Poison (1991)

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Director: Todd Haynes

Screenplay: Todd Haynes

Cast: Scott Renderer as John Broom; James Lyons as Jack Bolton; Edith Meeks as Felicia Beacon; Millie White as Millie Sklar; Buck Smith as Gregory Lazar; Rob LaBelle as Jay Wete; John Leguizamo as Chanchi; Anne Giotta as Evelyn McAlpert; Lydia Lafleur as Sylvia Manning; Ian Nemser as Sean White; Evan Dunsky as Dr. MacArthur; Susan Gayle Norman as Dr. Nancy Olsen; Marina Lutz as Hazel Lamprecht; Barry Cassidy as Officer Rilt; Richard Anthony as Edward Comacho

Synopsis: Poison is a triptych of three tales - "Hero", "Homo" and "Horror". Hero is a mock-documentary exploring a tale of a young boy who murdered his father, only for the image of him to drastically change as more is learnt. Homo follows a male prisoner in a 1930s jail, his erotic experiences with another man in the past rekindled when that person is transferred to his jail. And Horror follows a male scientist who, having found he can extract the compound of the libido into liquid form, accidentally consumes it and unleashes a virulent STD among the populous.

Poison wasn't Todd Haynes's debut; it was his first theatrical length production but the first was the acclaimed by infamous Superstar: A Karen Carpenter Story (1987), an innovative depiction of Karen Carpenter's life by way of Barbie dolls which got into trouble for using licensed songs by The Carpenters without permission and likely pissed off her surviving brother Richard by showing him in a very negative light.  That film now lives in a legal limbo which nonetheless hasn't stopped a copy being preserved in The Museum of Modern Art and the production to mysteriously be available online; Poison, whilst with acclaimed from the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, was just as controversial. The spectre of the AIDs crisis and a repellent homophobia marked the era; Todd Haynes, as a gay man, isn't hiding any of his anger and frustrations from his perspective. Horror, his monochrome sci-fi horror segment, is openly a metaphor about infection and pariah status and that's just a piece of the whole puzzle.

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Poison's structure is different as effective it's a three part anthology where the three segments are very different in style and intercut between each other, openly references an influence of French author Jean Genet (alongside Genet's only attempt at directing a film, Un Chant d'Amour (1950) which Poison does explicitly take visual iconography from). Haynes was making films this unconventional even when he went mainstream, like I'm Not There (2007) dealing with the problem with trying to portray Bob Dylan by casting six actors (one Cate Blanchett) as him in vignettes, but there was a period I merely viewed him as having settled into a comfortable niche, probably because his most successful work (from Far From Heaven (2002) to the mini-series remake of Mildred Pierce (2011)) have been conventionally plotted melodramas. Poison is a fresh reminder of how unconventional he is, even Safe (1995) being a horror film without no horror.

Hero is a pastiche of a documentary with direct to camera interviews and a documentation style, where the obsessions of a boy we never see, alongside the reason for him shooting his father, become increasingly complicated. Homo explicitly draws from Genet's film, both its eroticism of prison life (including a dark masochism) and a scene of idyllic in scenes of forest woodland, twisted and turned further in rich colour. Horror, pure b-movie black-and-white, feels like a clear mock-up of a strange fifties drive-in film but given the saddest and humane underlying message.

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Homo is stepped in sensuality, and yet that dark masochism is to be constantly found, jarring against the tasteful depictions of gay relationships; in Un Chant d'Amour, there were moments of tenderness, the kissing of one's hand clearly lifted for Poison, but it also had the eroticised moment of a prison guard pushing a gun barrel down a prisoner's throat. Jean Genet is a blind spot for me, but I am aware as a gay man he a) viewed homosexuality as being an outlaw status, and b) eroticised and wrote of criminality in a heightened way, something even John Waters ran with in deliberately bad taste comedies. Hero in vast contrast takes the cynical nature of an expose documentary, the true crime tales that are as numerous in the 2010s as back then, but subverts it as we see the explicit yearnings the boy had (an obsession with spanking Haynes tackled further making Dottie Gets Spanked (1993) later) but also showing the tale of an actual angel among normal heteronormative life's rancid underbelly of domestic abuse and broken marriages. Horror is about the plight of infection, how one is ostracised in pain, more striking as its surrounding a heterosexual relationship between the protagonist and a female love interest, the disease which causes growths on the face without any bias for sexuality as AIDs itself was.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Strange/Unconventional

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

Altogether, Poison is a striking production. The shock of some of its scenes has been replaced by more transgressive LGBT work, like the explicit moments of sexuality, but others are still impactful, such as a crowd of prisoners in a flashback for Homo (including a John Leguizamo cameo) spitting in a figure's mouth. I cannot help but think even Bernard Mandico for a film like The Wild Boys (2018) has been openly influenced by Poison, a work still in terms of how it fragments and intercuts the three segments between each other, and how they are different in technical style, very unconventional. That's before you have to try to decode and read the images onscreen, including those which feel like their own piece such as the first person from a child or youth pawing at colourful jewellery, in a full and vivid moment not dissimilar to what Kenneth Anger was after in tone in Puce Moment (1949).

Altogether, these moments come together with an earnest, striking thought in mind. Homo with a sense of immense eroticism, sometimes as colourful as its look and other times morbid, Horror a tragedy which takes ropey b-movie tropes and turn them into something deeply sad, and Hero the climax a happy ending where the camera literally floats into the sky. The result's an absolutely fascinating work and a reminder for me of Todd Haynes' talents.

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