big directors, small films:

TODD HAYNES presents his short works

• Texas Union, Assassins, Saturday, 8:00PM
• Texas Union, Dottie, Sunday,1:00PM

co-sponsored by: The Austin Film Society and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Buy Passes to Todd Haynes Online...

"My sister Wendy didn't really have Barbies as a child, but we would spend a lot of time playing with her collection of plastic horses...and I'd go nuts creating these ornate stories about a little girl who got a horse for her birthday, which then got injured and had to be shot-and she'd cry as I'd act these really sad melodramas. And I think Superstar really owes a lot to those years under the table with my sister."

Todd Haynes knows the horses are plastic but the emotions are real. He knows stories lie and that the lies are as necessary as they are pernicious. He knows how humane identification with a plastic horse can be, and also how cynically and misanthropically it can be manipulated. Moreover -- and here's the really important part -- he routinely plays it both ways.

Depending on the intonation, this could be taken as either the friendly appreciation it is or as an ad-hominem attack, and therein lies the true and essential danger of his films. Not exactly Brechtian, nor a hard and fast semiotician, either, Haynes uses identification with the lie not so much to alienate and unpack its underlying structure, as to lure us to other structures and other lies.

Fighting evil with evil, his debut feature, Poison arrived like a pop-cultural exorcism (incidentally raising religious-right ire over its unapologetically queer action and aesthetic, thus ironically raising Haynes's profile). Braiding three outwardly incompatible styles -- a true crime documentary, a sci-fi horror cheapie, and a respectfully disrespectful adaptation of Jean Genet -- Poison tightens around an interrogation of masochistic subversion in a society that prefers sadism.

Seemingly occupying only one genre at a time, Haynes's subsequent features may appear less extreme in synopsis, but not in experience. Like Jeanne Diehlman rehabilitating the disease-of-the-week, Safe escalates from unease to outright horror and austere heartbreak in its single-entendre pursuit of one woman's disintegration from environmental illness. Calmly attacking the self-loathing delusions of both the Reagan era's deregulatory individualism and its New Age "opposition," Safe made an axiom of Julianne Moore and emerged as one of the most acclaimed films of the '90s. It also propelled him to his most formally and conceptually ambitious work, the dazzling, dismaying Velvet Goldmine.

A Ken Russell-inflected Citizen Kane of Glam, this fantasy of the fan's entry into pansexual liberation through the star's lying surface also stares deeply into the reactionary void that can howl beneath. It might be Haynes's best but also most misunderstood film. Perhaps detractors wish they'd thought of it. But it's okay. Some day they will.

But those plastic horses most palpably haunt last year's Far From Heaven, a lushly precise Douglas Sirk-under-glass melodrama and Haynes's most acclaimed, financially successful film. Pushing lies of identification to an outer limit that might be the equal and opposite of Superstar, real people are moved around its lushly appointed, life-sized movie-movie dollhouse, making it an ideal preparation for these miniatures. In the early provocations, as throughout Haynes's career, the conceptual gloss is matched and exceeded by the performances of humans and Barbies alike. Playing it both ways forces the real, beating hearts behind the flesh or the plastic (or the lies) to push outward.

"To provide an audience with a solution-to give them the revolution-is to deprive them of the necessity of creating their own."

Spencer Parsons