Todd Haynes

By Christian Messer

“From my first encounter with the invigorating notion of gender as a product of ideology, feminist theory has left an indelible mark on my own critical – and creative – thinking…For me, everything that I questioned about what it meant to be a man – and how much my sexuality would perpetually challenge those meanings – could be found in arguments posed by feminists. What can I say? I identified.” Todd Haynes 2003

Oregon’s Todd Haynes has a fascination with identity, and it is carried throughout most of his films. How we as people identify ourselves, shape our identity, question it and adapt to it and our environment. He puts our beliefs in front of us, then challenges us on them, and as one would guess, it can cause controversy.
His career was most notorious when he made Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Using Barbie dolls for the characters, Haynes challenges us with public versus private personalities, and deals with Carpenter’s battle with body image and her bulimia. The Barbie dolls represent society’s idea of beauty and how this can take some of us down a treacherous road. Richard Carpenter was furious enough to file a lawsuit making it impossible to get a copy of it. Now you can see it on Google Videos.

In Safe, Julianne Moore plays Carol White, a housewife who is rather fitting the mold well. With her Snow White voice and personality, we see Carol go through her daily drudgery of suburban life. After getting a perm, we see her begin to experience chemical side affects. Suddenly, she is thrown into chaos, and eventually has to rethink who she is, and what she wants in life. She becomes allergic to her environment.

Far From Heaven, again was identity on two planes: One is Frank, the handsome successful business man, coming to terms with his homosexuality, the other is Frank’s wife Cathy who catches Frank in the act. Cathy befriends a gardener who is black. Two tracks, one family. Cathy is shocked into the reality that their perfect life and marriage are a sham, to cover up Hank’s sexuality. Cathy also knows that she cannot be a closer friend to the gardener, as people whisper about them spending time together.

In I’m Not There, Haynes’ subject is Bob Dylan. The identity issue here is that everyone around Dylan has wanted him to be this person, this icon of their expectations. He felt that he was neither and has constantly fought the notion of being put in a box.

Haynes was challenged with this project, often. What he did though was fascinating and it worked. Multiple actors played the hybrid fictional/factual characters to represent Dylan at different intervals of his life. Most striking was Kate Blanchette playing Jude Quinn (a representation of Dylan around 1966.) Blanchette is so immersed in the role, we actually believe we’re seeing Dylan himself.

Confusion certainly slips in when we see the actors portraying these pieces of Dylan. One character, Woody Guthrie, is an 11 yr. old boy carrying a guitar case with the phrase, “This Machine Kills Fascists” on it, as he travels the country. We eventually see Ben Winshaw, Christine Bale (playing two versions) Heath

Ledger, and Richard Gere all take their turn. Why this approach? Why not a biopic tale?

“The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he was. He’s like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you’ll surely get burned. Dylan’s life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. And that’s why his fan base is so obsessive, so desirous of finding the truth and the absolutes and the answers to him – things that Dylan will never provide and will only frustrate…. Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.”

Haynes is just getting started as far as we can see, his future is unwritten and no one could guess what he will tackle next. What more can you say about a man who received Bob Dylan’s blessing on a film that is just as multi-faceted as the man himself? Brilliant might suffice.