Poison
This week the From Below is showing Poison (1991) on Wednesday, August 27, at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP! Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10.
The feature-length debut by Portland’s own Todd Haynes, Poison is a bleak poem woven from three genre films. In “Horror,” shot in the style of a pulpy 50’s B-movie sci-fi creature feature, a scientist undergoes a goopy, contagious transformation after accidentally ingesting a test tube of lab-distilled sex drive. “Hero” is a Dateline-style true crime special about a seven-year old boy who kills his father and disappears. In “Homo,” Haynes adapts a mish-mash of works by Jean Genet into a high-artifice prison melodrama that explores the psychosexual sufferings and pleasures of two inmates. The meaning of Poison emerges from the resonances and disjunctures between the three segments, culminating in another confrontational contribution to new queer cinema and an attack on genre conventions.
It bears a heads up warning that Poison does feature an on-screen depiction of rape, and as a whole can be a tough watch. Haynes explores a whole array of coercive interrelations in the film that circumscribe our social worlds: bullying, incarceration, domestic abuse, infections, murder, and surveillance. Haynes is a master of presenting complex, misunderstood characters who struggle relating to their own opacity. They are often coming undone in the midst of some contamination or awakening while at the same time being subjected to the prying social demand for clear legibility by regimes of gender and sexuality. In Poison, the triptych of protagonists are commanded again and again to “show yourself” or “make yourself visible,” demands they ambiguously refuse or comply with. Haynesian characters are thrown into states of exile, traveling on the thin line between fugitive freedom and excluded humiliation, finding ways to somehow make a life amidst the unlivable present without, or perhaps disinterestedly beyond, redemption or inclusion.
Abjectly, Stefan, Charlie, and Stark
P.S. The From Below house band Horsebag is playing a show this Thursday at the Waypost, and we’d love to see you there!