Openly gay, experimental filmmaker Todd Haynes burst upon the scene two years after his graduation from Brown University with his now-infamous 43-minute cult treasure "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" (1987). Seizing upon the inspired gimmick of using Barbie and Ken dolls to sympathetically recount the story of the pop star's death from anorexia, he spent months making miniature dishes, chairs, costumes, Kleenex and Ex-Lax boxes, and Carpenters' records to create the film's intricate, doll-size mise-en-scene. The result was both audacious and accomplished as the dolls seemingly ceased to be dolls leaving the audience weeping for the tragic singer. Unfortunately, Richard Carpenter's enmity for the film (which made him look like a selfish jerk) led to the serving of a "cease and desist" order in 1989 (Haynes had never procured the rights to the Carpenters' music that plays throughout), and despite the director's offer "to only show the film in clinics and schools, with all money going to the Karen Carpenter memorial fund for anorexia research," "Superstar" remains buried, one of the few films in modern America that cannot be seen by the general public.

Haynes' award-winning first feature, "Poison" (1990), intercuts a triptych of stylistically divergent episodes, each set in a world "dying of panicky fright." Shot in the talking-head manner of TV newsmagazines, "Hero" reconstructs the story of a patricide; in "Horror", a parody of 50s B sci-fi flicks, a repressed medical worker isolates a liquid version of the human sex drive which transforms him into a pathetic, pus-oozing ghoul; and "Homo", inspired by the prison writings of Jean Genet, recalls Werner Fassbinder's unrestrainedly gay "Querelle" with its alternating tones of rosy passion and steel-blue brutality. Steeped in obsession, violence and rape, it was not for the faint of heart, prompting walkouts at its 1991 Sundance Film Festival screening and cries of outrage from right-wing critics. Partly funded by a $25,000 NEA post-production grant, "Poison" became a rallying point for both sides in the debate then raging about what constituted "appropriate" use of NEA moneys. Pilloried by the American Family Association as government-sponsored homoerotic filth, "Poison" established Haynes elsewhere as a socially conscious artist for the AIDS era, despite never addressing the disease directly.

Haynes' return to the short form for the 27-minute comedy-drama "Dottie Gets Spanked" (1993) also marked his first foray into TV with Independent Television Services (ITVS) providing the funding. Airing as part of PBS' "TV Families" in November 1994, the film follows a six-year-old boy's obsession with a Lucille Ball-like TV star and the hostile reaction it engenders in his classmates and his father. When protagonist Steven wins a trip to the set of his Queen of Comedy's show, the filming of an episode in which Dottie gets spanked by an angry husband unleashes a torrent of visual and emotional complications. His already rich fantasy and dream life runs amok with cross-dressing body doubles, mustachioed Dotties and spankings galore. Reviewing its TV debut in the VILLAGE VOICE, Amy Taubman called the short, "an homage to Freud's marvelously intricate essay on infantile sexual development. Like Freud, Haynes understands that sexuality, in its object choices and sadomasochism, is both ambivalent and overdetermined."

The inconclusive final image of "Dottie Gets Spanked" was the precursor of the ambivalence of Haynes' next feature "Safe" (1995). An unconventional, restrained study of a woman (Julianne Moore) suffering from an environmental illness, "Safe" functioned as both a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic as well as for the general malaise of late Twentieth Century life without giving a concrete clue what the filmmaker was really thinking. When Moore's Carol seeks out an alternative lifestyle as a cure, Haynes presents the New Age retreat she opts for as equally life-denying as the banal suburban existence at the root of her illness. Her character clearly fits the outline of the director's earlier social victims--bombarded by her environment, mold-poured into family constructions and paddled by a series of patriarchs--the latest in his series of plastic dolls. In response to the confusion surrounding the film, Haynes said, "All I was trying to say is that, in order to live in society, to be part of the world, we have to surrender a wild, unnamable part of ourselves, which often comes out in a self-blaming way . . . When we don't understand something, we blame ourselves . . ."

Haynes took a highly personal look at the British glam rock scene of the early 70s with "Velvet Goldmine" (1998), his biggest and most accessible film yet. Self-consciously structured as a "Citizen Kane"-like investigation into the life and career of a vanished superstar (there's even an extraterrestrial Rosebud--glam rock patron saint Oscar Wilde presented in the cheeky opening minutes as deposited here by alien beings), the film brilliantly reimagines the period as a brave new world of electrifying theatrical and sexual possibility followed by darkness. Though Haynes acknowledges Altman, Scorsese (particularly "The Last Waltz" 1978) and Coppola for its 70s style of filmmaking, "Velvet Goldmine" may resemble the phantasmagoria of Ken Russell more than anything else. Dazzlingly surreal with a vibrant glam-era soundtrack (missing only a representative sampling of David Bowie who refused to release song rights with a movie of his own pending), it puts ordinary period filmmaking and time-capsule musicology to shame. This ambitious step beyond the director's previous work also proved less cohesive and satisfying to his earlier fans.

A revisionist filmmaker whose ouvre consists of clever and insightful reworkings of the tropes of generic filmmaking, Haynes "Far From Heaven" (2002) is a logical extension of the thematic and stylistc elements that have thus far defined his career. While the kitshy "Superstar" and the unabashedly Freudian "Dottie Gets Spanked" critique of the cult of female celebrity and "Poison" and "Safe" underline the sometimes violent and debilitating repercussions of a society obsessed with repressing and containing our most primal sexual drives, "Far From Heaven" revisits, with little nostalgia, the almost forgotten genre of the domestic melodrama. Drawing from the "womens' films" of the 1950s, particularly those of director Douglas Sirk, Haynes' re-imagining of Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" casts Julianne Moore as a 1957 Connecticut housewife and mother who finds out one day that her idyllic suburban life is a lie once she realizes that her husband is having a homosexual affair. Utilizing the genre's propensity for heavy handed symbolism and dramatic mis-en-scene, Haynes explodes the mythical shell of innocence enveloping films from the fifties by exploring the ideological tensions and contradictions concerning gender, sexuality and race that define the melodrama as the quintessential fifties film genre. In doing so, Haynes manages to deconstruct our nostalgic view of an era gone by, while warning us, reminding us, that many of the period's most confining concepts of sexuality and the rigid pursuit of complacency and stability are as alive and volatile today as they were in yesteryear's precautionary tales from suburbia.