POISON
“The whole world is dying of panicky fright,” reads the title that opens Todd Haynes’s startling and original Poison. It’s a correct and judicious observation, one that helps to “explain” a fascinating and provocative movie, particularly if one sees it alluding directly to the specter of AIDS.
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It could be argued of course that Todd Haynes is well aware of this problem and that Poison is conceived in part as a scheme for both addressing and subverting the reflexes of a fearful postmodern audience. Up to a point, I think that this is Haynes’s strategy, but whether it functions entirely according to his plan is another matter. Yet if Haynes bites off more than he can chew, this is ultimately a disadvantage that he forces his audience to share; given the breadth of his ambitions, and the ideological stone wall that he’s battering against, he can be credited with stirring up a healthy amount of confusion. If he fails on some levels, he fails much more interestingly than most current movies succeed.
The most exciting moments in Poison are those that create a momentary confusion about which of Haynes’s three stories one happens to be watching–moments of vertigo during which two or more of the three stories seem to fuse (or, perhaps more to the point, “bleed” together). The opening shot retrospectively constitutes the first of these moments. By the time we discover which story a shot belongs to, we’ve forged enough imaginative links between the three stories–their overall meanings as well as their details–to experience directly some of the reasons Haynes chose to juxtapose them.
The stupidity and intolerance of society play central roles in “Horror” and “Hero,” but in “Homo” they seem confined in concrete terms to the inability of a prison official to speak the word “homosexual” and his query to Broom about whether the term consists of one word or two. (More generally, Broom remarks offscreen, “In accepting prison life, embracing it, I could reject the world that rejected me.”) Does this mean we’re supposed to regard the cruelties of the prisoners and reform-school kids with more leniency than the cruelties of the little boys who beat up Richie or the little girl who spits on Richie? Surely the unusual amount of freedom that Haynes grants the spectator in synthesizing his diverse elements plays a substantial role in raising these unanswerable questions.
