There and ‘not there’: Todd Haynes and the queering of genre

ABSTRACT

Focusing upon Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, this study illuminates a narrative strategy that I describe as a ‘queering through genre’ because it operates against the grain, using the conventions of genre both to integrate and familiarise, and to de-contextualise and render strange. While genre conventions structure many of Haynes’ films, the inclusion of generic elements becomes the pretext for exploring systems of meaning inaccessible in classically organised biopics – systems that also lie outside the parameters of a restrictive heteronormativity. I assert that the centrality of queerness is not only a deconstructive operation, but also a model for restructuring systems of meaning, even when the film narrative neither includes gay characterisations nor represents homosexual subject matter. This analysis promotes a line of inquiry that identifies queerness’s potential for revealing hegemonic mechanisms through which the politics of heteronormativity continues to be naturalised and rendered as ‘given’ in culture and society. This study asserts that Haynes’ queering operations – and especially his disruption of the biopic’s conventions of temporality, teleology, and identity formation – ultimately elucidate what he has to say about the career of an iconic musician whose own relationship with time is anything but profoundly causal or linear.

KEYWORDS:

• Todd Haynes
• Bob Dylan
• biopic
• genre
• temporality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Later in this essay, with reference to genre as ‘not simply a classification but as essential and constitutive framework, a generator of cinema’ (Doane 2004, p. 18), Doane strives to disrupt a tendency in popular critical work on Haynes to argue that his intellectuality renders his films unemotional.

2. For a discussion of this notion of redemption in the relationship between the star persona and the audience, see DeAngelis (2001, pp. 6–10).

3. Curiously, in a later article that takes its name from Haynes’ film but offers only a very brief analysis of its strategies, Edelman argues that Haynes’ pluralisation of personas is effected only as a means of getting closer to a coherent whole, rather than emphasising matters of difference and exclusion. See Edelman (2010, p. 158).

4. In their extensive analysis, Carolyn and Glen D’Cruz (2013, pp. 320–321) assert that this sequence enforces the impossibility of presenting the protagonist as a unified self.

5. Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, and Velvet Goldmine employ related devices of direct address to enrich the complexity of the network of glances among camera, audience, and diegetically situated characters.

6. Jacob Smith (2010, p. 73) describes this as ‘the section of the film in which Dylan encounters his past lives’, arguing that the Billy the Kid sequence is intended to convey a sense of Dylan’s memory.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael DeAngelis

Michael DeAngelis is Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL, USA. He is the editor of Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television (Wayne State UP, 2014), and the author of Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves (Duke UP, 2001) and Rx Hollywood: Cinema and Therapy in the 1960s (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2018).