POISON (1991)
Todd Haynes, before he made Poison, had made something of a name for himself with a 40 minute short about Karen Carpenter, made with a cast entirely of Barbie dolls. There’s a cheeky glee to that sensibility that Haynes has since lost, slowly and gradually (Far From Heaven, his retelling of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s weepies could have used that sense of impishness). Poison, Haynes’s first feature, retains his anarchist humor, and extends it into a complete narrative–three, actually.
Many people only know of Poison’s controversy (of those who even know of the film at all, anyway), and that is a shame, since it this is perhaps his one wholly successful project.
The controversy comes from one of the three narratives, the one set in a prison, and (adapted from several pieces of several Jean Genet novels stitched together) focusing on an illicit relationship between two of the prisoners there. Jesse Helms, evidently, was upset that there was an NEA grant involved in the production of this film, which contains no more than one scene of homosexual sex and a momentary flash of an erect penis. Those fifteen or so frames got the film the dreaded NC-17 rating.
Poison is stitched together of three narratives, described in the end credits as: “Hero,” “Homo,” “Horror,” respectively. The one called Homo, is the prison one described above; hero is a fake docudrama about a young boy who’s shot his father dead and has, unbelievably, flown out the window, never to be seen again. Horror is (in B&W, no less) a 1950’s style shocker about a scientist experimenting with the human libido who accidentally becomes a “Leper Sex Murderer.”
Haynes gets the message across, and still has a lot of fun doing it. The idyllic scenes of the boy’s reformatory (remembered by our prisoner-narrator) are effectively haunting and winking at the same time. When the doctor (in Horror) becomes visibly affected by his “leprosy” we know it is an AIDS metaphor, but the delivery makes it all the more subversive, and sinister, for being so campy.
Maybe this is ultimately the problem Helms and others had with this film; it isn’t the content itself (more explicit films have come and gone), but the film’s effective subversiveness.
Many films try to be subversive, try to undermine the status quo in ways large and small (and Haynes is still up to that, to a lesser extent), but few succeed, too often ending in broad strokes (the South Park film and TV show) or empty campiness (John Waters’ films). Poison works because it is unafraid of being shocking, but still has a point to get across, and handles the balance well.
HDFEST RATING:
Overall: A-
Acting: B
Originality: A
Enjoyability: A
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