "crisis" of Karen's anorexic body, becoming complicated through associations with external political crises conveyed by fleeting images of the Holocaust, the bombing of Cambodia, the Vietnam War, the Nixon White House, and the Carpenter family. Familial tension is particularly evident between Karen and her mother in arguments staged over her career, her clothes, her weight, and her desire for independence, but the family scenes are connected to the public arena of conflict as well as to scenes of performance.

The macabre character of wholesome images of American middle-class life fashioned through media of the seventies is particularly pronounced in the film by means of a counterpoint between "Barbie-doll" protagonists and a sound track that uses actors who speak their lines as if in a television sitcom, radiating "healthy" concern and ambition for their offspring. This clash of images and sounds is, in Haynes's description of the film's style, "alienating": "You laugh, but you're not really interested in the story or the ideas or the emotions. It's not helping you identify with the film; in fact, it's keeping you outside of it in ways that provoke . . . thought." ¹ Similarly, the use of intertitles to "explain" anorexia is also alienating, as are the fragmented shots of the female body, provoking questions about how to understand anorexia as a crisis. Crisis it may be, but what kind of crisis does the film portray?

Superstar offers symptoms and clues to a triple crisis—of the female body, conceptions of normalcy, and traditional portraits of the cinematic body—that Haynes will later develop more elaborately in his film Safe. Through the film's experiments with image and sound, it becomes evident that Karen's illness is an enigma for the viewer to unravel, since it is presented not merely as a physical problem but as an affront to the aspiring normality of the middle-class Barbie world. Karen's acknowledgment of her illness, after repeated denials, is equally problematic, since the emphasis in the film is not on finding a therapeutic cure for a specific physical or psychic condition but...