On the Margins
Michael Koresky on Poison
The following essay originally appeared on The Criterion Current on June 11, 2021.
"The whole world is dying of panicky fright.” The opening on-screen text of Todd Haynes’s Poison promises an unsettled experience. Yet these words also might as well be predicting the puritanical response to the film that erupted from conservative quarters. After winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, Poison became a minor sensation, provoking the smug ire of “culture war” commentators like Senator Jesse Helms and the Reverend Donald Wildmon, the head of the Christian fundamentalist American Family Association, who sight unseen denounced its “explicit porno scenes of homosexuals involved in anal sex.” (There is nothing pornographic or even particularly explicit in the film.)
One might logically assume that these are not the target viewers for a film like Poison, which, as one of the key works of the movement that B. Ruby Rich would name the New Queer Cinema, courted controversy with its content and invited bafflement with its form. Yet the bright and brash progenitors of the New Queer films were not just making films for queer audiences—they were inherently confronting the opposition. During the nineties, daring and bold visions by out filmmakers—also including Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, Gregg Araki’s The Living End, Rose Troche’s Go Fish, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, Tom Kalin’s Swoon, and Christopher Münch’s The Hours and Times, to name but a few—were gaining notoriety, simply by being what they are. Their confrontational aspect was not incidental but rather part of the point: heterosexist “mainstream” culture could still choose to look the other way, but LGBTQ directors were finding their voices and would not be silenced. Such films all but welcomed denunciation by intellectual Lilliputians on the right who latched on to the fact that they were partly funded through NEH government grants. Yet during this code-red moment in history, when gay people were succumbing to the ravages of AIDS in shocking numbers, and the U.S. government, under Republican control for more than a decade, was doing fuck-all about it, how could any serious artist or moral thinker respond to moral tsk-tsking with anything other than an erect middle finger? Yes, the world was dying of panicky fright—frightened by difference, entrenched in its own bigotry—but gay men were also literally dying.
Our current, schizoid moment is marked both by increasing queer acceptance and by a concurrent politesse that invites mass cultural risk aversion. True queer cinema is all about taking those risks and breaking taboos, however, and this is the subject of the latest edition of the Queersighted series on the Criterion Channel, which features Poison. Because true risk-taking has become so rare in our movie culture, it may be hard to recall or describe what it was like in the early nineties for a young, unestablished filmmaker such as Haynes to so unapologetically confront the moment. Poison is a movie about fear that’s entirely fearless. And despite the brouhaha it caused upon its premiere, the film cannot and should not be reduced to the sensation around it. What’s most radical about it remains intact all these decades later: its aesthetic ambition and its willingness to plunge viewers into a conceptual gambit left completely up to us to decode.
Poison consists of three discrete sections, each with its own visual conceit, narrative engine, and generic playbook. Each is titled in the closing credits, but while it’s playing, the film doesn’t provide even these markers of intent. In “Horror,” Haynes fashions what at first feels like a heightened parody of 1950s sci-fi, using cheap B-movie aesthetics to dramatize the tale of Dr. Graves, a scientist who has harnessed the sex drive in liquid form, only to become his own unwitting test subject after he accidentally imbibes the seminal-looking fluid, leading to his transformation into a leprous social pariah. “Hero” takes on an even more disreputable conceit, employing tabloid documentary tactics for the stranger-than-fiction (if entirely fictional) story of seven-year-old Richie, an abused Long Island boy who, in 1985, killed his father with a shotgun before allegedly flying out the window and disappearing from the earth. The third, “Homo,” takes on the least outwardly “mocking” and most carnal aesthetic, harnessing a dreamlike grandiloquence for a violent prison romance that toggles between an Edenic, rose-tinted past, shot in a James Bidgood–like fairy-tale haze, and a squalid present, set in a jail cell right out of Jean Genet’s love-behind-bars erotic classic Un chant d’amour.
Genet, who Haynes says “held the world permanently in contempt,” was an inspirational anchor point for the entire film. Throughout Poison’s eighty-five-minute running time, Haynes jumps among the stories with whiplash ferocity, and they begin to take on parallel weight in our consciousness, even if they are visually and thematically dissimilar. One can imagine a version of this film made a decade later—at the height of the early-twenty-first-century “we are all interconnected” era (exemplified by Oscar-approved hits like Crash and Babel)—that more explicitly draws literal junctures between the three parts. Haynes was here as disinterested in handholding viewers as he was in mollifying the easily scandalized, only teasing what threads might connect the stories. He said in an interview from the time, “I would say that the poison that the film describes is not necessarily one that any of us can avoid, living in the culture that we live in . . . The poison is our culture. The film is about laws and what happens when people break them or transgress them.”
Haynes’s words are a reminder that the politics and aesthetics of a film are inseparable. Now firmly established as one of American cinema’s finest and most ambitious directors, and one of its greatest chroniclers of the historically marginalized and dispossessed, Haynes was transgressive from the start, bursting onto the art-film scene with 1988’s forty-three-minute Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a formally accomplished, minuscule-budgeted debut that makes poignant, compelling drama out of its subject’s tragic life, despite the fact that it’s enacted almost entirely through Barbie dolls. Equally pissing off the Mattel toy company, A&M Records, and Carpenter’s brother and self-appointed legacy owner, Richard, Superstar remains technically unscreenable, except on licensing-lax YouTube and in surreptitious pop-ups. Superstar’s power resides in its refusal to place blame on our society’s most vulnerable, and it’s what unites it with Poison, as well as with Haynes’s subsequent film, Safe (1995): these films illustrate that the real disease of our contemporary culture—beyond AIDS or anorexia nervosa or environmental allergies or child abuse, or even a botched serum cooked up in a sci-fi lab—is a social rot formed by fear, bigotry, intolerance, and persecution.
As Poison opens, with subjective POV shots of a child’s hand grasping and tenderly touching forbidden objects from his parents’ bedroom, Haynes indicates that he is making a kind of fetish film, palpating off-limit realms. The recurring images of scars and mottled skin throughout are reminders that external markers of pain often don’t tell the entire story, and that society’s ignored, discounted, and bullied harbor deeper, inexplicable trauma. Poison is, at heart, about the chasm between the flesh and the spirit, the former made palpable and repellent in “Horror,” the latter represented by young Richie’s final, improbable flight in “Hero.” In “Homo,” as with any good prison story, there is a combination of the two, a depiction of the irrepressibility of the soul (here indicated as sexual release) despite the body being contained within the walls of a cell.
In all three stories, the body becomes spectacle, whether through transformation or eroticization, death or disappearance—an apt, moving metaphor for American life at the height of the AIDS crisis. Finally, it is Dr. Graves who most explicitly declares one of the film’s central themes, angrily exhorting from a ledge to a crowd that’s come to gawk at his monstrously transformed visage. “You’ll never know what pride is!” he screams. “‘Cause pride is the only thing that lets you stand up to misery. And not this kind of misery [he gestures to his face], but the kind of misery the whole stinking world is made of!” It’s jarring yet revelatory to hear the word “pride” used in this fashion, years before it took on widespread meaning for the LGTBQ community.
Poison is a testament to the importance of art told from the perspective of outsiders, an increasingly rare thing in our ever-more corporatized entertainment culture. This month, when every ad-supported streaming service and every bank branch in your neighborhood is waving its pride flag, save a thought for the filmmakers who broke taboos, flouted niceties, and risked rejection at a time when even the slightest hint of homoeroticism would work most of those in power into a furious lather. On being part of the New Queer Cinema, Haynes said, “There was a questionable discussion about what it means to be gay and look at the world from an outsider perspective. There’s a value in that. All of us felt this tremendous power in that marginalization.”