Todd Haynes

Haynes borrows the forms people love and feel slightly embarrassed by, the Douglas Sirk melodrama and the glam-rock myth among them, and fills them with people those forms kept quiet. Far from Heaven is a Sirk picture in full colour in which a model 1950s housewife finds her husband kissing another man. Carol follows two women falling in love in 1950s New York. In Safe, a California housewife who seems to have everything starts to fall ill and no doctor can find why.

Signature

• Pastiche of old forms: Sirk melodrama, glam-rock mythmaking, the oral-history documentary.
• Women confined by comfortable homes (Safe, Far from Heaven, Carol).
• Queer desire under social pressure, from Poison to Carol.
• Celebrity and performance seen from the side (Velvet Goldmine, May December).