Written on the screen: mediation and immersion in Far from Heaven.

Recently, while engaging in one of my favorite forms of procrastination--using my computer to search for mid-century modern bargains on eBay rather than using it to engage in more rigorous, or at least more legitimated, intellectual pursuits--I, quite by accident, came across an interesting listing: one "'FAR FROM HEAVEN' red '50's [sic] Eames era purse," described as looking like it could have been taken fight off the set of the film. This was a lucky find, not because of the object itself (however lovely), but because of the ways in which the listing encouraged me to reconsider assumptions about what might operate as a legitimate intellectual pursuit and how that operation occurs, specifically in regard to the media and consumer pursuits both representative of and represented within Todd Haynes's melodrama Far from Heaven (US/France, 2002). Thus, while I did not bid on that eBay item (nor on another purse, this time in black patent leather, also listed under the heading "Far from Heaven"), one might say that it nonetheless gave me purchase in helping to crystallize my thoughts about Haynes's work--especially concerning what that work reveals about how we, as viewers and consumers, relate to and through mass-mediated culture. For here was an instance of a film providing a language with which to express a particular identity (whether a consumer, aesthetic, or fan identity)--a film producing semiotic and epistemological cues for recognition (and indeed, achieving the status of keyword cue on eBay is clearly one sign of approving recognition in today's mediated universe). The phrase Far from Heaven was used here to signify not an actual item from the film, but a "look" presumed to be known and appreciated by viewers of both computer and film screens. This suggests how deeply cinematic and other media texts enter our consciousness, providing us with objects in which to invest--whether materially, as in the case of the bidder who bought the purse, or more elusively, as in the case of spectators such as myself who simply invest emotionally and epistemologically in the film itself.

Of course, as film and media scholars have long argued, there is nothing simple about investing in a text. (1) Furthermore, and more to the point of my argument, this notion of investing in cinema--using film references as a language with which to express one's concerns--is not something only enacted on a film like Far from Heaven by others (whether eBayers or film critics): given the text's link to films past, it is already fully enacted and inscribed in Far from Heaven itself. The film's narrative traces the dissolution of the marriage of characters Cathy and Frank Whitaker (played by Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid) as they attempt to escape the confines of their 1950s white, middle-class, suburban environment by exploring other social and sexual yearnings--yearnings that are seen by the characters as problematic, if also somewhat mobilizing, in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yet this narrative is further supplemented by one that additionally traces the problematic, if also sometimes mobilizing, confines of cinematic and other media texts as well.

The claim that Far from Heaven addresses cinematic as well as social issues is hardly a startling one. Practically all critics writing about the film have noted (and Haynes himself has made clear) that the film, in its articulation of social issues in and through domestic and romantic entanglements (and, as I will argue, in and through media entanglements), stands as a kind of homage to, or reworking of, the melodramas of director Douglas Sirk. (2) It references most clearly Sirk's 1955 film All That Heaven Allows (with its story of an upper-middle-class woman [played by Jane Wyman] who scandalizes her social circle through her romantic involvement with her gardener [Rock Hudson]) but also brings in key elements of the 1956 text Written on the Wind (dir. Sirk, US) (with its emphasis on frustrated sexuality and appropriate class, gender, and familial performance) and the 1959 text Imitation ofLife (dir. Sirk, US) (with its emphasis on tensions of race and, once again, appropriate class, gender, and familial performance).

By referencing these texts--and even further heightening their already high-pitched intensity--Haynes calls attention both to the issues that these films engage and to the issues with which Hollywood film at that time was unable to deal (or at least to deal adequately). This occurs through Far from Heaven's treatment of interracial romance (as marked in the film by Cathy Whitaker's relationship with African American gardener Raymond Deagan [Dennis Haysbert]) and same-sex romance (as marked by Frank Whitaker's desires for men). The two are linked, in a way, through the switch point of performance: namely, the substitution of Haynes's gardener played by Dennis Haysbert for Sirk's gardener played by Rock Hudson (who, given his textual history as leading man in Sirk's texts and extratextual history as a closeted gay man in Hollywood, serves in his structural absence to signify all manner of appropriate and inappropriate romantic fantasies). (3) By alluding to Sirk's films, style, and stars, Far from Heaven thus reminds its viewers of the history of Hollywood and melodramatic entertainment in addition to, or as it is interwoven with, the history of various social and identity struggles.

But, again, this use of cinematic convention to comment on both the possibilities and limits of Hollywood is not something only enacted on Sirk films: Sirk's texts themselves are notable for the way in which they call attention to aspects of Hollywood cinema, using dramatic mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, music, and performance to elevate, rather than diminish, viewers' awareness of cinematic textuality. (4) Indeed, one might argue that the family melodrama in general (that is, not just Sirk's melodramas, but the genre as a whole) insists that viewers see, rather than just see through, cinematic form. (5) By inscribing a level of stylistic, narrative, and performative excess, these texts appear to reject or subvert Hollywood's usual "invisible" practices, thereby opening the possibility that viewers might come to question not only the topics treated in the films but cinematic treatment in and of itself.

This is the effect of critical distanciation that many film scholars have attributed to melodrama: the way in which its formal elements might produce ironic, doubled, and/or "hysterical" texts so that the contradictions and distortions of cinematic melodrama expose the contradictions and distortions of both the diegetic worlds presented and the very basis of cinematic representation, undermining (even if inadvertently) the bourgeois ideology of consumer culture as they undermine the naturalization of Hollywood's realist conventions. (6) In this manner, Haynes's reworking of Sirk's reworking of melodrama's reworking of classical Hollywood film (and the social and personal issues it narrates) enacts a complex attitude toward, and position within, mediated culture. This (at least four-level) immersion indicates a deep involvement with mass culture--but one that is at the same time (and, indeed, because it is so involved) analytical. In other words, Far from Heaven demonstrates how media immersion need not be seen as opposed to critical distanciation; rather, media critique can arise with and through exactly that involvement.

This interest in the possibilities and limitations of media, mass culture, and consumer involvement is one, I would argue, that inflects all of Haynes's work (and one that makes this work itself so involving). From Superstars (US, 1987) and Safe's (US/ UK, 1995) examinations of women who are, one might say, literally sick of consumption (in the former, Karen Carpenter, who starves herself even as her image is consumed, and, in the latter, Carol White [Julianne Moore], who seems to be allergic to the very space of mass-produced life) through Poison's (US, 1991) experimentation with various film traditions and media genres that have historically been used to mark and manage "deviance" (with segments that recall a Genet-inspired sordid romanticism, a B-movie horror flick, and a bit of tabloid journalism) to Dottie Gets Spanked's (US, 1993) and Velvet Goldmine's (UK/US, 1998) explorations of the pleasures and dangers of media fandom (whether of television sitcoms or glam rock music), Haynes's work impels its viewers to consider our complex relationships to mass-mediated culture. His work thus demands that we think about not only film and media history proper but the mediation of our personal histories--the ways in which our desires and anxieties, identities and positions, are imbricated with those of the media. (7)

Likewise, the more engaged a spectator already is with popular media history--the more aware of film and other media conventions and references--the more engaging the work. Haynes rewards the cinephile (not to mention the television and pop music lover) by peppering his texts with media citations, allusions, and recollections, working both to gratify viewers in the know and to incite those not previously in the know to become more knowledgeable about his (and our) media precursors. (For example, there is much anecdotal evidence of viewers not familiar with Douglas Sirk's films--or at least not aware of their familiarity, having never associated the director's name with the melodramatic films they'd seen aired on television--who were encouraged to rent a host of "movie classics," Sirk's and others referenced in the text, to complete their Far from Heaven experience.) In this way, Haynes's work thinks through the media, making media forms not only objects of analysis but modes of analysis, mediums of thought and reflection themselves. In fact, it may be this very construction (or exposure) of media technologies as also epistemological technologies that has incited such critical interest in Haynes's work: by marking film and other media texts as themselves analytical discourses, Haynes invites the complementary analytical discourses of film critics, historians, and theorists (an invitation to which film scholars have certainly responded). (8)

Such thinking through the media is clear in Far from Heaven's use of the vocabulary of 1950s cinematic melodrama that I have already mentioned. Yet movies and other media are central to the film in other ways as well. Indeed, many media are represented in, and representative of, Far from Heaven's mode of thinking: film, television, telephony, painting, photography, print, and performance are all, to varying degrees, …