Summer Reading. 2.

"Gentlemen Prefer Haynes," Chuck Stephens, Film Comment, Vol. 31, No. 4, July/August 1995:

John Travolta's immuno-deficient Boy in the Plastic Bubble and Joseph Cornell's jeweled-beetle dioramas; Jean Genet's radiant convicts and Alfred Hitchcock's tormented dolls; homemaker Jeanne Dielman and chanteuse Karen Carpenter; Sigmund Freud's elaborative slapstick and I Love Lucy's interpretation of dreams. Run a namecheck on Todd Haynes's influence-roster and you're likely to find yourself wading through a palimpsest of moldering TV Guides and fine art melodramas, random grossout images from fringe horror flicks, and a few impenetrable back numbers of the crit-journal Screen. Is there another contemporary independent filmmaker whose remote-control rifling through American teleculture and European high conceptualism emerges in film politically engaged and free of Peckinpah-inspired male-crisis blood squibs? Is there another young American filmmaker whose work so thrives on contradiction?

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2003 6:28 AM