POISON

by Kevin Koehler

Todd Haynes' first feature-length picture, Poison, is not a particularly good movie regardless of what the Sundance Film Festival says (they bestowed upon it the 1991 Grand Jury Prize). The structure is certainly unconventional - three stories of distressingly limited relevance to each other, told concurrently - but it's ultimately gimmicky and unsatisfying. Homosexuality is depicted in an usually frank manner for film in general but customary for Todd Haynes. I imagine this elevates Poison somewhat (it certainly provokes a response) and perhaps it is a relevant historical marker in Queer cinema. This is not really my concern. Haynes has made other films of equally honest treatment of homosexuality far better than this one.

Poison is probably best enjoyed as a psychological portrait of Todd Haynes as a person rather than a movie proper. And the Todd Haynes, as shown to us in this film, does not enjoy sex very much. In one representative scene, a young boy walks in on his parents in the act. Not an unusual situation, per se, but the boy’s utter disgust at the vision before him is. One imagines such an incident happened to Todd Haynes and provoked a similar response in him. I should not like to know what he saw in that room as the sexual malevolence of this film was the likely result. It's also highly probable the director was spanked as a child, quite a bit in fact - the spanking "motif" appears in this film, as it does quite few of Haynes’ later work. It’s become a recurrent motif for him, like Warhol and his soup cans or Prince and the color purple. I’m inclined to believe he likes spanking more than sex, but this is neither here nor there.

Three stories, interwoven and punctuated with quotations from French writer Jean Genet (whose own life parallels the events depicted in the film), make up the brief 85-minute running time. Shot in faux documentary style, "Hero" recounts the life of a 7-year-old boy (through the memories of those who knew him) who murders his father and makes a fantastical getaway. "Horror" (The Fly by way of Godard) takes the aesthetics of the French new wave as its stylistic touchstone, telling the B-movie-ish story of a scientist who inadvertently ingests one of his own serums and develops some troubling side effects. The third story, "Homo," follows the exploits of an early 20th century inmate who falls in love with another prisoner.

I suppose you could say Poison sidesteps the pitfall of so many multi-character/story films: that one narrative line is bound to suffer in comparison to the others, making us anxious to return to the more entertaining ones. Unfortunately, it does this by making all three stories equally mediocre. "Horror" perhaps noses out the others as most unengaging - there is the murky sense that this is an AIDS parable, or even a gay parable (Haynes always seems the most comfortable discussing contemporary issues through the prism of iconic film genres), but it's not even worth discussing beyond the director's obvious fear of sex and sexuality, more precisely his own (after all, he did call a movie about sex Poison).

Each of the three segments touch on sex in general, sado-masochistic sex specifically. The boy in "Hero" is revealed to have reenacted, with naive classmates, his own spankings at the hands of Dad. The mad scientist of "Horror" becomes a sex maniac and serial rapist/murderer. "Homo's" protagonist engages in anal sex of questionable consent with a prison cellmate whom he saw tormented by a gang of reform school boys (in one of the film's more effective sequences) a decade earlier.

However, these common elements never extend much further than the surface - one story does not lend meaning, nor receive meaning, from the others. There is never much sense to the editing, to the grouping together of disconnected scenes, or even the inclusion of these three stories under the one singular umbrella. Instead, one gets the feeling of a director working out his own neuroses on screen, something that can be an exciting experience (see: David Lynch), but not here.

Interesting footnote: Religious groups, headed by one Rev. Donald Wildmon, protested Poison at the time of the film’s release because of its risque (homo)sexual nature and the fact that it was financed by the NEA (ie: tax dollars). Given the relative success of the film (and Haynes’ subsequent career), one can come to their own conclusion about what this protest accomplished.

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