Content area
Full Text
Filmmaker Todd Haynes has claimed that his films do not create cultural artifacts so much as appropriate and recombine the ones that audiences think they already know (MacDonald 2009, 57). This approach seems particularly true of the films in which Haynes puts the woman at the center of a melodrama-the genre traditionally associated with feminine sensibilities.1 He self-consciously returns to generic touchstones like Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven, for example, to explore the effects of the Motion Picture Production Code prohibitions and the paternal authority on which the classical woman's film relied (Superstar and Safe).2 How many of the familiar tropes of the "woman's film" have made their way into today's film culture? What anxieties persist in a genre that now has so much appeal precisely for its liberation from yesterday's film culture?
According to Mary Ann Doane, the classical woman's film is beset culturally by the problem of a woman's desire (a subject famously explored by writers like Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Laura Mulvey). What can a woman want? Doane explains that filmic conventions of the period, not least the Hays Code restrictions, prevented "such an exploration," leaving repressed material to emerge only indirectly, in "stress points" and "perturbations" within the film's mise en scene (Doane 1987, 13). Thus, Doane advocates what she calls a symptomatic reading of the classical woman's film in order not only to recover the repressed narrative content but also to reveal the patriarchal formal mechanism by which the classical Hollywood discourse "wishes.not to think" (Doane 1978, 44).
In that spirit, Haynes re-works the classical woman's film to express the return of repressed feminine desire-and anxiety- that had been concealed by the Hays Code in service to an essentially masculine experience of cinema. He sets out to remake the very subgroups Doane describes as traditionally feminine-the maternal melodrama, the love story, the medicaldiscourse film, and the paranoiac narrative-in order to articulate the limits of this classical form (Doane 1987, 36). With his recent HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, for example, Haynes has managed to create a fractious maternal melodrama that could not have been produced at the time of the original film. With Far From Heaven, Haynes updates the woman's love story in a manner that...