The Contemporary Film Directors series presents engagingly written commentaries on the work of living directors from around the world. Todd Haynes author Rob White was Commissioning Editor of Books at the British Film Institute, 1995–2005, and Editor of Film Quarterly, 2006–2013. He lives in London, England. He answered our questions about the subject of his new book.
Q: Haynes has seemingly taken radical shifts in direction from film to film. Is there a commonality that can be found in each of his works?
White: Roughly speaking, Haynes alternates between films about “rock’n’roll suicide” (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and domestic melodramas (Safe, Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce). Then there are Poison and the TV short Dottie Gets Spanked, which make up a kind of early 1990s “New Queer Cinema” interlude. The music films are narratively complex mosaics whereas the family movies are linear, and that difference reinforces the pattern of alternation. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to split his work like this but of course it’s not a hard and fast division. There are numerous interconnections and one in particular comes to the fore in my book: it’s the drama of leaving home—which is both a specific story incident in almost all of Haynes’s films and something more symbolic. This ordinary life event takes on a larger metaphorical significance as a defining act of social noncompliance.
Home in Haynes’s films isn’t a happy place, even when it’s loving and protective. It’s a place of danger, especially for the misfit (though normality is tough too). Sometimes home is horrible or haunted—somewhere to get trapped or go mad. In perhaps the most powerful scene in the glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, away from all its music-industry glitz and glamor, the teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) is humiliated by his father. Soon afterward he escapes on a bus from Manchester to London, and while the scene is made poignant by the fact that his mother runs after the vehicle to wave goodbye, it’s a scene of liberation, temporary and insufficient though it proves to be.
A more complex example is the journey Safe’s Carol (Julianne Moore) takes from her affluent life in southern California to a recovery community in New Mexico. Her conventional life has become unendurable—the comfort of it has actually started to make her sick—but her search for something better is much more risky than she realizes. Through such stories, Haynes dwells on the fundamental political question of what it means (and costs) not to belong, and I very much wanted in the book to stress the
consistency, coherence, and seriousness of this preoccupation in his work. Continue reading →
If you’re looking for something to do in Chicago this month, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has an exhibit called SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City which roughly coincides with our publication of the book by the same name, edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s online mini-exhibit has information about Midwestern towns featured in the exhibit (and in the book): Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Peoria.
The “Nikkei” path breaker with the St. Louis Cardinals
Posted by sfastSamuel Regalado notes that the first Major Leaguer of Japanese American descent suited up for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975.
Regalado’s book, Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues, examines baseball’s evolving importance to the
Japanese American community. “Nikkei” is a term not only for the value of the share on the Tokyo stock exchange, but also refers to first generation Japanese Americans.
“Ryan Kurosaki was an unassuming pioneer who brought with him, in spirit, generations of Nikkei ballplayers whose devotion to the game was overshadowed only by their love for their country,” Regalado says.
The author says that the young pitcher’s debut was a low-key one; there was no reporting of Kurosaki’s debut on the Japanese American newspapers at the time.
“Kurosaki’s path breaking entry into the big leagues was only unassuming to the Nikkei because their community had, by then, changed from its pre-Second World War identity as a strictly Japanese American enclave to a much wider Asian American profile from which baseball’s prominence played a less distinctive role.”