The late eighties/early nineties was a boom time for young
visionary directors, but your Steven Soderbergs and your Quentin Tarantinos and
even your Lars Von Triers had nothing on Todd Haynes. His first film starred a
Barbie and Ken doll as Karen and Richard Carpenter. Despite the silly premise
and the offensive blandness of The Carpenters’ music, Superstar not only wasn’t a joke but it was legitimately
disturbing, depressing, and moving. His second film, Poison, fell in line with his AIDS-awareness activism but did so
with fearless originality, interpreting the writings of Jean Genet as a shuffled
up portmanteau of horror, documentary, and prison mini-movies. Haynes’s
activism became a lightning rod for some viewers, particularly those in the
LGBT community, when he made his next and biggest budget (still under a million
dollars) film to date. Because Safe
dealt with disease, and featured implicit and explicit references to AIDS,
other activists felt Haynes was selling out by making his main character a
woman and her illness something other than AIDS.
