Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility
Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University and the author of several books, most recently Strangers on a Train: A Queer Film Classic. He is also the author of Willa Cather and Others and editor of Queering the Renaissance, both also published by Duke University Press.
Identity and Identification: Sirk-Fassbinder-Haynes
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Published:July 2016
This chapter explores the queer relationships between and in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Haynes’s Far from Heaven, films avowedly responding to and recasting Sirk’s impossible situation. Sirk’s film deals with the impasses around a couple separated by social status and age difference; Fassbinder adds racial difference to the couple’s dilemma; Haynes adds to race questions of hetero/homosexual difference. The chapter suggests these markers of social difference point beyond the particulars of the sociohistorical contours of identity. In so doing, they establish an insuperable mechanism of impossible difference (one that is both social...
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