A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven

Six minutes into Todd Haynes’s film Far From Heaven, the fragility of the domestic facade (of a harmonious, loving family) becomes obvious as the supposedly per­ fect, happy wife Cathy Whittaker receives a phone call from the police informing her that her husband is at the station (picked up, we later learn, for “loitering”). But we expected as much. From the film’s opening frames, Far From Heaven's satu­ rated “technicolor” palette, its mournful yet resolute full-orchestra soundtrack, its gleaming vintage cars, spotless sets, and well-starched costumes all point to the film’s reconstitution of a particular past, a re-presentation that relies on our cin­ ematic knowledge. We recognize the narrative and mise-en-scene as intertextual, as generally drawing on a past representational style that includes most Hollywood film productions from the 1950s. For those audience members in the know, the film has a more specific intertext in its recreation of the “woman’s weepie” (Singer 37), a melodramatic mode characterized by female protagonists forced to bear heartache, betrayal, prejudice, and other great injustices. Reproducing cinematic melodrama, particularly the “woman’s” domestic melo­ drama that reached its apotheosis in the work of Douglas Sirk, is a hazardous move, fraught with the usual dangers of reconstituting past forms (audience confusion and rejection, accusations of derivative filmmaking) and the added risk of trivialization stemming from the marginalized socio-historical position of the genre. As Christine Gledhill explains, “the relative invisibility of melodrama today is due to the rise of realism as a touchstone of cultural worth and to its ghettoisation as a Amelia DeFalco is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto working on aging and the uncanny in contemporary literature and film.