Poison

Inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, POISON deftly interweaves trio of transgressive tales - HERO, HORROR and HOMO - that build toward a devastating climax. HERO shot in mock TV-documentary style, tells a bizarre story of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice; HORROR filmed like a delirious ’50s B-movie melodrama, is a gothic tale of a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague; while HOMO explores the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates. (Zeitgeist Films)
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
When Jean Genet died in 1986, it made me realize that all this time, somewhere in the world, he’d been kicking around. What was he thinking when he opened up the paper? What would he have said about AIDS or Reagan or Jesse Helms? It was around this time that I first started thinking about creating a film that would enable some of these issues to interact with themes from Genet’s work. So I suppose it was inevitable that POISON would be a film about deviance.
Genet - the outlaw poet, thief, homosexual - always aligned himself with the deviant in society. Even late in his life, he seemed more at ease tagging along with the Black Panthers or the PLO than within the literary circles that had first liberated him (he was officially pardoned from a life sentence in 1947 partly due to a petition circulated by Cocteau and Sartre). In Genet’s writing transgressive acts are transformed into sacred rituals, described in luxurious language. Sartre called it the art of making you eat shit, which Genet tricks his readers into eating “by presenting it, from a distance, as rose jam.”
Genet held the world permanently in contempt, vowing from an early age to reject it as it had rejected him. And his resolve is still inspiring me. Whether or not it’s even entirely real, I think it encourages you to consider your own participation in systems of division and in the imposition of laws that make transgression, at times, a necessity.
In POISON, transgression is considered globally in the form of three interwoven stories. And although they’re depicted in distinctly different styles, they are each, ostensibly, the same story. What distinguishes them is not so much in what’s being said as in who’s saying it: who’s telling each story and why. What we learn, for instance, about the monster in a horror film, or of the suspicious subject of a tabloid documentary is very different from what we might learn from Genet, the exiled criminal of Miracle of the Rose. But in all three cases, we encounter a central character that has been shut out by his society as a result of his transgression of certain laws.
POISON’s structure created many challenges, but my primary concern was that it be a source of stimulation for the viewer. Although today’s video-fluent filmgoers experience something very much akin to fragmented narratives every time they flip around the channels on the TV, I still felt it was essential that beneath its braided structure, POISON’s central themes were clearly drawn. With any luck, it’s a film that plays around with the act of telling stories while at the same time asking a few serious questions about the nature of deviance, cultural conditioning and disease.
— Todd Haynes, 1991 (Zeitgeist Films)
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