4 - Queerness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
Throughout the previous chapters of this book, weaving through the explorations of independent cinema, authorship and the genre of melodrama, the subject of homosexuality and queerness has repeatedly surfaced. Observations have been made relating to the politics of sexuality in the film, challenges to cinema authorship made by queer directors, and so on. Due to the inclusion of Frank's narrative thread in Far from Heaven, and Todd Haynes's insights regarding the ways in which his sexual orientation influences his filmmaking, it would have been perverse not to devote some space to this topic. And yet, there is a great deal more to be said regarding the queerness of Far from Heaven. (Indeed, for many viewers of Haynes's film, the very experience of watching a Sirkian melodrama on the big screen in the first years of the twenty-first century may have seemed rather queer.) For all of its apparent conventionality – strict adherence to a generic template, linear narrative, classical score, and so on – Far from Heaven is also a deeply political film. As has been explored already, this is in part related to the resuscitation of an outmoded melodramatic mode, and to the incorporation into that form of 1950s understandings of sexuality and race mostly absent from classical instances of the genre. But the political significance of the film extends beyond this – and, I want to argue, in ways that are evidently ‘queer’, affected by and related to queer activism, criticism and film practice.
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- Information
- Far from Heaven , pp. 100 - 129Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011