MOVIE REVIEW : Deviance Is Theme of Erotic ‘Poison’

The following is a shorter version of a review of “Poison” that was published in Calendar on April 3 , when the film was singled out by a conservative citizens group because of a grant filmmaker Todd Haynes received from the National Endowment for the Arts. It has been shown in limited engagements in Los Angeles before, but begins its first general release today at the Nuart Theater. Woven together out of three separate stories, “Poison” works by disorienting juxtapositions, a gradual accretion of themes and interrelationships.

The “Homo” section is the Genet adaptation: a story of the obsessive love of one convict for another, which ends in rape, attempted jail break and death. “Horror” is about an earnest young scientist who isolates the sex drive in a “molecular coagulation,” accidentally drinks it and turns into a reluctant monster, a “leper killer”; this segment is obviously an AIDS allegory. “Hero” is a mock-documentary, in which reporters investigate the disappearance of a little boy, whose mother claims that he shot her husband to save her from a savage beating and then leaped out a window and flew away.

It’s full of symbolic names--the boy, an “angel of light,” is called “Beacon,” the diseased scientist is called “Graves”--plus symbolic doors, windows, quotations from Genet, social satire and quite a bit of sentimental self-pity--all highly artificial and self-conscious.

“Horror” is a parody of black-and-white horror movies, shot in the slightly exaggerated noir form, all skewed angles and stark shadows, which flowered in ‘60’s TV episodes of “The Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits.” The mock documentary “Hero” is full of banal camera set-pups and talking heads.

The Genet sections are shot in an ultra-romantic style that suggests Hollywood romances of the ‘50s: soap operas by Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause.” In some shots, the lead actor of “Homo,” Scott Renderer, is an eerie double for James Dean.

“Poison” is an arty, literary, socially conscious movie, exactly the kind government arts agencies often subsidize. But, for many people, the question of whether “Poison” is technically hard-core pornography or not is irrelevant. The very fact that it sympathetically portrays homosexuals is enough to damn it and call down wrath on the NEA and its embattled head, John Frohnmayer.

Portray homosexuality it does. The prison scenes in “Poison” unspool like a swanky gay fantasy: washed in romantic blue light, populated by blue-clad convicts, who occasionally remove their shirts and finger their scars, tenderly. Earlier reformatory scenes are even more romantic: scenes of sexual initiation or degradation in a sylvan glade, a strange courtyard abloom with exotic flowers and splashed with sunlight.

These scenes aren’t real at all. They’re deliberately imbued with erotic fantasy. And that may be more disturbing, for some audiences, than explicit sex. They may become convinced that they’re seeing more than they really are.

None of the sexual scenes in “Poison”--and there aren’t many--are free of suggestions of pain or fear. The entire film, right from the opening moments--a card that reads “The entire world is dying of panicky fright” and subjective shots of police breaking into a besieged apartment--is soaked in paranoia.

It seems to be about the pain and isolation of any deviance. The dedicated scientist who turns into a monster of leprous sexuality is like a Dr. Jekyll of venereal disease and the little boy who kills his father, saves his mother and flies away is like a mixture of Oedipus Rex and Peter Pan. All three main characters are linked, but, while the scientist plunges to death from one window, and the little boy soars away through another, the convict will apparently remain locked away from the sky.

Haynes says the theme of his movie is “deviance,” which seems right. It’s also clear that the “poison” of the title is, partially, society’s attitudes toward the three “deviant” characters--whom it beats up, imprisons, hunts down. That’s what makes the reaction to “Poison” so ironic. The foes of the movie--and the people who want to take down the NEA because of it--seem bent on proving that its paranoia isn’t a fantasy.