When Netflix’s May December hit theaters on Nov. 17, a new generation was introduced to the particular, peculiar pleasures of a Todd Haynes movie. Since the late 1980s, the director has crafted gorgeous, hyper-intelligent films, often period pieces centering women, with an unmistakably queer streak.
Haynes, who is gay, became known as a pioneer of what we called the New Queer Cinema movement in the ’90s (ask your Gen X friends, they’ll tell you all about it), after making the experimental, banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which the singer is literally embodied by a Barbie doll. He went on to helm acclaimed features like 1991’s Poison, inspired by the French writer Jean Genet, and the Julianne Moore-starring Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002), which don’t seem so queer, at least at first. But under the glossy surfaces of Haynes’s movies often lies a buried desire known well to queer folks, whether explicit (the modern lesbian classic Carol) or more subtle. Such is the power of the queer gaze—though we expect his upcoming NC-17 Joaquin Phoenix gay romance to be decidedly less subtle.
May December is in this tradition. Following an actress (Natalie Portman) who visits an older woman (Julianne Moore) she’s been cast to play along with the woman’s husband (Charles Melton), years after their relationship caused a media scandal, the dark comedy is shot through with enough irony, melodrama, exaggerated femininity, and savage insults to make Ryan Murphy blush. Moore’s withering stare alone gives new meaning to shade. Which is to say, Haynes has made the best queer movie of 2023. Here, we look back at all of his feature films plus one notable short, ranking them by their queer vibes on a scale of zero to five Judy Garlands, in honor of the eternal queer icon Haynes somehow hasn’t made a movie about… yet.
Wonderstruck
0/5 Judy Garlands
In general, the queer cultural canon favors aging divas, drag queens, and serial killers over innocent children. I didn’t write the rules, that’s just what they are. Kids are too precious and unironic (unless they’re played by a quippy, precocious Dakota Fanning) to pass the test. And they’re especially so in Haynes’s earnest adaptation of Brian Selznick’s illustrated young adult novel, for which Selznick also wrote the screenplay. Weaving together stories of two children on quests separated by decades, Wonderstruck is a moving testament to the magic of memory and connection. In other words, it’s a family film, and an outlier in Haynes’s mostly queer-eyed career.
Dark Waters
0.5/5 Judy Garlands
A competently made legal thriller based on the case against chemical manufacturing company DuPont, Dark Waters is not like any of the other movies here. Environmentalist exposes are necessary, but not necessarily queer. The only reason this gets half a Judy Garland is the casting of Mark Ruffalo, a zaddy and covert gay icon (if you haven’t seen him rock short shorts in Spotlight, you’re missing out).
I’m Not There
1/5 Judy Garlands
Based on the premise, you might think I’m Not There is a fascinating queering of the rock biopic. Bob Dylan, after all, is being played by a rotating cast of six not-Bob Dylans who each embody a bit of the musician’s elusive persona, including none other than Cate Blanchett in a butch wig. But that’s where the queer fun ends. While admirably ambitious, Haynes’s twist on the biopic turns out to be stiff, academic, boring, and pretty much as straight as a worshipful crowd at a Dylan concert. (Having once attended a Dylan stadium show in Chicago, I can say I was nearly shaken by how heterosexual the entire experience was.) Which is probably why this movie is more popular in universities than gay bars.
The Velvet Underground
1.5/5 Judy Garlands
Lou Reed is an OG alt-queer idol. Though implied, the late Velvet Underground singer’s bisexuality is considered a given among biographers. More important than who he slept with, Reed’s androgynous performances and slippery use of identity in music (“I’m waiting for my man,” he memorably sang of a dope dealer on the band’s debut album) disrupted what it meant to be seen as a badass dude in rock and roll. Haynes, clearly a fan, knows this and sketches a well-rounded appreciation of the Andy Warhol-backed group and its massive influence in his documentary. But this is really for anyone who’s ever wanted to look as cool as Reed smoking a cigarette, and not the go-for-broke bi treatise some queer fans might want. Temper your expectations.
Far From Heaven
2/5 Judy Garlands
It’s fair to say that queer viewers are a large part of the reason anyone still cares about melodrama as a genre. Haynes lifted the cinematic language of Douglas Sirk’s “women’s pictures” like 1959’s Imitation of Life and made it cool again, or maybe for the first time, in his masterpiece. He adds a discomforting modern distance to the material, way before Mad Men got there, and both Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid nail the nuances of their repressed spouses desperately in search of real romantic companionship and self-actualization—and yes, one of their characters happens to be gay. But it’s the sublimely detailed production design that really puts the icing on this slyly queer confection.
Safe
2.5/5 Judy Garlands
Safe is commonly read as an allegory for the AIDS crisis, and though the mysterious “environmental” illness Julianne Moore’s stunted housewife wastes away from is never specified, it’s not hard to read between the lines. The sterile ‘80s suburban surroundings not-so-subtly point to the trappings of Reaganism, and the hush around Moore’s unspoken disease mirrors the way AIDS patients were made to feel invisible even as their death toll became catastrophic. The twist here is that, instead of insisting on being seen, Moore’s character retreats from society and replaces one kind of subjugation for another in a fringe New Age community that definitely doesn’t bode well for her physical or mental health. Though hardly the queerest AIDS narrative out there, Safe might be the most haunting metaphorical treatment of the plague and one specific fallout from those years: the feeling of being unable to acknowledge who you are, even to yourself.
Velvet Goldmine
3/5 Judy Garlands
David Bowie infamously denied Haynes rights to use his music in this meta biopic that is obviously about the openly bisexual glam rock star without explicitly being about him. That’s too bad, because it creates kind of a muddle in the portrait of fictional Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers embracing his inner and outer fabulosity) and leaves the viewer only guessing at why Slade eventually turns his back on his old provocative persona in favor of a more conservative strain of pop. The answer seems to be, well, that’s what Bowie did! But there’s a lot of male full frontal nudity and man-on-man snogging going on here, so queer props where they’re due.
May December
3.5/5 Judy Garlands
May December is being touted as Todd Haynes’s funniest movie, and rightly so. It’s hilarious from the moment Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) opens her fridge and deadpans, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs!” But it’s also the director’s trickiest film, a delicate genre balancing act that threatens to go haywire at any moment. The thudding piano score by Marcelo Zarvos punctuates dramatic moments like a daytime soap opera, but Haynes isn’t just going for self-aware camp. Yes, these people are ridiculous (and almost have to be, given that Moore is playing a woman married to a man she started a sexual relationship with when he was a seventh grader), but the movie also asks you to take them and their problems seriously—which is where things get uncomfortable.
To that end, Charles Melton, as that seventh grader turned dad-bod-hot doting husband, is the soul of the movie. His anguish as he comes to grips with how he’s been exploited is painful to watch—and, well, not exactly queer. But around him, Haynes builds a universe of deliciously vampy mannerisms and put-downs. If you’re intrigued by the idea of Natalie Portman saying “it’s not that kind of snake” in a Southern lisp, or by the thought of Moore smugly declaring, “I’m secure. Make sure you put that in there” … well, you know who you are. Haynes has made a glorious, gay movie for you.
Carol
4/5 Judy Garlands
Carol is already regarded in some corners as a Sapphic Christmas classic. Haynes’s midcentury period piece is, like everything Cate Blanchett’s chic yet deeply sensitive and repressed housewife wears, gorgeous to behold. But the polished Manhattan surfaces belie the heartache we know awaits her and the young woman she falls for (a never-better Rooney Mara). Thankfully, then, this isn’t the kind of retrograde queer tale, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s ahead-of-its-time novel The Price of Salt, in which one or both of them ends up dead. The only thing that could have made this kind-of-happy-ending gay story gayer is if the sex scene between the leads had a little more, well, sex. And we‘ll deduct another half a point simply because the straights can’t help but also swoon over this film for one reason or another (my dad came out of the theater raving about the period-accurate automobiles).
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
4.5/5 Judy Garlands
What, you might ask, is so damn queer about a biopic following the life and tragic end of Karen Carpenter, one-half of the hopelessly middlebrow yet sonically enchanting soft rock duo? It’s all in the subversion, baby. Combining postmodern technique—Carpenter is played by an actual Barbie doll, whose plastic face gets gradually etched away as she suffers from anorexia—with a legitimately gripping, devastating narrative and that music (the reason Richard Carpenter successfully sued to have the arthouse short banned, though it lives a happy bootleg life online), it’s both ironic and lacerating in its genuine insights into celebrity self-destruction. It’s the hellish diva rise and fall every queer Carpenters fan didn’t know they needed.
Poison
5/5 Judy Garlands
If you’re unfamiliar with the works of Jean Genet, French poet, novelist, vagabond, and all-around provocateur, you were sorely missing that impossibly cool queer literature major in your life. That’s okay, because Todd Haynes has a primer for you. Loosely inspired by several of Genet’s work, and loaded with themes of gay otherization, Haynes’s debut feature follows three stories: a boy shoots his abusive dad and flies away, as depicted in the style of a trashy deep-cable documentary (bonus queer points); a scientist’s sexual urges transform him into a horror B-movie creature; and two men with a past develop an unlikely sexual fixation with each other in prison. If that sounds outrageously homoerotic and indecent to you, well, that was the point—and what made Haynes one of the heralded voices of so-called New Queer Cinema over three decades ago. Oh, we didn’t know how queer we had it.
