Patricia Highsmith, Phyllis Nagy, and Todd Haynes, 2015
#2, 2015 Skandies
Looks like we’re staying in the mid-20th century for at least another day. It’s the 1952 Christmas season, and Thérèse, a pert youngling with a short-banged pageboy cut who has come to New York with vague thoughts of pursuing photography, is working the toy counter at a high-end department store. A well-heeled older woman in a fur coat and pink velvet crown cap—Carol—comes in to buy a gift for her young daughter. I’ll let the blurb on the cover of the book on which the movie is based take it from here: “THEIR LOVE WAS EXPLOSIVE, TENDER—AND DIFFERENT. AND THE PRICE WAS HIGH.”
The last Todd Haynes film I’d seen was Far From Heaven, which trod a lot of the same ground: you had the beginnings of a gay romance and an interracial romance, but in the words of the Julianne Moore character, such pairings were “not plausible” because it was the 1950s. The “price” referred to on the book cover is that Carol is in the midst of a divorce, and if her husband can provide the court with evidence of her lesbian proclivities, she stands to lose custody of her daughter due to the law’s “morality clause”. Initially, I had thought that one of the dynamics at play here would be that perhaps the times might work in Carol’s favor—i.e., if her husband came home to find a strange man in the house, he’d go through the roof, but if he found a strange woman, Carol could coolly pass it off as having just invited a friend over. But even in 1952, her husband is fully aware that Carol prefers sex with women, so when he comes home unexpectedly to find Thérèse sitting at the piano, he’s like, for fuck’s sake, it was bad enough when you were hooking up with your bestie, but now you’re picking up random shopgirls?
Anyway, as an enthusiast of history I liked the intense 1952-ness of the film. I liked the way the tension ratchets up as Carol and Thérèse go to lunch, go to Carol’s house, go to Thérèse’s apartment, go on a road trip, and each time Carol’s proposes one of these escalations of their relationship, Thérèse gives her a firm, spirited yes. Yet they both keep putting off and putting off making a move that might puncture the ambiguity—they’re spending all their time together, and occasionally there will be a meaningful hand on a shoulder, but each one seems afraid that leaning in for the kiss will make the other one yelp, “Oh my god, what are you doing?!” This was both interesting in itself and made the eventual payoff more effective. My problem with Carol is the same problem I always have with movies like these, to the point that I think I need to add a new pattern to my list. See, I can relate to what it is like to be taken with someone. It has happened to me a few times over the years. And the script in my head goes a little something like this. You meet someone. You want to get to know her better. You try to get a conversation going. If signs are positive, you try to prolong it. You have an intense back-and-forth over the course of six or eight weeks. If you still find her compelling, and signs remain positive, you then fess up to your attraction and hope that it is mutual. If it is, you figure out where to go from there. Carol skips the six to eight weeks. The two leads meet so close to Christmas that the doll Carol wants is already out of stock, and well before New Year’s they’re already visiting motels together. Both women upend their lives for each other… and they’ve only just met! All Carol knows about Thérèse is that she’d like a fancier camera, and all Thérèse knows about Carol is that she has a daughter and that she liked the tune Thérèse was playing on the piano! And you can say, oh, it’s about love at first sight, and just because it hasn’t happened to you, that doesn’t mean it’s not a real thing. Look, the movie is aware that things between these women are moving awfully fast! Here’s a supporting character telling Thérèse that Carol seems to have her in a kind of trance! But I just can’t shake the suspicion that things are moving so fast not because Carol is a movie about deep, true love at first sight, but because it is a movie, period, and the running time is only two hours. So here is my new pattern, Pattern 42:
42 | Though part of my objection is that it doesn’t jibe with my experience, love at first sight, especially in movies, feels to me like a narrative artifice, dictated by the constraints of the medium. Real love develops over time, but time is a resource feature films have in very short supply, so in place of those weeks or months of growing affection they substitute meaningful stares. I can’t get on board with a story’s insistence that two people were meant to be together if they haven’t even had time to get to know one another. |
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