What the response to ‘Carol’ says about expectations of queer narratives
Establishing a framework for reception of queer stories beyond political necessity
There’s been a minor key of detachment underscoring some of the response to Todd Haynes’ magnificent, involving romance Carol (2015). The film, which stars Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird and Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet, a housewife and a budding photographer respectively who slowly fall in love around Christmas of 1952. As adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novella The Price of Salt by playwright and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, Carol is a film which favours temporality over contemporaneity.
Many of the less favourable takes on Carol — even ones which are still generally positive — cite a purported “coldness” or “emotional distance”. They say that there’s no chemistry between Therese and Carol, or at least little chemistry between Blanchett and Mara as performers. The film’s world is populated minimalistically; for the most part, the other people in the film are just heads in a room across which Carol and Therese can lock eyes. Even Abby (Sarah Paulson), Carol’s best friend and former romantic interest, is peripheral to the bulk of this story.
These interpretations of the film as ‘politely subdued’ seem to stem in part from the fact that Todd Haynes has set out to depict a queer romance using, essentially, a language specific to this particular moment in history and these characters.
As such, the fact that Carol is subdued is because it’s period appropriate. This is a story about a queer woman who has spent most of her life stifling her sexual identity in favour of constructing a typical American nuclear family, then falling in love with a young woman who is only just discovering her own non-normative sexuality.
Over the course of the film, the two women are very slowly radiating towards each other because they don’t know the language of outward expression of same-sex attraction.
It’s not instilled in them culturally or otherwise; they have no frame of reference aside, perhaps, from queer-coded characters in films who were usually villains, considered mentally ill, murderers or victims.
That’s why a moment like when Therese gets in the car with Carol to go to her place is filmed in such a transcendent, hazy way — you’re observing them observing each other as they try to figure out if investing in each other romantically is even worth the trouble it’s liable to, and eventually does, cause. In many ways, they’re like teenagers slowly stumbling into their first love.
This is what it’s like for some queer people — discovery is very delayed. Where most people are able to learn these ways of being with other people in their teen years in very natural ways, being closeted stifles this, and even still, many people don’t come out until their 20s or even much later. Our learning curve when it comes to intimacy is awfully steep.
When Therese asks her boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) if he’s ever been in love with a boy, she’s trying to understand whether or not it’s possible to love someone of the same gender in the same way you can someone of the opposite, like he claims to love her. Therese seems removed because, and I can say this from personal experience, awareness of your own difference makes it far easier to distance yourself from other people and from expressing an intimate humanity, because it prevents people from getting so close as to learn something about you that’s you’re not ready to share.
It’s self-preservation for her and for many of us. Rooney Mara’s china-doll performance is far from unchanging; charting the course of her emotional expressiveness tells as much about her characters as any words which come out of her mouth.
Because honestly, I find the idea that people would think this film is unemotional is truly strange. And it might honestly just be the case that a queer filmmaker making this queer story means that some people don’t really have the experiential language to see it for what it is, which to me, is an exceedingly warm and meaningful romance.
When straight directors and writers tend to make films of comparable budget, subject and ‘prestige’ — The Imitation Game, Dallas Buyers Club, or even The Danish Girl — they are fracked for their emotional portent, taking every opportunity to remind audiences that what they’re watching is a tragedy.
Look at the way The Imitation Game dramatises Alan Turing’s later life — a husk of a man, trembling and barely able to speak. This is the language of queer desire straight audiences have been taught to understand — not a lexicon of expression, but one of constant mourning. He was caught with a male prostitute (in real life, he was caught with a young man he had essentially been dating, but heterosexual screenwriter Graham Moore evidently thought this wasn’t tragic enough) and this is his penance. Any positivity in a period-set queer narrative is, by audience acclimation, obligated to be undercut.
These are rank expectations which are reinforced over and over again, and to an extent this has been condoned. And it’s not that Carol doesn’t address negative historical attitudes towards homosexuality (plot spoilers to follow).
Throughout the film, Carol is locked in a custody battle for her daughter with her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler), who invokes a “morality clause” in lobbying for sole custody when she refuses to acquiesce to his demands that she return to him. But it’s more than evident that Carol’s subversiveness has been underestimated. Not only does Carol elect to forego custody of her daughter in favour of living an authentic life, their romance is actually a path to self-actualisation for both of them.
Therese is finally encouraged to pursue her desired career in photography, thanks in part to meeting Carol and the consequent inspiration she provides. And after leaving Harge, Carol takes a job as a buyer in a furniture store and invites Therese to live with her in her new apartment. In 1950s terms, this was massively progressive, perhaps a rough equivalent to the same-sex marriages-as-protest which occurred, and continue to occur, prior to its partial or full legalisation in various parts of the world.
The intimacy conjured between Carol and Therese is very distinctly queer. This is not to say that straight audiences will uniformly be alienated from it — far from that. But much of the response to it feels like the expectations of its story and its tone are far too modern.
It’s worth remembering that prior to the 1980s, implicitly queer narratives (not those some viewers read as queer, like classical musicals or Sirkian melodramas) were not only incredibly scarce, but almost never positive, romantic, or intimate. If queer characters were present, there would be no intimacy.
The increased presence of queer stories in the last 25 years particularly has been encouraging, but still limited, and the major exposure people now have to queer stories is through television, not film, which privilege highly modern queer narratives in shows like Sense8, Please Like Me, Orange is the New Black, Looking and Transparent. We’ve reached a point at which queer stories are expected to look like this — positive portrayals where the shows embody the progressive attitudes of its makers in literal terms.
We have a kind of cultural recency bias — that if queer art doesn’t declare and underline its political allegiance, it’s not fulfilling its primary function.
Todd Haynes, whose films have mostly been period pieces, doesn’t really do literal. His vision of Carol very deliberately elides the pandering to contemporary attitudes which tend to be expected of films classed as ‘Oscar bait’, and it is perhaps resultant of the way late-year marketing campaigns position films as ‘Oscar bait’ that some have been unable to connect to Carol.
The film is, nevertheless, political, just not overtly so. Calling it “icy”, as Wesley Morris has in a piece for The NY Times, is coded as negative, as though dogging the film for not being activist in spirit when contrasted with the buzzy Amazon series Transparent. But Transparent is a show which clamours to embody the zeitgeist just as much as Haynes shrugs it. He’s disinterested in playing the film for the people who “need” to see it, instead crafting a film which anticipates an adaptive audience rather than a reactive one.
Carol is not a film designed to be cannon fodder for same-sex marriage thinkpieces. It doesn’t exist to reinforce existing progressive attitudes.
Carol is about the intertwined sensations of discovery and love; how it can be formative to our identities and an explanation of our futures. Its reception is an instructive: relax cultural expectations of LGBTQIA stories. Let them breathe, and be what they need to be rather than what this particular sociopolitical moment wants them to be. Allow the broadness of stories to be found on television to permeate films of similar stature.
We expect so much of Carol because the path it follows is not the one typically laid out for something of its kind. It’s a film which takes the viewer down a road less travelled.
All the way to Waterloo, Iowa and back.
Find us on: Medium | Twitter | Facebook
