Todd Haynes' CAROL, adapting Patricia Highsmith's pseudonymous early '50s lesbian romance

another way of putting that is that it felt inauthentic -- the work of someone who idealized (and in the process, simplified) the glam subculture and reduced it to a few obvious signifiers.

A couple of other things I appreciated about Carol:

(a) It treated homosexuality as a common perversion acknowledged and tolerated by urbanites if you weren't affected (and those who lived in rural America, as many novels and essays have shown). The couple's first scene, the one at the Plaza, sets the tone. We see them from the POV of Therese's friend, and there's no question that their body language suggests they've been intimate. A later scene in which Therese's boyfriend calls her attraction to Carol a crush is staged with admirable straightforwardness. He's not OMIGOD YOU LOVE A WOMAN. It's true to what we know, and what my grandmother tells me: we weren't stupid, we knew this stuff went on.

(b) It preserves Highsmith's antipathy towards children. Carol may genuinely love her child, but it's clear that Therese will never love that child, and the child may not like any of them.

(c) The decades of resentment shared by Abby and Hardge. Their one scene was a quiet knockout.

the Frank Rich piece i linked way back pointed out that two women together could, in their way, 'get away with' more than two men in pre-Stonewall America.

or maybe it was the haynes FC interview, i don't know

boston marriages etc.

What perplexed me was how hamhandedly he tried to insert the queer overtones; it should have come naturally! (although most of the evidence suggests glam was more het than queer: straight guys discovering they get chicks by wearing lipstick).

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 December 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When did you come to this stunning realisation?

Amateurist - if this is what people are doing at grad school then sign me up. I think Haynes is unusually good at talking about film - but also in that academic way (which I consider it to be really good when he does it - but might be well recognised around here so maybe that gets under people's skin.

he is good at talking about film! he's very wedded to some critical tropes he encountered in the 1980s, though. but i'm not really talking about haynes /talking/ -- i was referring more to the way that some of his films are inspired in large part by ideas that were circulating in the academic field of film studies (and the post-structuralist trend in the humanities) in the 1980s and 1990s. that in itself isn't a problem, either! it's just that sometimes i feel like his films are closed systems, that they provide their own interpretive apparatus, and that limits their interest for me. at least these days.

took me a moment to realize that the FC interviewer was Nick Davis.

i hear some ppl think his films are closed systems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbE9N6LRpG0

feel like my opinion of Haynes' output is the exact opposite of everyone on this thread so far (I haven't seen Carol, I probably will at some point - although I also thought I would enjoy his Mildred Pierce and got bored with that fairly quick)

like SAFE is okay but all the criticisms of stiffness, awkwardness, "closed system" I feel can be applied to that and it largely left me cold whereas I absolutely love his music stuff (VG and I'm Not There). Far From Heaven also v good.

xpost

i don't get a sense that we all agree! what do you think is the 'consensus'

my opinions on his films wouldn't be well-served by a 'ranking' not only b/c i have changed my feelings about several of them multiple times, but because i really admire a lot of aspects of e.g. SAFE while feeling like i recognize its limitations more and more.

i guess i found both of the music films overly didactic, even more like films à thèse than SAFE. but even in I'M NOT THERE there were lots of fugitive awesome things in the set design, editing, costuming, etc. it's just that i was totally allergic to the general gestalt of politically-correct poststructuralist noodling.

btw sorry if i'm repeating myself, morbs et al

god knows nobody on ILX has ever done such a thing before

p clear consensus that Velvet Goldmine is awful and Safe is great, both of which I strenuously disagree with. Seems like consensus is also that Carol is flat and unsuccessful but as noted I haven't seen.

xp

the fact that SAFE topped the village voice's "best films of the 1990s" poll seems like a good emblem of its virtues and limitations IMO

it's like, yes it has a ton going for it, but some of its limitations and problems come from precisely those aspects of it that make it catnip to film critics (esp. of the highbrow variety)

anyway I don't think we should rehash my opinions of VG on this thread (we can look up the VG threads for that), but I will say that it bums me out that that movie routinely gets pilloried from both sides - from fans of the glam scene/music who are outraged at all the things it "get wrong" and from Haynes' usual coterie of arthouse film supporters who are disappointed in how it handles the cultural politics.

xp

in my view both of those angles attack the film for failing to do something it was not really designed or intended to do, ie the criticisms are misplaced

Seems like consensus is also that Carol is flat and unsuccessful but as noted I haven't seen.

The consensus here, maybe, but even here there's a range of enthusiasm. Also: it's doing spectacularly well in critics polls.

i was referring more to the way that some of his films are inspired in large part by ideas that were circulating in the academic field of film studies (and the post-structuralist trend in the humanities) in the 1980s and 1990s.

And that he watched a lot of 70s film. Like really closely watched Fassbinder and Akerman (really striking how the framing of so many shots on Safe are to all that. I had only seen in on TV before)

What do you mean by 'closed systems'? What is an 'open system'?

I took that to mean that they're hermetic, they don't reference or bear any resemblance to anything outside of the film or its clearly stated reference points

this film refers to gay life...?

Well ask amateurist then

let's not

ugh when did ilx become an all caps film title venue, please we have italics

re the consensus on this movie though it is kinda fascinating & to me v unfamiliar the degree to which everyone - people who liked it, those who didn't - seems to be trying to express the way in which it was somehow almost intangibly dissatisfying; for me this is the uncanniness, for others its slight, &c. even when i hear people receptive to it, even brody's weird qualified rave, everything seems compelled just to make time to at least register this abstract frustration

xp alright Crime BREEZE.

i am working on a new stylesheet that allows you to use simple code - [w][/w] - to display text in a more elegant fashion, it is preferable because the all caps thing is so bizarre, like this plain text attempt to erect this statuesque & glaring twentieth-century-fox-logo lettering that impresses the weight of a film on casual readers, this awkward tone shift in which civility buckles under the weight of an uncontrolled outburst, "my favourite welles picture? i'd have to say THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS", really just best to apply basic title case formatting to make it look more reasonable than reflexive all caps look, here let me just test it, http://img.bhs4.com/FD/7/FD78B20A162DC47709289F54C7BDA3921E31ABF2_large.jpg

'Closed system' vs 'open system' is just another way of re-stating Barthes' distinction between 'writerly' and 'readerly' texts, no? (ie the open, readerly text is polysemic and only completed by its interaction with the reader, whereas the closed, writerly text is complete unto itself and provides its own critique). But I think it would be dishonest of Haynes, or other filmmakers of his generation and after, to pretend that they haven't ever encountered film theory at all, or that theories about the gaze, identification etc etc aren't sometimes relevant to their work. If Haynes' films are closed systems because they "provide their own interpretive apparatus" - well, isn't that a failure of criticism, or at least a challenge to it - there are always new things to be said.

let's not

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Thursday, December 10, 2015 11:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hey morbs good news: http://kottke.org/15/12/happiness-doesnt-help-you-live-longer

btw i didn't mean it was a completely closed system (which couldn't really exist) just that it kind of tended that way

The weakness of this closed/open distinction is that it clearly favours the open text over the closed one - but there are plenty of closed texts that give great pleasure (ie most of Kubrick's films)

ilx: cheaper bullshit than grad school

This isn't a language I speak, but I'm always fascinated to read it.

In other words, whilst open and closed systems are commonly used frameworks for identifying structural relationships and characteristics, we can tend to find asymptotic trade offs in variables and dynamics that introduce instability and complexity - unless we're prepared to make more restrictive and heroic assumptions.

I'm not sure what I think about this over all (I think it's underpowered and overpowered) but I do think the best thing about it is Sarah Paulson's incredible performance as Carol's ex lover and confidant. She's so good in this that I she makes the rest of it seem so fake -"who is this actress?!" and after googling I realised that she was also the one that made 12 Years A Slave convincing. Chalk me up as a Sarah Paulson Stan. The way she fidgets with her cigarette as she talks with Carol justifies the whole film IMO.

Sorry I edited that into confusion. There's a rogue "I"

And then later she does the same fiddling cigarette action while talking to Therese. Like those visual motifs, Haynes likes to repeatedly deploy a good thing.

I like it a lot (want to re-read her book, remember it being underwhelmed - then again it came after I read a bunch of other awesome fiction by her and couldn't deal with the one-offness and ii) its not for me anyway) although its more of a move sideways from Far From Heaven. Haynes is in a difficult situation. It seems he is putting things more in the open - he is making these films w/out the restrictions on Sirk - but also being bound by the time they are set in, so avoiding a more confrontational approach (Fassbinder mode). This open 50s movie is something I found to be a tad unsatisfying.

Blanchett is the best face in anglo cinema since Weisz in Deep Blue Sea. Give it to me.

does blanchett do more than one face in this film?

It's more like a mask.

As a character Carol is one-dimensional so no need for more than one face - and, who needs more, as long as its Cate Blanchett's face.

i think she had so little to work with as a character (unless you count looking haughty/majesterial/imperious for 90% of the film) she just looked like what a character in the 50s might have looked like had she received an early trial of botox.

Amazing movie. The best I've seen all year. Absolutely gorgeous, devastating, beautiful...

I adored this.

6/10...Nice photography, but to score higher both Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara both needed to show they are capable of more than a single expression. And would it have hurt for there to be a bit more sense of enjoyment?

I thought that tension was one of the best parts of the movie...everyone is so uptight, so 1952...a forbidden love! made sense everyone was stone faced

particular years are actually not that uptight.