Of housewives and saints: abjection, transgression, and impossible mourning in Poison and safe.

In the opening sequence of Velvet Goldmine (dir. Todd Haynes, UK/US, 1998), future glam-rock trendsetter Jack Fairy stands in front of a mirror and, having been brutalized earlier by a pack of schoolyard bullies, smears the blood from his split lip into a glistening, cherry-red smile, satisfied in the knowledge that "one day the whole bloody world would be his." This is a signature Haynes moment: Fairy converts the corporeal sign of his abjection into the brazen emblem of his star power. The very stigmata that brand him as a pariah literally provide the raw materials for his transformation into a flaming proto-pop icon.

Though characterized by extraordinary stylistic diversity, the films of Todd Haynes have maintained a consistent focus on the theme of abjection. This is as true of the so-called women's films as it is of his more explicitly queer works. The release of Far from Heaven (US/France, 2002), in fact, makes it possible (if it was not so before) to discern in Haynes's oeuvre a pattern of alternation between two key problematics, each of which approaches the issue of abjection from a different angle. The first concerns the performative resources provided by the condition of abjection or rejection by the social order at large. Jack Fairy's tactics of resignification, for example, unmistakably recall the performative strategies adopted by the outcast characters in Haynes's earlier film, Poison (US, 1991). Based on the autobiographical novels of Jean Genet, (1) and intercutting three different narratives rendered in three distinct visual modes, Poison introduces us to a host of marginal figures who, in masochistically embracing their abjection, ascend (or perhaps one should say descend) into Genetian sainthood.

The second problematic to which Haynes's films repeatedly return concerns the psychosomatic costs of a too-forceful repudiation of the abject, or of the constitutive exclusions that are a precondition for the achievement of normative femininity. Safe (US/UK, 1995) and Far from Heaven, for instance, take up the cinematic conventions associated with the maternal melodrama (the former in a much quieter way than the latter, to be sure) in order to foreground that which cannot be accommodated within the bounds of bourgeois domesticity--life-threatening illness and racial and sexual otherness. In Safe, Carol White's (Julianne Moore's) body itself becomes the site of the abject's disruptive return, which manifests in the form of environmental illness.

This essay examines Haynes's handling of the abject in Poison and Safe, with a particular view toward the question of what kinds of political work these films perform. Poison and Safe form a complementary pair, in my view, despite their discontinuous treatment of gender and their striking formal differences, because both lay out in paradigmatic terms the issues that have continued to preoccupy Haynes in his more recent films. Both works were also palpably born out of the first phase of the AIDS emergency in the United States. Poison opens with a quote from Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers: "The whole world is dying of panicky fright." This intertitle sets all three of the film's narratives in an atmosphere of mass panic, while clearly referencing the extradiegetic scene of the AIDS pandemic.

Safe, too, has generally been read as an AIDS metaphor. After all, environmental illness is a recently identified syndrome (often referred to as "twentieth-century disease") that, like AIDS, compromises the immune system. AIDS itself is only referenced a handful of times in the course of the film, but its very absence from the plot makes it one of the film's most powerful structuring elements. One of the arguments I wish to make here, however, is that the relationship between the major problematics to which Haynes's work again and again returns is not so much a metaphoric as a metonymic one. That is to say, it does not so much suggest an analogical relation between the condition of femininity and that of male subjectivity "at the margins," (2) but instead outlines their interfaces and the foreclosures on which each is founded. For instance, in a scene remarkable for the economy of its dialogue, Carol White's best friend, Linda (Susan Norman), reveals that her half brother has died but denies that the cause of death was MDS--a suspicion apparently provoked by the fact that he was not married. The entire exchange, which comprises just a handful of halting, truncated utterances, takes place without the words gay or AIDS ever being spoken. Set in Linda's startlingly immaculate kitchen--clearly not a space that can accommodate sexual deviance or death--the scene attests to how loudly the unspoken can be made to signify.

Analyzing Haynes's films in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of abjection necessarily means placing them in dialogue with Julia Kristeva's foundational text on this topos, Powers of Horror. (3) Read alongside and against each other, Haynes's films and Kristeva's theoretical work do much to illuminate one another. Poison and Safe are indeed rife with bodily elements of abjection--spit, shit, cum, blood, pus. In Poison, these elements frequently serve as symbolic tokens of filth in ritualistic acts of violence that mark the victim as a deject, while fortifying the subjecthood of the perpetrator. At the culmination of "Homo," for instance, the protagonist John Broom (clearly a surrogate figure for Genet, (4) played by Scott Renderer) rapes Jack Bolton (James Lyons), a fellow prison inmate and the object of his desire. He violently breaches a bodily margin and ejaculates across it in order to put Bolton "back in his place" when Bolton begins to ascend the ranks of the prison's homosocial hierarchy. In "Hero," the mock television tabloid segment that revolves around the mystery of a seven-year-old boy named Richie Beacon who killed his father and then flew away, a neighbor describes an episode in which Richie entered her backyard naked and "made a BM" right before her eyes, submitting her to a humiliating spectacle that was also a theatrical display of his own abjection. And in "Horror," the black-and-white sci-fi segment, scientist Dr. Thomas Graves (Larry Maxwell) distills the sex drive into a liquid form and accidentally drinks it, infecting himself with a lethal contagion that makes him the target of a hunt for a menacing "leper sex killer." At one point in the narrative, a little girl disgusted by the grotesque, oozing sores on his face spits on Graves as he is walking down the street. In each of the above scenes, a token of abjection forcibly transferred across a bodily or topographical boundary marginalizes the victim, excluding him or her from what Judith Butler calls "the domain of the subject." (5)

Safe begins with a more mundane episode of violence: Carol having sex with her husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley). An overhead shot taken from above the bed shows her on her back, facing the camera, her face unresponsive as Greg's bare back undulates over her body. Though this is sex--not rape, as in Poison--it nevertheless marks Carol's body as a passive receptacle, a repository of the abject. The abject later returns to haunt the conjugal bedroom in an episode that presents an ironic counterpoint to the sex scene. Having lashed out at Carol when she declined to have sex with him the night before, Greg apologizes. He embraces Carol consolingly, and she buries her face in his shirt. Carol's body then begins to convulse in a manner that visually rhymes with Greg's spasmodic movements in the sex scene. She suddenly pushes away from Greg and violently pukes on the floor in front of him. What at first looks like crying--that classic act of feminine catharsis that so often facilitates the renewed bonding of the couple--turns out to be repulsion. It is as though Carol's body can no longer tolerate the sexual misuse it has endured in the interests of adhering to a normative ideal of femininity.