Douglas Sirk’s now-recognized 1955 classic “All That Heaven Allows” is a film deeply concerned with rupturing the sheen and accepted norms of hetero-patriarchy and class in the so-called idyllic suburbs of the era. By choosing to focus on the desires and emotional life of a widowed mother, the film takes the uncommon approach, offering Cary Scott a chance at happiness and romance with a man below her economic status and years younger than her to boot. Through their relationship the film destabilizes conceptions of what is right and what is ideal, offering viewers new potentialities. Using this same era, locating his characters within the same pristine, racially segregated suburbs of New England, while situating queerness in the home via father Frank Whitaker’s closeted torment and Cathy Whitakers almost romantic tryst with their black gardener, Haynes raises the stakes with his 2002 film “Far From Heaven,” further destabilizing accepted and celebrated notions of the nuclear family. In this essay, I will highlight the methods by which Haynes queers Sirk’s film, further complicating viewers' notions of history. Haynes builds upon the lush melodramas that Sirk perfected with a keen understanding of how beautiful surfaces, including the lush use of color, often hide a darkness that characters refuse to face.
While Sirk chooses to eliminate the supposed head of the family altogether, leaving an uncomfortable and uncertain void for widowed Cary Scott, Haynes resituates the father at the head while subverting the audience, and the New England community’s, expectations by making him a closeted gay man. Both films take aim at what is romantically possible in their respective worlds. At the onset of Haynes’ film, the Whitakers seemingly have it all: a spacious New England home, Frank is seen as financially successful, so much so that their family can afford to hire black workers for every domestic need, and most importantly, they have produced children. In their introduction to “Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America” Benshoff and Griffin argue that within traditional notions of gender, “it is supposedly ‘normal’ for dominant men to seek out passive women as sexual partners. The media often reinforces these notions by routinely presenting images of passive women and dominant men,” and that within the patriarchy, “such a regime, men and masculinity are valued above women and femininity.” (1) Frank Whitaker exhibits these traditional conceptions of masculinity and more through dominance and at times violence while concealing his true self from his family and community. Knowing full well the world-shattering consequences of revealing his queerness for were it not for his sexuality, Frank’s star seems destined only to rise. By queering the patriarch, the ruler of the family, and exploring the friction between the surface and the shadows, Haynes asks viewers to question what is sacrificed to fulfill this vision of a nuclear family, as well as, how the borders of gender, sexuality, and race are policed on screen and in the suburbs.
Consider the shadows and framing of Cathy and Frank in the aftermath of an evening of partying when he attempts to forcefully prove his masculinity by pouncing on her in the living room only to quickly discover the impossibility of arousal regardless of how intoxicated he gets himself. In his moment of crisis, in a room draped in shadow and deep, vibrant blues, Cathy attempts to reaffirm his manhood, repeatedly stating that he’s the only man she’ll ever need which only inflames Frank’s shame and guilt. He lashes out violently, only to turn around and apologize profusely in the next breath while she assures him that everything is alright. The following day we see Cathy skillfully conceal the bruises with a change in hairstyle but her friend, and neighbor, sees through the ruse. This becomes emblematic of how homophobia, racism, and misogyny of the era were lurking beneath pristine aesthetics to illuminate how the nuclear family ideal is contradicted by the roiling unease under the surface which encapsulates the American dream envisioned by the suburbs was always a fiction people tried to violently maintain.
It is all in the title. While Sirk, through irony or sincerity, situates his characters within a Heaven, Haynes dashes such illusions from the jump, locating his characters’ internal lives as outside of this celestial space. When Sirk crafts the uncommon union between an older widow and a younger gardener, both white, he presses viewers to consider the likelihood of what Hollywood demanded in that era: a happy ending. Haynes’ inclusion of homosexuality within the family life, foregrounded via the father, further dampens any hopeful expectations of a happy ending by juxtaposing the husband's tormented search for love with Cathy’s foray into another romantic taboo: interracial dating, thereby exposing the limitations and repression of the era. Consider In her essay, “All That Heaven Allows: An Articulate Screen,” Laura Mulvey concludes by saying, “Although All That Heaven Allows does, on the face of it, have a happy ending, its “happiness” is twisted with more than a touch of Sirkian irony.” (2) Though she has come to embrace her love of Ron, one is left to wonder how much, if any, of Heaven she will still be granted access to.
Todd Haynes’ retrospectatorship of Sirk’s film and its aesthetics demands that we, the viewer, acknowledge the existence, however troubled, of queer individuals within our collective history, while encouraging our unraveling of accepted norms and the gilded masks from an era that is still seen, and fought for, today as the idyllic pinnacle of hetero-patriarchy. This is a search for truth and it brings to mind a 2002 Haynes interview with an American Cinematographer wherein Haynes reflects, "Sirk’s films do have artificial elements – exquisitely rendered lighting, the clothes, the décor, and all of those things we think of as archly fake. But they tell incredibly simple stories about domestic crises that concern people are very ordinary, despite how gorgeously they dress and move. They’re not heroic; they don’t overcome their problems and change the world. They’re really victims of their society, and that makes them shockingly real." (3)
Citations
Benshoff, Harry M, and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 978-0742519725
Mulvey, Laura. “All That Heaven Allows: An Articulate Screen.” The Criterion Collection. Accessed April 2, 2023.
Silberg, Jon. “A Scandal in Suburbia.” American Cinematographer. Last modified December 2002.