Farther and Farther From Heaven

"The greatest obstacle to making sense of Far From Heaven's relation to the present is its seemingly banal treatment of race and sexual orientation." -Salome Skvirsky



what is the significance of this banal treatment of racism and homophobia in Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven?

i think that the banality Skvirsky addresses, rooted in "displays of racism and homophobia and the surface-level injunction to tolerance and color-blindness" functions as a font of absurdity. the audience recognizes a certain lack of believability in these scenes: they aren't "genuine," and they don't resemble the far more subtle and insidious forms of racism and homophobia we all must unfortunately regularly encounter in our own lives. when the young black boy enters the pool and everyone clears out of it, we the audience are left to gape in disbelief at the sheer absurdity, and absurdity is ever the most useful implement of that great, Swiftian-style satire. Paeans to colorblindness and tolerance, outmoded ways of addressing racial and sexual difference in modern society, seem at best like the idyllic dreams of foolishness, concepts worth considering but ultimately impractical in addressing racism and homophobia. I see the film suggesting that as horrible as the attitudes of our society may have been in the fifties, our "solutions" were equally untenable.

what is the significance of this sort of criticism?

as Skvirsky notes, "the interest of Haynes' film lies in the way it questions the ability of the moralizing mode of melodrama to address the social issues of the contemporary historical moment," but i think it goes further, to perhaps call into question the ability of narrativization to in some way affect the social issues. Haynes doesn't really do anything in his re-imaging of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows to try to dispel the regrettable social blights of homophobia and racism. He fails to offer us a reasonable alternative: in fact, he seems to be purposefully presenting us with an unrealistic and untenable alternative in the form of implausible "colorblindness" and the regrettable concept of "tolerance", now rightly regulated to its proper status as an unacceptable capitulation in a failure to achieve true acceptance. Here, we seem to have a nihilistic dichotomy: society can either consume itself with its prejudiced bigotry, or with its insufficient means of dealing with said bigotry, and no part of the narrative seems to help provide an answer. We are left in the same state as Cathy Whitaker: crying as the train pulls away from the station without us aboard.