Far from Heaven · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A branch of flowering quince, snapped off and held out across a fence. Raymond, the gardener, has noticed Cathy Whitaker noticing the bushes, and he gives her one, and the whole catastrophe of the film is already in the gesture: a Black man and a white housewife, a flower, an autumn afternoon in Hartford in 1957, and a stretch of perfectly tended lawn between them that neither will be allowed to cross. The light on them is too warm and too orange to be real. It is the light of a movie that does not exist anymore, made with equipment that no longer exists, about feelings the original movies were not allowed to have. That gap is the whole subject. Todd Haynes did not set Far from Heaven in the 1950s. He set it inside a 1950s film.

This is the thing to hold onto, because it is what separates the film from a costume drama and from simple nostalgia. Haynes and his cinematographer Edward Lachman rebuilt the look of Douglas Sirk's Universal melodramas — the unmotivated lavenders and teals, the colored gels thrown through windows, the autumn-to-snow palette ticking off the emotional calendar — using contemporary stock and lighting and grading. The three-strip Technicolor dye process they are imitating was dead and gone. So the sumptuous surface you are watching is a knowing reconstruction of something that can no longer be photographed, and the film keeps you faintly aware of the seam.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for what art does when it stops choosing between true and false and starts working in the gap between them: the powers of the false. His example was the forger, the figure who does not copy a truth but fabricates one, and in fabricating it makes something real that was not there before. Far from Heaven is a forgery in exactly this honorable sense. The 1950s woman's picture told a kind of lie — its glossy happy endings, its censored silences, its way of gesturing at homosexuality and race only sideways, through subtext it could not speak. Haynes forges that surface flawlessly and then makes it say the things it always meant. Frank's desire for men, the love between Cathy and Raymond: these are not anachronisms dropped into Sirk. They are the truths Sirk's form was built to hold and forbidden to utter. The false surface produces the true statement. That is the maneuver, and it is why the film is sincere and double at once.

Deleuze's other great tool fits the look itself. He called the kind of color that detaches from any real light source and absorbs a whole feeling into itself the colour-image. When a wash of cold blue falls over Frank alone, or a lilac glow settles on Cathy in a room where nothing has visibly gone wrong, the film is not lighting a place. It is making an emotion into a visible thing hanging in the air, exactly as Sirk did, except here the artifice is foregrounded one degree further. The wrongness of the color is the point. It is the social artifice of the town made into light you can see.

Then there is Julianne Moore's face, and what Deleuze called the affection-image: a feeling that arrives on a face and finds no action to discharge into. Cathy is a woman engineered to compose her features, and Moore plays the composure as a continuous, costly act, a luminous control that cracks only where the script lets it. Watch her at the threshold of her own beautiful rooms, framed in doorways, behind window panes, on staircases. Lachman shoots her through glass constantly, and the polished surfaces of the respectable home keep handing her back a reflection of the self she is permitted to be. This is close to what Deleuze meant by the crystal-image, the world sealed inside its own mirrored surfaces with no outside to escape to. The Whitaker world is a perfect crystal — color-coordinated to theatrical perfection, mirror-bright, total — and the drama is the fissure running through it, the crack along which Frank and Cathy each try to flee a totality that will not let either of them out.

And it is a crystal rotting. Deleuze's grimmest version of the figure is the ordered, almost aristocratic world that is decomposing from within while keeping its surfaces immaculate, and that is precisely Hartford here: the genial surveillance of the neighbors, the country-club smiles, the social map that lets Cathy into the modern-art gallery but not across the line into Raymond's neighborhood, all of it gleaming and all of it spoiling. The body language carries the rot. Everyone in the film performs respectability as a posture, what Deleuze called the gest, the attitude that exposes a social relation instead of just expressing a private feeling. The stares of onlookers, the way bodies freeze in doorways when the wrong two people stand too close — these are the town thinking out loud through its postures.

The lineage is unusually literal, because the film wears it. The gardener-and-lonely-woman romance across a forbidden social line is lifted whole from Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, its entrapping window and mirror framings reproduced almost shot for shot, with class transgression rewritten as race. The lurid, emotion-keyed color coding comes from Written on the Wind. The use of glossy perfection as ironic counterpoint to racial cruelty, and the whole strategy of letting the picture say what its words cannot, descends from Imitation of Life. The frozen, doorway-framed tableaux of staring onlookers, and the very idea of recasting Sirk's class story as an interracial one held at a cooler distance, Haynes inherits from Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, itself a remake of the same Sirk film. What Haynes added was completion. He took a form built for displacement and removed the displacement, and in doing so proved that pastiche could be a mode of truth rather than parody — that you could reanimate a dead genre not to mock it but to finish its sentence. The cinema of homage that followed learned its sincerity here.

So the significance is quiet and large. Far from Heaven showed that a film could be entirely a copy and entirely original at the same time, that fidelity to a defunct style could be a way of thinking and not merely of decorating. Watch it again and watch the color, not the plot. When the light goes wrong on a wall where nothing has happened yet, the film is telling you the truth its beautiful surface is too well-mannered to say.