Review: Todd Haynes’s New Queer Cinema Classic Poison Gets Kino Blu-ray Edition

Todd Haynes’s 1991 feature-length debut rings in its 30th birthday with a solid Blu-ray package from Kino Lorber.

PoisonTodd Haynes is known for his chameleonic ability to slip into different aesthetic skins for each project in ways that enrich his material with deeper subtext. Poison, his 1991 debut feature, illustrates that tendency in supercharged form. In exploring the subject of social deviance and the violent groupthink that tends to materialize around it in American society, he combines three separate short stories into a larger, chaotically ricocheting whole, with each segment drawing on disparate modes of visual storytelling: tabloid news exposés, overcooked midcentury B movies, and the homoerotic work of avant-garde pioneers like Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger. Anticipating later collage films like I’m Not There and Wonderstruck, Haynes doesn’t present these three stories sequentially, but rather intercuts between them at irregular intervals throughout—all the better to tease out the thematic correlations between otherwise incongruent material.

Poison’s most gripping story is “Hero,” a mockumentary regarding the troubled life of one Richie Beacon, a suburban boy whose disappearance under supernatural circumstances occasions a talking-heads investigation into the mystery of his brief time on this planet. In its backward-looking address and televisual archness, “Hero” hearkens back to Haynes’s banned 1987 experimental short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, with Richie ultimately emerging as a Carpenter-esque figure, exalted and misunderstood in equal measure, and driven toward self-abuse stemming from a hazy sense of being an outsider.

The major difference is that he’s only commented upon within the film, never seen—though Haynes does conjure up the boy’s backside in two rear-projected, over-the-shoulder shots that visualize him both experiencing and witnessing the acts of domestic violence that led to his alienation and eventual flight from reality. Richie—sensitive, sexually confused, and relentlessly bullied—is otherwise constructed, incompletely and perhaps deceitfully, through the testimonials of his mother, Felicia Beacon (Edith Meeks), and various schoolmates and townsfolk who interacted with him without ever making an effort to understand him.

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“Horror,” filmed in black and white, concerns another harassed outcast, though here Haynes fixates his point of view around the anxious recipient of social pressure rather than the hordes of judgmental onlookers. In the fictional small town of Centerville, scientist Dr. Graves (Larry Maxwell) stumbles upon a purified liquid form of libido (the “elixir of human sexuality”), drinks it, and devolves rapidly into a walking contagion, his face progressively mangled by bulbous, pus-leaking sores. He’s quickly framed as a menace to society in a flurry of hysterical headlines and word-of-mouth rumors, finding acceptance (and eventually fleeting romance) only from a well-meaning admirer of his research, Dr. Nancy Olsen (Susan Norman).

With this burlesque of cheaply made sci-fi melodramas of the ’50s and ’60s, Haynes is mining a number of contemporaneous tropes, among them the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy era and the notion of a good-hearted girl redeeming a damaged male hero, though one need not look too hard to detect the more urgent traumas coursing through the story, namely the AIDS crisis and its predominantly negative framing in American media. Graves is criminalized, ostracized, and neglected on the way to a mortifying end—a brutal microcosm of the larger tragedy of AIDS victims in America, whose ordeals were nonetheless too vast and too complex to be dealt with in the black-and-white terms dramatized in this segment.

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If the suburban home and the idyllic small town are equated with prisons in “Hero” and “Horror,” “Homo” makes the analogy explicit by focusing on the actual incarceration of petty thief John Broom (Scott Renderer), whose outsider status is cemented when a stodgy bureaucrat (Barry Cassidy) grills him on his sexual history. “Is it written as two words?” Cassidy’s Officer Rilt condescendingly wonders aloud when faced with the term “homosexual.”

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Cannibalizing three novels (Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, and The Thief’s Journal) and one short film (Un Chant D’amour) by Jean Genet—whose writings also feature in Poison as intertitles—the narrative of “Hero” flits between Broom’s present in a French prison and his past at an all-boy reform school. Held together by Renderer’s feverish, diaristic narration, the short’s addition of two timelines to Poison’s already jumbled chronology brings with it a bifurcated visual treatment as well: chiaroscuro lighting and stark close-ups in the French jail and summery pastoral haze in the reformatory. While the former aesthetic lends a grim, pleasureless quality to scenes of sexual mischief between Broom and fellow inmate (and longtime crush) Jack Bolton (James Lyons), the latter renders the stirrings of illicit desire felt by the younger Broom (Tony Pemberton) toward Jack as unreachable, faraway fantasies.

The near-total failure to consummate one’s desire, or to even acknowledge it, runs throughout Poison, and its frenzied intercutting (Haynes edited the film with Lyons, his then-partner) alights on moments of emotional synergy between Richie, Dr. Graves, and Broom. Though only Broom is openly gay, all three protagonists are linked by the psychic stress of ostracism for their departures from prevailing normalcy, and it’s that shared emotional experience that binds the film’s frenzy of competing styles together, from the prosaic televisual realism of “Hero” to the expressionistic Dutch angles of “Horror” to the Bressonian montages of “Homo.”

For all the skill and erudition that Haynes brings to these appropriations, however, Poison’s highlights come in the fleeting moments when his filmmaking departs from carefully chosen reference points to visualize the rare instances of reprieve or catharsis for the characters. For instance, a scene in which the young Broom takes voyeuristic pleasure in watching Jack get hazed in spectacularly disgusting fashion by his elders (the sequence inspired walkouts at the film’s Sundance premiere) prompts a shift to slow motion and a curious low-angle shot of ominous heads bobbing in and out of frame in front of a lush cumulus sky. The sky features again in Poison’s haunting coda, in which Felicia Beacons finally reveals the magical way in which her son disappeared one fateful afternoon. Quoting a trick shot once exercised by Genet collaborator Jean Cocteau, Haynes ultimately transcends the reference point (and the aesthetics of the afternoon special) to create an airborne vision of liberation that gives Poison its lingering feeling of benevolence.

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Image/Sound

Judging by the paltry, washed-out image quality of the trailer included among the extras, there was evidently quite a bit of work to be done to restore Poison, now 30 years old, back to some semblance of its original luster, and Kino Lorber has done a respectable job with this Blu-ray release. The grainy 16mm image hasn’t been destructively polished and colors are vibrant and distinct, though darker areas of the frame appear at times overly compressed and without sufficient detail—an issue that can be hard to attribute to the digital transfer or the film’s original negative. And while the audio has a pleasant analog warmth and crackle to it—composer James Bennett’s flute-led theme music sounds particularly lush—occasional lines of dialogue are hindered by a bit of digital distortion.

Extras

Last Address, an elegiac 2010 short film by Ira Sachs that marks the disappearance of a generation of New York artists lost to AIDS, might seem like an outlier on this disc—“Why this AIDS-related film and not another?” you might wonder—but look closely and you’ll notice that one of the artists memorialized in the short is James Lyons. Consisting exclusively of observational footage of the urban spaces where its subjects once lived and worked, Last Address is a neat spiritual companion to Poison, which similarly pays homage to the tragedy of AIDS in oblique fashion. In a candid introduction included on the disc, Todd Haynes discusses the guiding inspiration of Jean Genet, whose death in 1986 came well before the crisis, in turn prompting the director to imagine how the French writer would have responded to it. That same sentiment is echoed in a Q&A session from the 2010 Cannes Film Festival on the occasion of the film’s 20th anniversary, which finds Haynes and producing partners Christine Vachon and James Schamus reflecting casually and affectionately on the film’s production and turbulent reception. An energetic original trailer rounds out the package.

Overall

Poison, Todd Haynes’s inspired New Queer Cinema feature-length debut, rings in its 30th birthday with a solid Blu-ray package from Kino Lorber.

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Score: 
 Cast: Edith Meeks, Millie White, Buck Smith, Anne Giotta, Rob LaBelle, Susan Norman  Director: Todd Haynes  Screenwriter: Todd Haynes  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: R  Year: 1991  Release Date: June 29, 2021  Buy: Video

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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