A Sap for Todd Haynes

As a fan of The Carol Burnett Show, the skit I remember most was "Mildred Fierce," a parody of the Joan Crawford noir potboiler, Mildred Pierce (1945). When I saw the film version of Mildred Pierce my first semester in college, I was floored by how little the Burnett sketch really made fun of the movie and that the overcooked criminal plot, outlandish costumes and even the sketch's preoccupation with how cooking grease symbolically separates the working-class Mildred from her pretentious, social climber daughter,Vita, are lifted from the original movie nearly intact. Consequently, Crawford's definitive vehicle has always felt to me like a long, dull episode of variety show television.

A few months before seeing Mildred Pierce, when I was seventeen and graduating high school, I saw a photograph of a powerless, wet, young man screaming from the cover of a film journal. At that time in American pop culture and in my own youth, there was hardly an homosexual image to be found. However, I was convinced this single image of a silent, screaming outsider was gay. I bought the magazine and hid it in my bedroom.

The magazine cover was a still from Todd Haynes' first feature film Poison (1991) and my instincts were keen: the image is a homosexual prisoner who is spat upon by his fellow inmates. Ever since, openly gay Haynes has primarily followed the paradigm of an indie movement known as the New Queer Cinema: to reimagine the conventional representations of the disenfranchised (primarily women & homosexual men) by investigating genre and subverting the structure of the traditional narrative film.

Haynes has become my favorite living filmmaker, making such classics as the moving Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1989), the haunting Safe (1995) the gorgeous Far from Heaven (2002) and the aforementioned Poison. Yet his films are cerebral affairs, demanding repeated viewings to uncover the meaning below their use of cinematic style, grammar and semiotics. Sometimes, as with his most recent film, I'm Not There (2007), an attempt to portray the "many lives" of Bob Dylan using actors of different ages and gender, his experimentation makes his narratives indecipherable and he wraps his characters so tight in genre conventions that they suffocate. When it was announced that Haynes would be tackling an HBO re-make of Mildred Pierce, I feared Haynes would alienate me further by revisiting a text that Carol Burnett had already deconstructed.

Within thirty minutes of viewing the six-hour miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), I realized I was a fool to doubt my hero. Liberated from a feature-film running time, Haynes uses realism to tell Mildred Pierce the way it should have always been told. True to the original novel's plot (no guns, no flashbacks), this Mildred does something no film does anymore: takes its time. From the opening introduction of Mildred during the Great Depression, a montage honoring pie and cake creation, to its intention to balance screen time equally between Mildred's three big passions--her work, family and love lives--Haynes creates a staggeringly thorough, emotionally fulfilling portrait of a flawed, likeable and very human heroine.

What distinguishes and draws us into Mildred Pierce is how much alone time Haynes spends with his heroine (played by the great Kate Winslet, possibly giving her most transcendent performance yet). Every episode is anchored with her wondering, deciding, anticipating and regretting. At the end of the fourth episode, when she hears her estranged daughter's operatic voice over a radio broadcast, Haynes is brave enough to stay with her as she walks away from the radio and onto a long pier and then gaze into the dark nighttime sky. After years of using film style and camera grammar to challenge his audience, Haynes finally invests as much of his energetic virtuosity into searching the soul of a woman trying to make a better life for herself.

Haynes' most personal film, the short film Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), ends with an image of a heartbreaking seven-year-old boy, Steven, wrapping his favorite drawing (a crayon rendering of a Lucille Ball-esque TV idol getting spanked by her husband) in foil and then burying it in the backyard to keep his father from finding it. As Mildred would say, I'm a "sap" for Steven because he cherishes classic TV comediennes and hides meaningful, dangerous pictures from his parents. But Dottie is also just good, plain, old-fashioned drama, told simply and beautifully. Mildred and Dottie shine brightest in Haynes' remarkable canon.

As a gay man and a filmmaker, I embrace the way Haynes' work often has foregrounded movie genre techniques and torn apart narrative structure. He holds up those traditions so we, the audience, can see how that structure is imposed by a patriarchal (read: heterosexual) culture and constrains us. The desire to take nothing for its face value is at the heart of gay sensibility--the desire to find beauty, humor and meaning in a popular art form outside the art form's original intention. But, sometimes, the greatest work isn't reactionary. Sometimes the bravest and most moving artistic expression, for lack of a better way of saying it, is to just tell the story straight.

On July 15, 2011, Mildred Pierce was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, more than any other program in the 2010-2011 television season. It was screened on HBO and is available on many cable ON-DEMAND systems. It will soon be available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

- Sawyer Lahr