Poison: Nascent Todd Haynes

I love Todd Haynes, or at least his films. He and I share a love of Fassbinder and Sirk. He’s turned that into a career. I have Letterboxd. But tut tut to our differences, I’d like to talk about what brings us together: humanity. Not the concept, no. Not even the anthropological reality of sharing a species. Rather, I find Haynes’ films so fascinating because of their willful combination of artifice and genuine interest in the complex moral frameworks developed by extremely broken people (most of us). So, I found my way to his first feature, Poison (1991).

I don’t know that I’d call Poison “good.” I wouldn’t recommend it to my dad or my cousins or a young person seeking initiation into the not-so-hallowed halls of cinephilia. Still, I warmed to it, liked it quite a bit. Three mini-movies stitched into one—titled “Hero,” “Homo,” and “Horror”—that’s a hard sell. But each, no matter how bizarre, expresses, in its own way, Haynes’ overwhelming obsession with human desire and social belonging.

Weaving between each story, Haynes generates more than just pastiche here. True, “Homo” feels like a bootleg remake of Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982—both are based on the works of Jean Genet). And true, “Horror,” down to each frame, perfectly encapsulates the 50s and 60s sci-fi-horror B-picture. But Haynes maintains an insistent emphasis on the destructive (and inescapable) power of human sexuality. Each text expresses it in a different way. One root, three branches.

“Hero,” for instance, concerns the slowly unraveling story of a boy who is abused by his father, catches his mother cheating, and takes vengeance before flying away into the sky. “Horror” has a scientist isolating and extracting the human “sex drive,” the accidental consumption of which turns him into a leper and serial killer, entirely unaccepted by society but now incapable of being any different. “Homo,” perhaps the most brazen of all three, follows a petty criminal who meets a young man in prison that he knows from reform school. The school, let’s say, is set up on the British model. And our protagonist seeks to reconnect with that more ironically idyllic time in a very cruel way.

In each case, society refuses to accept the main character for some reason. One comes from a dysfunctional home and so lashes out. Another finds himself branded an academic outsider and accidentally experiments on himself. The last knows nothing but prison from his youth and dwells in that rage in lust through the rest of his days. None is perfect. But each is a victim in their own right.

As usual, Haynes—here working with source material from Jean Genet in all three cases—is intent on interrogating the relationship between human desire and belonging. When we foreclose desire, we create maladjustment; when we give in to it, we create chaos. It’s ineluctable, socially corrosive, and yet unfairly maligned and thereby made worse.

That’s why I like Haynes. To put it very simply (too simply), he recognizes the complicated nature of human desire. I think, crazy as it sounds, he and Augustine might have gotten along.